Are You Going to use Cloud Computing?
I did a keynote on cloud computing last week.  When I asked the audience how many people were using cloud computing today, nobody raised their hand (in an audience of about 300).  Then I asked how many people thought they would ever use it.  Maybe 20 people raised their hands.  How many people thought it was “real” or coming?  Same 20 or so.

Flashback to 1994
In preparing for this keynote, I had a flashback to 1994 when I was asked to do a debate on client server computing vs. this new technology call “web computing.”  I was a client server guy, so I was to debate how client server was here to stay, how it was proven, etc.  After doing my research, I realized that the computing world would move toward dynamic web page generation, web computing, etc.  At that presentation I talked about web development as an “early adaptor” technology at that point.  Sure things changed, but those who were in on the group floor understood the fundamentals and therefore saw opportunities that weren’t available later…such as Amazon.

Are You an Early Adaptor?
Cloud computing is in a similar state.  If you’re an early adaptor, now is your time to truly understand and dig into cloud computing.  If you’re a late adaptor, wait 10 years or more.  The thing I can assure EVERY company out there is that they will use a form of cloud computing at some point.  Some sooner than others.  Personally when it comes to new applications, businesses, etc. I’m only thinking in terms of this elastic computing model.  Simply put, for less than $3/hr I can spin up a SUPER fast processor on Amazon.  If I purchased that machine, it would cost me $50k or more…and I’d have to install the OS, configure hardware, install my applications and more.  Why not just fire up a virtual image pre-configured?  You can do your development, testing, etc. on a box that will cost you about $.08/hr.  Imagine what $1000 will do for you in this model vs. a traditional / physical model.  There’s no comparison.

Are You Confused?
There’s a lot of confusion out there.  There are also a number of cloud offerings in a variety of forms.  When I think about cloud computing, I think of server farms that can be spun up to run my application at the drop of a command.  Those are cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.  Then there are Application Platform cloud providers like Google App Engine, Force.com and hosted Oracle Application Express (ApEx) vendors.  These are vendors who provide a platform that you can build your applications on.  Google App Engine can be built on Java or Python.  Force and ApEx are 4GL application platforms (i.e. point and click interfaces).  There are many portal and mashup companies who feel they provide cloud solutions.   There are SaaS portal applications like iGoogle, MyYahoo, Yahoo Pipes, Yahoo YQL and more.  There are cloud load testing companies like Soasta.  There are also a number of SaaS integration appliance vendors (Integration as a Service).  Most of which mention cloud computing in their marketing literature.  So yes, there’s plenty of confusion and it’s difficult to keep up.

What’s in Your Way?
So why not move to the cloud today?  There are many reasons of course.  Just like when web computing came into play - many things come to mind.  They can likely be grouped into 3 categories: 1) Technological - security, integration, etc., 2) Financial - such as SLA, what does it cost you if you’re down vs. your SLA, etc. 3) Cultural - do you really enjoy spinning up servers?  Someone in your company might.

SaaS vs. Cloud
Many people say they have cloud offerings…and by their own definition, they might. Many of those are SaaS (Software as a Service) vendors…not Cloud vendors. SalesForce is actually both, but what most people thing of when they think of them is their CRM package online –that’s SaaS. Hardware as a Service (HaaS) is something that’s been around for a while too – i.e. timesharing, outsourcing your hardware to someone else. Cloud is SaaS and HaaS – running your applications on someone else’s hardware. The software could be used as a service – i.e. an Oracle license.

 

No Lack of Benefits
The reality of cloud computing is that the benefits are numerous. Ultimately you can absolutely reduce your costs using cloud computing. It’s all about economies of scale. To do it right in a data center is very expensive. If you can share that expense with 1000 of your closest friends – why wouldn’t you! The fact that you can spin up new instances within seconds is exceptionally powerful. All of this translates into risk mitigation. You don’t need to spend any money on hardware! I think you’ll see more seamless cloud offerings in the future. Google has a nice seemless cloud offering for example. You can run their cloud offering (Google App Server) in your own environment or in theirs. You’ll have real power from Oracle when there is a “cloud” option on a SQL statement – just like parallelism…run it on the cloud.

