Oracle's Ken Jacobs gave OracleWorld attendees welcome news today -- that their systems will be incredibly easy to install and manage with Oracle 10g, and especially so within enterprise grids.
Jacobs spoke to a wealth of new features in Oracle's software in Oracle10g that will help DBAs and system administrators become "more productive, more thoughtful and more valuable" to their organizations.
Oracle has completely enhanced its information management capabilities within Oracle 10g Database and Application Server, and enhanced its management tool, Oracle Enterprise Manager. "I've got three words to describe the very important advances in the new Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g," Jacobs said. "It's aware of its own environment, it's proactive and it's intelligent."
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g is designed to easily manage entire enterprise grids and their underlying software. According to Jacobs, Oracle's management console helps DBAs and system administrators manage their systems "end-to-end." They will be able to monitor service levels, performance, automate tasks, do backup and recovery, among other things, in a unified way and across groups of computers, or grids.
"You can establish standards for across the grid, set metrics and thresholds for performance that will automatically generate warnings or critical alerts," he explained. "You can also apply standards for security."
Speaking to security, Jacobs highlighted it as one of Oracle Enterprise Manager's key features. The "Critical Patch" facility automates the discovery, tracking and scheduling of software patches. Software patching has become critical since the Microsoft SQL Slammer virus exposed the issue broadly -- security patches had been available for the virus, but not applied, crippling systems around the world. With Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, the Oracle software automatically alerts administrators to critical patches, pulls them down into a repository and recommends where the patches should be applied.
Jacobs also introduced "My and your friend Adam," which is really ADDM, Oracle's built-in Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor. Calling it "an expert in a box," Jacobs demonstrated how this automated feature will help administrators uncover more than 75 specific kinds of issues ranging from performance bottlenecks to memory shortages.
Jacobs highlighted two other important manageability features: rolling upgrades and "EM2Go." Oracle 10g will allow customers to apply patches without taking the system down through a process known as a rolling upgrade. EM2Go will allow administrators to manage systems from anywhere through an HTML browser and through wireless PDAs.
Jacobs concluded his speech by encouraging the audience to start taking advantage of the new enhancements.
"You can start with existing hardware, clusters and application server farms, use your current software and move to 10g incrementally," Jacobs explained. "Oracle 10g ushers in a new era. Oracle 10g powers the grid and I hope you all will run with it."