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Review: Oracle Database 12c
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.'"
Shouldn't shill articles be over on SlashBusinessCrap or whatever?
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
Wait what. He wrote a review about Oracle, gave an 8 for value, and didn't mention pricing? Is this some kind of shill or such?
Even for a shill I would at least expect a line like
'Yes, a license for a normal octocore setup costs more than your home, but...'
or 'After going through the 2 hour cost calculation matrix, the resulting price seemed a tad steep, but'
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, 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...
so which backup programs support mysql natively
like i install an agent, set a policy on the backup server and have it backup to my tape library automatically without dumping the data to another storage device?
It's free for personal use (edelivery.oracle.com) just like all Oracle software. You only need paid licenses and support for commercial use. For that you need a lot of money.
mysqldump? But what you are doing, i.e backup of the database files directly, is a very dangerous form of backup. Restoring such when the database has been corrupted for whatever reason is not something I would enjoy, so going by an ascii dump like mysqldump does is way more saner from that perspective, it's of course also way more slow.
mysqldump can and will lock tables during its backup - there's some tricks around this; but on a big production database, its really suboptimal.
#!/bin/csh cat $0
I see you're a dedicated full-time Oracle support guy. I don't know of a lot of other products that require a full-time support person to do (conceptually) simple stuff. My biggest complaint about Oracle has always been that to even take it out of the box and install it required guru-level Oracle knowledge, much less keeping it running well. I absolutely hate all things Microsoft, but at least you can install Squeel Server and set up backups without two days effort and an overwhelming desire to stick a gun in your mouth.
Nobody, not one single person is using Oracle databases in a personal capacity. It is always in connection with business. Therefore, I expect there to be a mention of pricing.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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
It's a complex product. of course it has a point-and-grunt installer, but anything else requires configuring the product, and it doesn't have an "easy mode", simply because it's not targeting "simple people".
You're thinking from a tiny point of view (small company or personal). And yes, in this case, oracle DB might not be for you. But a company which makes arguably billions off data located in an oracle DB Cluster doesn't care whether the DB needs 0, 1, or 25 people who manage it. Whatever the costs are, they represent a tiny fraction of the profits.
if your monthly profit is $10K then your DB costs might need to be below $200. However, make your monthly profit $500M, then you can afford spending anywhere between $200K and $1M a month on the DB and its support (licensed or in-house) and even more.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The complexity often sets the ceiling.
SQL Server is pretty simple out of the box, and with a reasonable toolset to let you administer it. I trust it to a level. However, cost 'savings' being what they are, a lot of companies who do not understand exactly what it is they're asking, will hire someone who can click the SQL Server buttons on the GUI and change a tape.
They're cheaper than an in depth DBA that groks the environment by a long shot. However, when it comes emergency time, I really don't trust that things will go smoothly.
Oracle has the starting point that you need to know a few of the bits under the hood, so you actually start to understand what's really going on (it tries not to hide the messy details from you), seems to come with the kitchen sink (though occasionally with a fair mortgage as well), and requires staff that actually know what they're about; it actively encourages you to go deeper all the time.
I don't have a problem with a product that's geared for high end enterprise requiring a guru level knowledge to actually get going. At that level, you really should have the skills to back your actions up with.
First off installing Oracle does not require guru knowledge. They write pretty good installation guides. Developers install Oracle for themselves all the time. I will agree it is much harder than SQLServer to install but that's a SQLServer strength.
Oracle is a professional product. It exists at the top end for people who want to be able to manually configure and tweak the database to get the most out of it. It also allows for complex configurations that the other systems don't. It the database server hardware cost is in 4 or 5 figures, and the configuration isn't extremely complex don't use Oracle. When you compare Oracle to SQLServer compare a setup of a database distributed over 4 continents involving $20m in server hardware because that's where all that complexity really shines.
...this earthy smell, I do like it!
This is all very true. For a small website MySQL or MariaDB are fine. I work in government and we collect, process and create terrabytes of ocean data a month for weather, sea ice, waves, salinity, temperature, oxygen, species migration, satellite imagery, and tons of other things. I hate Oracle because of their business practices and general asshatery as much as the next techie, but for large databases that require the kind of collection, processing and modeling we do, Oracle is all there is.
You're especially right that there's no "easy mode". I think it'd be silly to include such a thing and dumb down such a hugely complex product to a level that you might as well be using MySQL or MariaDB. And for the amount of data we deal with and the number of database instances we have, yes it's a full time DB admin job. God forbid the someone was to pull a Bobby tables because we didn't have someone qualified creating and maintaining the databases at all times.
No, it's $200/year for a personal licence if you're going to use it commercially. If you're just creating a DB to categorize the porn on your PC and don't ever plan on making money or exposing it in a commercial sense it's free to use.
http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/2.1/
"Percona XtraBackup is an open-source hot backup utility for MySQL - based servers that doesn’t lock your database during the backup."
http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/backup.html
"MySQL Enterprise Backup performs online Hot, non-blocking backups of your MySQL databases."
Oracle uses a tiered system for licensing and the prices are usually depended on what features you need for your business. I've installed and use Oracle DB for personal use. It was mostly a training excise, but I use it to keep track of my beer brewing recipes, cost of supplies, quality checks, temperature, specific gravity, alcohol by volume, taste, etc... I could have used MySQL, but I wanted to learn and practice with Oracle because that's the industry standard for large database applications.
I'm not a shill promoting Oracle, MySQL and SQLServer are all great products. I haven't used MariaDB yet, but I like to play around with the technologies. Oracle is a great product if you have a need for large database applications. It's management are still a bunch of asshats; it sucks that business people get in the way of and ruin great technologies.
What modern SQL server does not have some method of doing this? Even if it requires outside programs running against it?
Please stop calling MS SQL server, sql server it makes it sound like it is the only one.
mysqldump? But what you are doing, i.e backup of the database files directly, is a very dangerous form of backup. Restoring such when the database has been corrupted for whatever reason
Actually no, it is not dangerous provided that you use a backup agent or an operating system that supports this. Windows does, Linux and Unix do not.
On Windows the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) will interact with registered processes to coordinate *when* they should ensure persistent consistency - which is reserved as a fraction of a second. It requires the processes to register as VSS writers - which database servers generally do (Oracle and SQL Server do - I do not know if MySQL does).
On Windows in a virtual environment this will even propagate through VM volumes, i.e. if you backup the host of the VMs (where some of the VMs could be running database servers), the host VSS service will ask the guest VSS service to ensure consistency right when the disk image file is being backed up. This means that you can backup the host Hyper-V server with all the disk images and rest assured that the VMs are consistent.
Huge boon for uptime.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
99% of database users have no need at all to give money to One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
Yes, there are a tiny handful of applications where Oracle outshines the alternatives. Yours probably isn't one of them. If you're running a small website, MySQL/MariaDB will almost certainly work just fine. (Or the free version of MS SQL Server, if you're developing in ASP.NET.) For larger applications, PostgreSQL can do the vast majority of what Oracle can do at no cost. If you're not working with absolutely massive datasets, and don't need the specific enterprise features the system offers, Oracle is probably a waste of your money.
Too many companies throw their money away just because it's "standard", even though it really isn't – other databases are more widely used as well as being cheaper and easier to administer. Anyone who wants to buy Oracle should have to justify with clear and specific reasons (not just marketing buzzwords) why they need it and how the massive expense is going to benefit the company compared to the alternatives.
Of course unless you use only InnoDB (which everyone does since it's the default for some years now) and use --single-transaction to do the dump via a transaction istead of locking the tables.