 

On the other hand, the variable costs can be high. If I buy a box, put some hardware on it, install software on it, I know the costs, right? Not totally – all of this setup requires time, but we often don’t consider that a variable cost. We also have to support our hardware and software – that’s all very expensive. But we tend to think of these things (i.e. salaries, hardware, software, etc) as a sunk cost, right? We’re fooling ourselves. It’s like setting your watch ahead by 15 minutes – do I really think I’m that dumb?

 

Cloud Solutions
I’ve experimented with all of these cloud providers in one form or another. Some I’ve used in production environments and others not. I think I have a pretty good handle on these technologies, but I learned a long time ago – if I’m a guy who likes my big boat, there’s always someone who has a bigger boat out there…and that’s true for all of these technologies. I know the Oracle technologies pretty well and I’m confident that I don’t know the entire stack. This is complicated stuff. I’m going to tell you my thoughts about each of these vendors cloud offerings. Again, my goal is to get you energized – to get you thinking, questioning some future direction, etc.

If you’re thinking about a new highly scalable application that you’re going to build, I sure hope you’ll consider doing it in the cloud. 

• Oracle
• Amazon
• SalesForce (Force.com)
• Google App Engine
• Yahoo Pipes
• Zoho
• Others…

Keep in mind that long term this is an infrastructure decision, so don’t take it lightly!  There are so many questions that you have to ask yourself: 

• Do you need to spin up servers or just run an application?
• Existing or new application?
• Oracle in the Cloud?
• Pay per use OK?
• Global application?
• Scaling on demand important?
• Public, private, partner cloud?

 Let’s take a look at what each of the above vendors.

 

Oracle

First off, Oracle is really a cloud enabler, not so much a cloud infrastructure provider. The preferred Oracle cloud infrastructure is provided by Amazon. You could say that ApEx running in a SaaS environment is a cloud offering. On apex.oracle.com you can build your own application there and run it on their hardware. Not really in a production environment – Oracle doesn’t provide “production level” ApEx – at least they don’t support it.

 

Oracle has numerous SaaS offerings, which is running their software on their hardware….for example CRM, ERP, etc. They say they have “Oracle Technology on Demand” but it’s all Oracle 9.2, so I’m not sure what that says since Oracle’s on version 11g now.

 

Personally I believe they could be one of the biggest cloud providers once they complete the Sun transaction. The Exadata boxes running in the cloud would be a great virtual offering!

Amazon
Amazon is one of my favorite cloud infrastructure providers…Oracle’s too – so far. That’s certain to change. With EC2 you can spin up a server in no time. You pay by the hour of computing time. As low as about 8 cents up to about $3/hr depending on the size and performance of the virtual box. You also will pay for data storage, data transfer, and other costs. But…what’s it cost you to spin up a box today? What’s it cost you to decommission a box today?

 

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)  is a true cloud infrastructure.  S3 (Simple Storage Service) is how you store your data.  You can get virtual machines in a variety of configurations – small, large, extra large, high CPU or standard CPU.  You can run as many virtual images as you would like - $.085-$2.88/hr/machine + licenses + data transfer (to S3).  And of course, you can build your own virtual instances on the OS, software, etc. of your choice.

 

Force.com
SalesForce offers what they call a cloud offering.  It’s really an “Application Platform as a Service.”  I liken it to apex.oracle.com. If you want to build a hosted Web app – Force.com might be for you.  There are entire consulting firms sprouting up who do nothing but Force.com development - I like this!  Force.com provides an ApEx like development environment,  There are are sample applications (recruiting and volunteers) that you can check out on their site too.

 

I’d like to know how do you spin up a box?  Manage reliability, performance, etc…these are concerns to me.

Google App Engine
Google App Engine is a very powerful way to run your applications. It’s basically a hosted JVM environment. It’s nice that you can run it on your own hardware too. But, the downside in my book is that it’s not all that developer friendly. There’s no ApEx-like interface.  So it’s a 3GL Application Platform as a Service.

 

But…don’t count Google out just yet. They have a number of SaaS offerings (Mail, Calendar, etc) that can be great components of your cloud solution…for free.

