Re: Future of Oracle DBA - Man vs Machine

Agreed, as long as it has been tested first.

It has to be disabled on production until it has been adequately tested in non-production.  Then, in production it can be re-enabled, the patch applied, then disabled again.

My father, who was a police officer, said he'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six.  In our less life-threatening line of work, I'd rather be judged stodgy than let untested patches render me unemployed.  Particularly following the disaster with the recent July PSU discussed on this list
<https://www.freelists.org/post/oracle-l/ORA600-after-July-PSU-apply-production-down>, one should certainly never trust patches or upgrades implicitly.

On 10/4/17 10:03, MacGregor, Ian A. wrote:
>
> Minor patches to Linux operating systems  are done automatically.
>  Isn't this bringing  that same methodology to database executables.  
> Larger changes require a reboot to pick up a new kernel.  I have to
> think  the database  won't apply patch sets or upgrade itself  without
>   permission.  If once the DBA deigns that the system is ready, and
> these things happen without outages this is a good thing.
>
>
>
>
>
> Ian A. MacGregor
> SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
> Computing Division
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org <oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org>
> on behalf of Tim Gorman <tim.evdbt_at_gmail.com>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, October 4, 2017 8:20:08 AM
> *To:* knecht.stefan_at_gmail.com; verma.labs_at_gmail.com
> *Cc:* oracle-l
> *Subject:* Re: Future of Oracle DBA - Man vs Machine
> I think it was at Collaborate in the 2007 timeframe when the Oracle
> keynote (forget who) tried to announce "automatic upgrades and
> patching" as part of Enterprise Manager.  He was literally booed by
> the entire audience of several thousand for a good 5-10 seconds,
> followed by derisive audience cross-chatter for another 30 seconds.  I
> recall turning to the person next to me in astonishment, and she had
> the same incredulous look on her face.  It wasn't because the
> technology was futuristic, it was because it was such a tone-deaf,
> naive, newbie thing to announce.
>
> That was 10 years ago.  I'm guessing that the people who experienced
> that feedback are mostly gone from product management now, and a new
> batch of fresh-faced young things just rediscovered the idea for the
> first time.
>
> I don't think that anyone at Oracle has realized that patches, never
> mind patchsets and oh-my-god upgrades are *always* tested first, at
> least by anyone who wants to keep their job.  As Stefan said, my first
> reaction would be to figure out how to disable it.
>
> Initially, one might think that, as a cloud vendor, Oracle might have
> first-hand knowledge of operational requirements by now. But after you
> realize that cloud vendors write their own operational requirements
> and that customers have to live with them (not the other way around),
> it becomes easier to understand why such a feature might worm its way
> back into the product.
>
> I recently heard someone use a great new verb:  "dogfooding" (i.e.
> where one eats their own dog food).  I'd like to see Oracle dogfood
> features like this on their own mission-critical internal systems
> (i.e. is their EBS GSI still running?) prior to trying to feed it to
> the world.
>
> Long ago I heard someone wise say that Oracle software isn't ready for
> production use until it hits extended support; the market has
> certainly shared that view with Oracle12c Database.
>
>
>
> On 10/4/17 01:00, Stefan Knecht wrote:
>> Well, personally I don't think there's much more to it than marketing
>> noise at this point.
>>
>> Automatic upgrades - well, sounds fancy, but who actually wants that?
>> Upgrades needs to be tested, evaluated, tested again, etc etc... And
>> well, obviously there's the downtime involved, which needs to be
>> scheduled, and so on and so forth. Unless they have magically
>> overcome the need to actually do any of those things I don't see that
>> happening. It's been a long standing issue with "zero downtime
>> upgrades" ever since Oracle started announcing it, what, 10 years
>> ago? I still haven't seen one to date (it is somewhat possible using
>> application technologies, but not database technologies). If you were
>> to present me a database with "automatic upgrade"; my first question
>> would be "how do I turn it off?".
>>
>> Automatic patches / security updates is the same thing. And I kinda
>> doubt they can actually do that, particularly because as of today
>> they still need a full cluster outage to apply an OJVM PSU (maybe
>> Larry forgot about those since they are already getting rid of Java
>> IIRC?).
>>
>> The self-tuning they have already introduced in 12.1 with the
>> adaptive optimizer. And we've seen where that went. They've
>> apparently now disabled some of it again in 12.2 by default since it
>> simply didn't work as expected in live environments.
>>
>> Automated backups, well, most of us would already have that won't we?
>> We schedule them and from that point on they are running automated.
>> The one thing that's needed is of course to validate the backups and
>> do the occasional test and I highly doubt anyone would blindly trust
>> automation in that area. At least not if you care about your business.
>>
>> I think that at this point, nothing will change. The one thing to
>> take away from it for me personally is that it indicates the general
>> direction Oracle is heading, which sounds a bit like a "hands-free
>> don't touch it" black box.
>> At least that's my THB 0.02 :)
>>
>> Stefan
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 12:07 PM, AMIT VERMA <verma.labs_at_gmail.com
>> <mailto:verma.labs_at_gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Hello Gurus,
>>
>> I was looking át OpenWorld, in which Larry presented Oracle18c in
>> which many of the Oracle DBAs tasks are automated like-
>>
>> -Database Automatically Upgrades
>>
>> -Applying Software Patches
>>
>> -Oracle Tunes itself while running
>>
>> -Automates security updates
>>
>> -Backing up of data
>>
>> -Less compute & storage because of ML & Automatic compression
>>
>>
>> After having 18c, The World first Autonomous Database than
>>
>> 1. What will be future of Oracle DBA roles for the new learner &
>> existing DBAs?
>> 2. Will Oracle guarantee 100% Autonomous Tuning, as we have
>> observed many of the recommendation by existing tool even
>> doesn't work in real production?
>>
>> Look forward to your valuable time on this Man vs Machine.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Amit Verma
>> v.amit84_at_skype.com <mailto:v.amit84_at_skype.com>
>>
>>
>> "Winning takes talent but it takes character to keep winning"
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> //
>> zztat - The Next-Gen Oracle Performance Monitoring and Reaction
>> Framework!
>> Visit us at zztat.net <http://zztat.net> | Support our Indiegogo
>> campaign at igg.me/at/zztat <http://igg.me/at/zztat> | _at_zztat_oracle
>

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