How to Get More Time to Play Golf or Faster Data Delivery with Delphix



The Delphix Data Virtualization Engine allows DBAs to spend less time cloning and refreshing databases and focus on other import tasks - like golf or your favorite activity. In full disclosure, I tried golf once and was 'turrible' at it. In all seriousness, having the ability to spin up a virtual database (VDB) in a matter of minutes shaves hours or days off of manual, mundane and error prone work. This makes customers (developers, analysts) happy too. Not only can you quickly and easily create full read/write copies of their production data, they also get the time machine-like ability to go backwards and forwards with their data, which opens up a world of possibilities.

As a database administrator, I've spent way too many hours creating clones of databases for development, test and reporting purposes. Cloning or duplicating multi-terabyte databases can take a very long time. Oracle databases, in particular, can become complex depending on how the clone is being performed. Recovery Manager (RMAN) is the tool of choice for cloning an Oracle database. Nonetheless, many things can go wrong during the process. How long does it take you to clone a database to a new server after you've requested the storage, and reviewed your carefully drafted cloning document, last used six months ago? What happens if you run out of space in the middle of a cloning operation? Wrong point in time selected for clone - oops! Flashback to the many hours,  nights and weekends lost having to monitor a painstakingly long refresh process - only to have it fail due to missing archive logs!  Especially on a beautiful day with mild temperatures and low humidity - perfect conditions for golfing!

Now let's imagine getting a ticket on a Friday morning requesting a full database refresh for an urgent bug fix affecting customers. You sigh to yourself because you know you'll have to deliver the bad news that it'll take the weekend to get it ready, and more importantly, that tee time that you booked for the weekend is now goners. With Delphix virtualization engine, that's a thing of the past. Why? cloning or refreshing a database takes minutes - no matter how large your database is. You also get great bonus features too. Storage savings (datafiles not copied), ability to rewind your VDB after the developer accidentally deletes data because he didn't specify a where clause in his delete script. On top of that, you have a little known cold failover solution for your VDBs!

I know what you're thinking. It sounds too good to be true. Getting your work done and making your customers happy and still having time to golf! Learn more about the Delphix Data Virtualization engine here. And try it for yourself.

I'm going to leave you with a video created by a colleague of mine that captures what I've just discussed. Happy golfing!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Setup a Wordpress site in 10 Minutes using Oracle Container Cloud Service

Image
Oracle Container Cloud Service Oracle Container Cloud Service lets you easily deploy applications based on docker images. If you don't have an existing application you can create one on docker. However, the easiest method to get a full application up and running is by deploying a stack. Oracle Container Cloud Service provides several example stacks that you can deploy, including web servers based on NGINX or Apache, MongoDB database, and Wordpress. You can find more examples on Oracle GitHub Site . Let's see just how easy it is to spin up a Wordpress site using the Oracle Container Cloud Service. Prerequisites: Access to Oracle Cloud Account Subscription to Oracle IaaS Service First, go to the Oracle Container Cloud Service console and launch a new service. In this example, I created a service with three containers. One manager and two worker nodes. Choose an appropriate "shape" for your compute instances. Note: Oracle uses the term "shape" to r...
Read more

Oracle Home Cloning: Tools and Techniques

One of the many necessary and frequent tasks that a database administrator performs before creating a database is installing the Oracle database binaries. These binaries form what is known as an Oracle Home (referenced by the ORACLE_HOME environment variable on Linux and UNIX environments). Unfortunately, this is also one of the most mundane and uninteresting tasks a DBA can perform. So like all good DBAs know, the best way to deal with such repetitive task is to automate it. Automating installations of Oracle database binaries enables us to reliably repeat the process to enable faster installation as well as provide identical copies of the software in multiple environments. Fortunately, Oracle allows us to clone the Oracle database binaries from one environment to another. Cloning your Oracle binaries from a source copy with all the necessary patches applied enables us to have gold images which can then be deployed to multiple environments. The procedure for cloning an Oracle home...
Read more

Using XFS on Oracle Linux

Install xfs packages on Oracle Linux 6.6 via Oracle Public Yum [root@matthew ~]# yum install xfsprogs Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit Setting up Install Process public_ol6_UEKR3_latest | 1.2 kB 00:00 public_ol6_UEK_latest | 1.2 kB 00:00 public_ol6_UEK_latest/primary | 19 MB 00:02 public_ol6_UEK_latest 407/407 public_ol6_addons | 1.2 kB 00:00 public_ol6_addons/primary | 77 kB 00:00 public_ol6_addons 269/269 public_ol6_latest | 1.4 kB 00:00 public_ol6_latest/primary | 46 MB 00:05 public_ol6_latest 29302/29302 http://public-yum.oracle.com/beta/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/uek3/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 22 - "The requested URL returned error: 404 Not Found" Trying other mirror. Resolving Dependencies --> Running transaction check ---> Package xfsprogs.x86_64 0:3.1.11-1.0.5.el6 will be installed --> Finished Dependency Resolution Dependencies Resolved ===================================================================================================...
Read more