It’s a true Cloud (scalable, redundant, etc) environment, but can’t run Oracle.  You have to develop your own app in Google App Engine lingo - i.e. Java or Python.  You can run Java databases like Derby of course.  By default you get BigTable, which is the same “database” that Google’s search engine uses.
 
One thing I like about this architecture is that you can run it on your own hardware or run on Google (i.e. in the cloud).  Easy to build, easy to maintain, easy to scale.  An application on a free account can use up to 500MB of storage and up to 5 million page views a month.  You can also pay and configure:

 

• CPU Time
• Bandwidth in
• Bandwidth out
• Storage
• Email

Google provides the Google Data API to get to everything.  As I mentioned, there are many SaaS / hosted solutions that they have too - such as Calendars, Documents, App Server, etc.

 

Yahoo
Yahoo is a content company.  They don’t really seem to have any cloud solutions.  They have one that’s currently been introduced to universities only, but that doesn’t seem all that interesting to industry.  Yahoo’s been talking about their cloud offering for a while now. In April they finally released it to universities – i.e. a limited beta. But again, don’t count Yahoo out – they are a content company.

If you want weather information, stock information, traffic, etc…they have the content. All of us love SQL, and Yahoo has YQL. Is the Y long or short? EEQL, IQL, ICKQL? YuckQL?

Actually I’m a big fan of YQL as you’ll see in a minute.  Yahoo provides many great developer tools (YUI, YQL, APIs).  In fact, YQL is quite powerful.  It returns data as XML or JSON.  You can also store your own data on Yahoo (Google offers this too).  You can query your own XML through YQL.  And…Yahoo Pipes are great!

 

Zoho
Zoho considers themselves a cloud provider. Personally again, I’d say that’s a stretch. It’s more like a Google Documents on steroids. It does have some nice APIs and a JDBC driver.  Zoho as in Soho, so I have to wonder - is it for small time companies?  Again, it’s more like ApEx on a server than Cloud.  They say they have CloudSQL…all marketing hype.  It’s really more like SaaSSQL…  They do have JDBC and ODBC drivers, which is pretty cool!

 

Others
As I mentioned, there are MANY other cloud providers. So take some time to pick your cloud provider. This is an infrastructure decision.  Think about what you really need right now.  Do you need SaaS or Cloud?
Do you need to move from your hardware to someone else’s?  What kind of scale do you need?  I’d recommend you hire an expert…so you make the right decisions.  As I mentioned, it’s tough to study up on all this stuff.

Cloud with SOA?
What’s SOA – Service Oriented Architecture. SOA is an architecture, not a technology. So it contains a lot of components, best practices, etc. Many people say that SOA is a best practices approach to best practices. SOA bigots will say that SOA is just Web Services – in fact, you can do SOA without Web Services. Sure, that’s true, but I think the best place to start on your SOA journey is via Web Services. What are web services? Just an open standard API. You already have services or APIs. You already have data. So why not expose your existing data and business logic through an open API?

What’s your path to cloud? Start with web services. Start with something like YQL and see how it works. Integrate some Yahoo data into your applications. For example, I send myself emails with all of the weather updates for the town I live in – Littleton, CO. My plan is to integrate this with my calendar and figure out what city I’m in or going to be in and send weather updates for my current location…and traffic info…and events of interest, etc.

What are the steps to success?  I believe a company should:

 

• You have services (packages, data)
• Figure out which service you want to expose internally or externally
• Create web services based on your existing services
• Pick a product to create your services - iPerspective, Jdeveloper, …
• Try out Yahoo YQL

 I’d also encourage you to check out Yahoo Pipes. Pipes allows you to prompt for information, use YQL, draw it in a map, overlay data and more. The maps you see here are 2 maps I created that show current traffic on a map. The map on the bottom of the page shows the culinary events that are in town. Again, I plan on merging this information with my “current” location and sending daily emails of maps and other items of interest. So let’s take a look at how you can do this with ApEx…

CGQ
I wrote a product that we call CGQ – consumer gateway for queries. It allows you to write a query against ANY Web Service. We have another product, iPerspective that creates Web Services based on your existing assets – i.e. data in any database or business logic in any database (T-SQL, PL/SQL, etc.). So CGQ allows me to write a query against any Web Service. The services can be ones I created or ones already in existence…or in a cloud. Using CGQ I could query from YQL or fire off an EC2 server or CRUD data, etc. VERY powerful stuff and to the developer it simply looks like SQL and/or PL/SQL code.

