Review: Oracle Database 12c 147
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Riyaj Shamsudeen offers an in-depth look at Oracle Database 12c, which he calls a 'true cloud database,' bringing a new level of efficiency and ease to database consolidation. 'In development for roughly four years, Oracle Database 12c introduces so many important new capabilities in so many areas — database consolidation, query optimization, performance tuning, high availability, partitioning, backup and recovery — that even a lengthy review has to cut corners. Nevertheless, in addition to covering the big ticket items, I'll give a number of the lesser enhancements their due,' writes Riyaj Shamsudeen. 'Having worked with the beta for many months, I can tell you that the quality of software is also impressive, starting with a smooth RAC cluster installation. As with any new software release, I did encounter a few minor bugs. Hopefully these have been resolved in the production release that arrived yesterday.'"
Re:New features? (Score:3, Informative)
lots of third party backup programs support Oracle and SQL server to back up the databases online
last i looked at mysql you had to shut down the database or dump it to another db and then backup the file. too expensive to do this on a 200Gb database sitting on a SAN
Re:New features? (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't read that from TFA - just that object level restores have been improved, as has some compression features.
Just so everybody is aware Oracle has always had kick-ass restore and recovery features, way ahead of other database - such things as Flashback [oracle.com], it has been shipping transaction logs since Noah was a boy, and the good ol' "ALERT TABLESPACE BEGIN BACKUP" to allow you to copy files online. It can perform change block tracking on database datafiles to allow increment backups "ALTER DATABASE ENABLE BLOCK CHANGE TRACKING USING FILE ;". All of this is platform independent too.
Recovery is also awesome. "ALTER DATABASE RECOVER UNTIL [timestamp]", "ALTER DATABASE RECOVERY UNTIL CANCEL", "ALTER DATABASE UNTIL CHANGE [transaction number]" and so on. If you accidentally loose you control files (somewhat like your MS-SQL master database being trashed) you can recreate them using SQL.
The big problem is that you have to be doing a lot of it to be good at it, many very think books have been written on Oracle backup and restore. So tools like Oracle's RMAN have been created to manage the process for DBAs...
Re:If you have to ask, you can't afford it (Score:5, Informative)
Re:New features? (Score:5, Informative)
mysqldump can and will lock tables during its backup - there's some tricks around this; but on a big production database, its really suboptimal.
Re:New features? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nothing about price? (Score:2, Informative)
Price is pretty much the same - $25K per core for basic, $50K per core for enterprise, $75K for RAC. Things like containers are extra, so figure a typical 8 core at being only $.5M license (14% annual maintenance). Around here, that only buys a small house.
Re:New features? (Score:5, Informative)
one of the selling points of sql server and oracle is you can backup the database directly while its running. you can backup the database, by separate files and file groups
SQL server you can even have the database online during a restore. you restore the main file group and then the others. all the data may not be there, but the database will be able to server applications with some data. you can always move your tables around so that the most important ones get restored first
with SQL server on decent hardware from the last 2-3 years you can backup a database during business hours and your users will never know. i do it all the time
Re:If you have to ask, you can't afford it (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nothing about price? (Score:3, Informative)
My old workplace (post anonymously to protect them) had a bit of fun with that. We had our main production machine licensed for Enterprise, but another machine licensed for Standard. Oracle decides to do an audit - I was working at a state agency, and they decided to audit the entire state government. We ran the scripts they sent us and sent back the output, believing that we'd done everything correctly.
As it turned out, at some point, one of our DBAs had run the Oracle database tuner against the machine that was running the Standard version. You're not allowed to do that. Oracle said that we would have to upgrade the server running Standard to Enterprise, and back-license it for the previous five or six years - the time since we'd installed Oracle on that server. That was a significant chunk of money - it's been a few years now, but I believe it was in the neighborhood of $200K (after Oracle's offer of their usual incredibly steep 'discount' Hypothetically, we owed them over a million, at the list prices that no one actually pays). Certainly the state could afford it, but it was an unbudgeted expense, and someone would likely wind up on the chopping block for it.
We dug deeper. We created a new database on the server running Standard, then tried to connect to it with the tuning application (which you install elsewhere, on a server running Oracle's management tools, not on the database server itself). We discovered that it did not give any warning that you are connecting to a server running Standard. Checking into the logs from Oracle's audit scripts, we also discovered that the tuner had been used against that server exactly once.
So we talked to Oracle. We told them that one of our DBAs had innocently run the tuner against one database on there, once. We'd identified which DBA it was and given her additional training so that it would not happen again, and added to our procedures to let any future additions to the DBA staff know that they should not assume that the tool would let them know if it wasn't okay to use it on a particular database. We told them there was no malicious intent, and it was a simply mistake. We also mentioned to them the fact that their own tool didn't indicate anything about it not being allowed, and that they might want to fix that, since it would be simple for the tool to determine it.
Their reply was essentially, "You touched it, you bought it. Pay up."
We got our legal department involved, explaining the situation to them. One of our attorneys wrote a rather fun letter to Oracle, using the phrase "minefield marketing" - meaning basically that Oracle appeared to have deliberately set things up so that it would be likely for someone to accidentally do something they weren't supposed to, in order to make money by doing audits and then threatening people who made honest mistakes in order to get extra money.
Again, their reply was simply, "You touched it, you bought it. Pay up."
We offered as a compromise to pay them one year's licensing for the Enterprise version for that server, since there had only been the one incident. They replied that they would not accept that. License it all the way back (including a couple of years before the activity outside the license ever happened), or they would take us to court.
Our legal department replied, "Okay. Take us to court, then. We'll have some very interesting things to tell a judge and jury about how your software is set up to entrap unwary users."
I don't know what happened from there, since that's about the time that I left the company. The last I talked to anyone about it, about a year ago, it was just their lawyers and Oracle's lawyers talking, and the people in IT were being kept in the dark about it.
Still, though, I found Oracle's attitude toward a company that had been a loyal customer for more than twenty years to be very hard to understand. We'd literally paid them somewhere in the neighborhood of $40-50 million in that time... but they w