Cost Saving, High Availability and Faster Performance are just a few of the benefits associated with Oracle 11g Release 2, not to mention improved use of storage across the data centre and claimed query speeds of up to ten times faster. However, sales lingo is rarely enough justification for investment in a database system upgrade. Decisions to upgrade will always be based on cost and business requirements.
There are a number of factors to think about when considering a database system upgrade:
1) Is your Oracle version still supported?
Oracle 9i Release 2 and 10g Release 1 are no longer supported.
Whilst organisations like Xynomix can offer full third party support across the entire database portfolio from Oracle versions 6 upwards, many organisations appreciate the security of Oracle support for more recent database versions either instead of, or in addition to external support.
2) Is effective change management a priority for your organisation?
Nowadays, organisations are expected to react to changes and deliver services to increasingly demanding SLAs.
Oracle 11g Release 2’s Real Application Testing feature utilises a workload capture and replay feature alongside a SQL performance analyzer to test development and infrastructure changes against actual production workloads. It reduces the risk of making changes to the production environment and mitigates against the potential cost and service delivery issues associated with changes that have not been tested in a production context. If your organisation is entering a particularly developmental phase, ‘RAT’ functionality would prove useful.
3) Are your storage requirements escalating?
Storage can take up a huge portion of IT budgets. If you are looking to approach the issue of storage management any time soon, Oracle Database 11g Release 2’s Advanced Compression feature would help you to address rapidly increasing data volumes and manage higher volumes of data in a cost-effective manner. All data types can be compressed to reduce required database storage for structured, unstructured and backup data, with a knock on effect of reducing costs for network bandwidth, memory, backup media and power requirements.
4) Do you need to improve Data Security?
In accordance with regulatory compliance requirements, organisations must protect sensitive data located within the database itself, on the network, or on backup media. Oracle 11g Release 2 offers a host of security features than can help you to achieve compliance, including Oracle Database Vault [an option that facilitates the application of transparent access controls to applications based on time restriction, user identity, etc.] and Oracle Advanced Security [an easily deployed option that protects all mobile data moving to and from the Oracle Database with network and SSL based encryption].
5) Are your database transactions critical and high enough in volume to require investment in higher system availability?
Real Application Clustering and Grid Computing are clearly forerunners for resource pooling and both are championed features of Oracle Database 11g Release 2. In addition to this, Oracle Active Data Guard is designed to offload resource-intensive activities from a production database to one or more synchronized standby databases. Not only would this enable you to use standby databases to improve performance, but also acts as a testing environment and a valid disaster recovery strategy.
6) Would you be happy to implement automated database system management measures?
Oracle Database 11g Release 2 features a number of automated management aspects: Automatic Storage Management; Automatic Performance Diagnostics and Monitoring and Application Tuning. The benefits of such automation are clear in terms of saved operational costs and DBA time. Whilst there are a number of third party tuning tools available to execute performance diagnostics, they usually provide a blanket view of statistics and rely on the DBA acting on this information to identify the root cause of an issue. Oracle Diagnostics Pack 11g enables the database itself to automatically diagnose its own performance problems and deliver them to the DBA. Similarly, Oracle Tuning Pack 11g automates application and SQL tuning for lower management costs.
Automatic Storage Management featured in the first release of 11g and remains in 11g Release 2 to automatically balance data across available disks for optimal performance. Release 2 has built on this functionality with ASM Cluster File System capabilities, which mean that ASM can be used for Oracle database files, Oracle software binaries and non-Oracle related files.
7) Are you comfortable with database upgrade processes?
Oracle has worked hard to improve the upgrade process over the last few Oracle database releases: documentation is more streamlined and a number of on-line guides containing upgrade information have been made available. Even if upgrade skills are not available in-house, external third parties will be able to undertake a system upgrade and test the new database version to ensure that it works seamlessly with the rest of your IT infrastructure.
11g Release 2’s Database Upgrade Assistant Feature [DBUA] should, however, remove the need for some of the external upgrade assistance that may be required. The DBUA feature automates a number of the steps required to upgrade to a new database release or patch set, providing a visual interface through which an upgrade can be performed, monitored and reviewed after installation. Single Instances, Real Application Clusters and Automatic Storage Management instances can all be easily upgraded using this interface.
8) Would your organisation benefit from Real Application Cluster Technology?
As mentioned previously, Oracle RAC is a key feature of Oracle Database 11g Release 2. It delivers unbeatable fault tolerance, performance and scalability for critical Oracle environments, particularly enterprises consolidating their transaction processing and data warehousing applications. It enables a single Oracle database to run across a cluster of servers without the need for any application changes. Server resources are dynamically assigned based on policy management to run specific workloads as and when required, with any free servers being pooled to create a free cushion of server resource.
Key Benefits include:
Oracle Database 11g Release 2 makes the high availability, faster performance and scalability offered by both RAC and Grid Computing easy to achieve. Organisations that would benefit from RAC technology would also benefit from the functionality of Grid Computing, where multiple applications can be consolidated onto a shared Grid and resources within the Grid can be allocated to different server pools: for example, separate nodes can be allocated to CRM and Websites, ERP databases, Data Warehousing and Reporting etc. Unallocated nodes can act as a free resource pool, being dynamically re-allocated where required to meet service level requirements.
9) Do you have the resources available to effectively support and manage the database?
Oracle claim that, with 11g Release 2, the time spent managing the database can be reduced by 50% in comparison with earlier Oracle releases. A number of database management tasks such as Storage Management, Backup and Recovery and SQL Tuning that are typically associated with errors and valuable time consumption have been automated.
Where tasks cannot be automated, database management is still made easier through the provision of embedded database administrator guides that offer advice on the best course of action to achieve maximum performance [e.g. advice is delivered for Partitioning, Data Recovery, Compression and Maximum Availability].
If DBA resource is still stretched thin, a number of companies including Xynomix are available to offer you specialist Oracle support and managed services.
Summary
The key value propositions of Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and the faster and smooth upgrade process make it compelling for businesses to consider upgrading older Oracle databases. Not only does upgrading give you access to new functionality, but it also ensures that your Oracle database is fully supported by Oracle. System management has been made easier and there is certainly scope for organisations to achieve much more from their Oracle investments, from the high availability, fault tolerance and performance delivered by RAC to the increased database security functionality provided by Oracle Database Vault and Audit Vault options.