 

CGQ Query 1 - Get all of the places named Littleton
If we take a look at this query, it’s pretty simple.  It “virtualizes” the Web Service from Yahoo, so the Oracle engine thinks it’s an Oracle table:
 
select text_column1 place_type, text_column2 name,

text_column3 country, text_column4 state,
text_column5 county, text_column6 postal_code,
text_column7 locality1, num_column1 centroid_lat,
num_column2 centroid_long
from table(cast(soap_ws.select_restful(
‘placeTypeName,name,country,admin1,admin2,postal,locality1′,
‘centroid/latitude,centroid/longitude’,
‘http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=
select%20*%20from%20geo.places%20
where%20text%3D%22littleton%22′,
‘place’, ‘results’,
‘xmlns=”http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/schema.rng”‘)
as generic_table));

 

Here’s what the output looks like in SQL Developer:

 
Sample CGQ Query 2 - Get the detailed weather for 80123
 
select text_column1 date_1, text_column2 day1,

num_column1 Day1_Low, num_column2 Day1_High,
text_column3 Weather_1, text_column4 date_2,
text_column5 day2, num_column3 Day2_Low,
num_column4 Day2_High, text_column6 Weather_2
from table(cast(soap_ws.select_restful(
‘yweather:forecast[1]/@date,yweather:forecast[1]/
@day,yweather:forecast[1]/@text,yweather:forecast[2]/
@date,yweather:forecast[2]/@day,yweather:forecast[2]/@text’,
‘yweather:forecast[1]/@low,yweather:forecast[1]/
@high,yweather:forecast[2]/@low,yweather:forecast[2]/@high’,
‘http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=
select%20*%20from%20weather.forecast%20
where%20location%3D80123′,
‘item’, ‘results’,
‘xmlns:yweather=”http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/ns/rss/1.0″‘)
as generic_table));

 

Here’s what the output looks like in SQL Developer:

Query 3 - Get the upcoming events for a location
 
select text_column1 date_posted, text_column2 description,

text_column3 name, text_column4 photo_url,
text_column5 distance_units, text_column6 start_date,
text_column7 start_time, text_column8 ticket_price,
text_column9 ticket_url, text_column10 venue_address,
num_column1 distance, num_column2 latitude, num_column3 longitude
from table(cast(soap_ws.select_restful(
‘@date_posted,@description,@name,@photo_url,
@distance_units,@start_date,@start_time,@ticket_price,
@ticket_url,@venue_address,@distance,@latitude,@longitude’,’’,
‘http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=
select%20*%20from%20upcoming.events%20
where%20search_text%3D%22music%22%20
and%20location%3D%22Denver%2CCO%22%20
and%20radius%3D1′,
‘event’, ‘results’)
as generic_table));

 

Here’s what the output looks like in SQL Developer:

Query 4 - Traffic in a Radius
 
select text_column1 date_posted, text_column2 description,

text_column3 name, text_column4 photo_url,
text_column5 distance_units, text_column6 start_date,
text_column7 start_time, text_column8 ticket_price,
text_column9 ticket_url, text_column10 venue_address,
num_column1 distance, num_column2 latitude, num_column3 longitude
from table(cast(soap_ws.select_restful(
‘@date_posted,@description,@name,@photo_url,
@distance_units,@start_date,@start_time,@ticket_price,
@ticket_url,@venue_address,@distance,@latitude,@longitude’,’’,
‘http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=
select%20*%20from%20upcoming.events%20
where%20search_text%3D%22music%22%20
and%20location%3D%22Denver%2CCO%22%20
and%20radius%3D1′,
‘event’, ‘results’)
as generic_table));

 

Here’s what the output looks like in SQL Developer:

Now It’s up to You!
I can assure you that the cloud is real. I can assure you that you’ll use it in your business.  There’s a natural progression to get started.  Give SOA a try.  Test out a Cloud provider.  Learn!  I have some questions for you:

 

• Did I get you thinking?
• Are you more curious than before you read this?
• Do you see how it might apply to your business?
• Still don’t see a fit? Why not?

