Oracle Makes Managing Fleets of Databases Simpler

Oracle today announced it has infused Oracle Enterprise Manager with additional capabilities that make it simpler to manage its databases running in hybrid cloud computing environments.

Oracle Enterprise Manager is the control plane that Oracle makes available to IT organizations that wish to manage instances of Oracle databases and associated IT infrastructure from within an on-premises IT environment.

See also: Oracle Launches Free Database and Cloud Service Tier

In addition to providing a single dashboard to manage multiple Oracle database environments running on multiple clouds, the latest release of Oracle Enterprise Manager provides additional analytics and monitoring tools in addition to making it simpler to migrate databases into a public cloud computing environment.  IT organizations can also now opt to take advantage of a Grafana plug-in to visualize data.

The enhanced analytics provide enhanced capacity and forecasting capabilities enabled by Exadata Warehouse, an instance of a data warehouse running on Oracle databases optimized for Exadata servers from Oracle, says Dan Koloski, vice president of product management for Oracle.

Finally, Oracle has improved security by adding support for Transparent Data Encryption, improved compliance monitoring, fine-grained control of on-premises fleets, and new security standards for Oracle Database 18c and 19c databases. Oracle also revealed that Oracle Enterprise Manager has been certified for best practices by the Center for Internet Security Benchmarks.  

By providing a superior lifecycle management experience, Oracle is making it more compelling for organizations to embrace a commercial database platform versus relying on open-source databases, says Koloski. As IT organizations find themselves managing fleets of databases it quickly becomes apparent the challenges associated with managing a fleet of open source databases spanning multiple platforms lead to higher total costs, notes Koloski. The manageability of Oracle databases becomes a major differentiator, says Koloski.

“Customers want to be able to manage a hybrid estate as it were a single estate,” says Koloski. “They don’t want to go from fire drill to fire drill.”

Oracle Enterprise Manager is intended to be an alternative to a management service that Oracle also offers via its cloud. Oracle provides IT organizations with a choice because some organizations prefer having the management plane for their database environments to reside in an on-premises IT environment or on cloud infrastructure they directly control, notes Koloski.

Regardless of where the manage plane resides, Koloski notes the role of database administrators (DBAs) is evolving. Instead of managing a handful of databases the average DBA will be increasingly relying on machine learning algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence to manage fleets of databases, says Koloski. Many DBAs are also now managing the cloud infrastructure databases are deployed on, adds Koloski.

No matter which database platform gets selected, the one thing that is certain is there have never been more data stores to manage. IT organizations in the months and years ahead will be hard-pressed to manage them all without relying on additional layers of automation. It may take some time for IT organizations to adjust their processes to that new reality, but like it or not increased levels of databases automation are now all but inevitable.