Bradley D. Brown soa

As I mentioned before, Yahoo provides Yahoo Query Language (YQL) in a variety of forms.  There is a console that allows you to write a query in a browser and see the XML results on the screen.  This is nice for development purposes, but XML isn’t all that “humanly readable.”  I’m a big fan of maps to represent data that can be attached to a latitude and longitude.  When you think about it, most data actually can be attached to an address, a zip code, a city or some geospatial component.  In my last blog, demonstrated how to use YQL and it’s RESTful API to query and display information in a tabular form.  Today I’m going to show you how to take that tablular data and represent it in map.

In my ApEx application, I created a region that contains 4 input fields:

You can see that I’m collecting:

• Address (to use for events and traffic)
• Weather Zip (zip code to use for the weather information)
• Event Search (search text for the events)
• Radius (radius from the address to search for events and traffic)

As you can see in the following figure, I displayed the traffic information on the map (pretty cool isn’t it).  Below the map, I included the detailed traffic information in a tabular format (not very existing is it).  The traffic is within the specified radius of the address on the page.

In the following figure you’ll see that I displayed all of the events within the radius of the specified address that contain the search text specified.  Again, below the events, is a tabular listing of the event details.

.

 There are many maps available including Yahoo, Microsoft (Virtual Earth), Google, etc.  Yahoo Pipes, which I’ve discussed previously, allows you to consume RESTful (or standard) Web Services.  Pipes allows you to consume YQL queries too.  I decided to use Yahoo Pipes to consume my YQL queries.  The figure below shows the Pipes visual diagram, which I’ll explain below.

Above you’ll see that the diagram starts in the upper right corner with 2 text input values (location and radius).  These feed into the “String Builder” which writes a SQL statement that’s used in the YQL query.  The query will look like: select * from maps.traffic where location=”loc” and radisu=radius.  This is fed into the YQL query, which pases it’s results into rename, which changes item.description to description and item.title to title.  The “Location Exrtaction” module will pull the lat/long information from YQL query.  Amazingly simple isn’t it!  When you run the Pipe, you can see that there are 2 tabs.  1 for the Map (because we used the Location Extractor and a list.

You see that all of the traffic shows up in the lat/long location it belongs on the map.  I’m always amazed how easy it is to integrate this data when you have services.  You can see above that there are many options available with the Pipe data.  You can publish the map on your MyYahoo page or you iGoogle page or get it as an RSS or JSON feeds and more.  You can also see that there is an option labeled “Get as a Badge.”  As you can see here, you can put the badge in TypePad, Blogger, WordPress, iGoogle or as an Embedded link on your Web page:

When you click on “Embed,” Pipes provides you with a link to copy and paste.  Now back to ApEx.  How do we take this embedded link and put it in ApEx?  Remember that we have 2 bind variables for this Pipe.  These will be input variables in the RESTful service.  For this Pipe, the link that I copied looks like this:

<script src="http://l.yimg.com/a/i/us/pps/mapbadge_1.1.js">{"pipe_id":"1000b6378cfdcd6dd7c46397c03c08a8","_btype":"map","pipe_params":{"loc":"215 Union Blvd, Lakewood, CO","radius":"50"}}</script>

You can see the 2 bind variables.  Remember that in my ApEx application, I had 4 input variables (ApEx items) on my page.  The names of my variables are: P2_ADDRESS, P2_ZIP, P2_SEARCH and P2_RADIUS.  I created a new HTML region on my page.  Then I pasted the above embedded script into the region’s HTML source.  The only thing I needed to change was to add in my bind variables.  You can see how I changed it below.  In PL/SQL, you reference bind variables with a colon in front.  For example, you would write something like “where radius = :p2_radius” in PL/SQL.  In HTML, the binding uses an ampersand before the variable name and a period at the end.  So here’s what my region source looks like now:

<script src=”http://l.yimg.com/a/i/us/pps/mapbadge_1.1.js”>{”pipe_id”:”1000b6378cfdcd6dd7c46397c03c08a8″,”_btype”:”map”,”pipe_params”:{”loc”:”&P2_ADDRESS.”,”radius”:”&P2_RADIUS.”}}</script>

My events map HTML region now looks like this:

<script src=”http://l.yimg.com/a/i/us/pps/mapbadge_1.1.js”>{”pipe_id”:”443aa7ea681f51feb5ff3e24cc71812b”,”_btype”:”map”,”pipe_params”:{”search”:”&P2_SEARCH.”,”loc”:”&P2_ADDRESS.”,”radius”:”&P2_RADIUS.”}}</script>

You can see my bind variables in this region too.  You can see what my “Events in Town” Pipe looks like when I run it.  Notice the visual diagram (flow chart) here too - very cool!

Let’s take a look at the details behind this Pipe now.  Here’s the flow:

This Pipe begins in the top middle of the page with 3 text input variables - search text, location and radius.  Again, this feeds building the select statement that feeds into YQL.  I then took the results of that query and split it into 2 threads.  One thread takes a lot of the information and moves it into a “new_description” field.  This is used for all of the events, which are then put into an RSS format, sent into the union, which goes into the pipe’s output.  The other thread extras the venue’s zip code and gets the weather for that zip code.  Since many events could be in the same zip code, I ran it through a unique filter for unique cities and for all unique cities builds a YQL query for the weather information, which is also unioned into the pipe’s output.  So we have a powerful combination of service requests. 

Again, I’m hoping to inspire you to go and build a really cool application that you can use in your company or personally.  Services are VERY powerful.  And of course…if you need help, give us a call!

Bradley D. Brown Uncategorized

Bradley D. Brown Uncategorized, mashups, oracle application express, rss, web services

Have you checked out Google Wave yet?  The videos and discussions are pretty cool!  If you sign up, you might just get to check it out in the sandbox too!  I received a sandbox account, created my first survey and sent it off.  Wave made it very easy for me to analyze the results and get answers in no time at all.  I was trying to organize a 4 wheeling adventure this coming weekend, next weekend or in the Spring.  It turned out that next weekend worked for a number of people, so we got it on the schedule.  Here are the results in a spreadsheet format: 

You can also view the summary of the results - what’s next - enterprise integration?:

14responses

Summary See complete responses 

 

 

Would you be interested in a 4 wheeling adventure?
	Yes   14 100% No   0 0% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

How much 4 wheeling experience do you have?
None   A Ton	1 - None 4 29% 2   3 21% 3   5 36% 4   1 7% 5 - A Ton 1 7% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

Would you want to use your own vehicle or ride with someone else?
	My own vehicle if it’s easy   6 43% My own vehicle if it’s challenging   3 21% Don’t have a 4 wheel drive with enough clearance, but would like to ride along   5 36% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

How much clearance do you have with your vehicle?
	None, it’s a car   3 21% Standard SUV clearance   9 64% Lifted Vehicle   2 14% Don’t worry about my clearance   0 0% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

If you want to ride with someone else - how many of you need a ride?
	1   3 43% 2   3 43% 3   1 14% 4   0 0% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

If you can drive, how many extras can you take?
	1   1 14% 2   4 57% 3   2 29% 4   0 0% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

Where would you like to go?
	Keystone area (on the divide)   8 73% Idaho Springs area (Fall River Road / St. Marys)   2 18% Somewhere else (put in comments)   1 9% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

Which dates work best for you - Sept 26 No responses yet for this question.
	People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

Which dates work best for you - Sept 27
	#1   1 33% #2   2 67% #3   0 0% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

Which dates work best for you - Oct 3
	#1   6 75% #2   1 13% #3   1 13% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

Which dates work best for you - Oct 4
	#1   1 13% #2   5 63% #3   2 25% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

Which dates work best for you - Next spring
	#1   6 67% #2   0 0% #3   3 33% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

 

Bradley D. Brown Uncategorized

Oracle Open World (OOW) is just a few weeks away.  It’s going to be a busy week for a lot of people!  Rolta TUSC will have a LOT of presentations that week.  We have 2 booths at the conference.  Numerous demo stations will be at the booth.  It’s going to be a fun week!  I have 3 presentations.  1 on Monday, 1 Wednesday and the final one Thursday morning.  I’ll be arriving on Sunday and heading home on Thursday.  I always love a week in San Fran!  Here are my presentations - please come see me!

Title: Wimpy Web Services Versus Powerful, Flexible Web Services
Track: Oracle Develop: Service-Oriented Architecture
Date: 12-OCT-09
Time: 11:30 - 12:30
Venue: Hilton Hotel
Room: Yosemite C

In this presentation, Brad will discuss the importance of strong Web Services, the difference between wimpy services and powerful flexible Web services. Many companies today are attaching SOA MBOs to their technical teams. These performance metrics often measure based on quantity rather than quality. What is quality? Reuse? Performance? Flexibility? Brad will discuss this topic in detail.

Title: Building a Mashup with Application Express
Track: Database
Date: 14-OCT-09
Time: 17:00 - 18:00
Venue: Moscone South
Room: Room 252

In this presentation, Brad will talk about how to develop a mashup using Oracle Application Express. Traditionally people think of ApEx as being an “Oracle database” tool only - not a mashup tool. However, Brad will show how you can consuming Web Services to access data from any source - Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, Access, Excel, Cloud Databases (like Zoho), etc. In Brad’s presentation titled “Scalable Oracle ApEx” he explains how to create an n-tier architecture for ApEx. This architecture provides unparalleled scalability to your organization. This presentation explains the implementation side (i.e. the specifics) of this solution.

Title: Scalable Oracle Application Express: Case Study of a True N-Tier Architecture
Track: Database
Date: 15-OCT-09
Time: 09:00 - 10:00
Venue: Moscone South
Room: Room 306

Do you like the power and flexibility of Oracle Application Express (ApEx)? But…are you frustrated by the fact that it chews up database cycles generating dynamic HTML pages? Do your architects and DBAs go mad thinking about this? I know I sure have!  This presentation will demonstrate a solution to this architectural dilemma! A reference architecture is provided along with a case study that this presentation is based around. You’ll see exactly how to scale ApEx (inexpensively) within your environment.

Bradley D. Brown ajax, bpel, mashups, oracle, oracle application express, rest, soa, web 2.0, web services

Here’s the article of interest for today.  Sun’s in and HP’s out!  Here’s the bottom line:  An Oracle spokeswoman said that the Exadata machine built in partnership with HP is no longer available for sale.  If you want to watch the annoucement - here it is.

Bradley D. Brown Sun, oracle

Oracle Unveils Exadata Version 2: The First Database Machine for OLTP

 Redwood Shores – September 15, 2009

News Facts

·         The world’s first OLTP Database Machine was unveiled today by Oracle Chief Executive Officer, Larry Ellison; and Sun Executive Vice President John Fowler.

·         The Exadata Database Machine Version 2, made by Sun and Oracle, is the world’s fastest machine for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP).

·         Built using industry standard hardware components plus FlashFire technology from Sun, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle Exadata Storage Server Software Release 11.2, the Sun Oracle Database Machine Version 2 is twice as fast as Version 1 for data warehousing.

·         The Sun Oracle Database Machine goes beyond data warehousing applications with the addition of Exadata Smart Flash Cache based on Sun FlashFire technology to deliver extreme performance and scalability for online transaction processing (OLTP).

·         Exadata Version 2 is available in four models: full rack (8 database servers and 14 storage servers), half-rack (4 database servers and 7 storage servers), quarter-rack (2 database servers and 3 storage servers) and a basic system (1 database server and 1 storage server).  All four Exadata configurations are available immediately.

·         With the Sun Oracle Database Machine, Oracle customers can store more than ten-times the amount of data and search data more than ten-times faster without making any changes to applications.

·         Hardware from Sun

o        Sun’s FlashFire memory cards enable high performance OLTP

o        80% Faster CPUs – Intel Xeon (Nehalem) processors

o        50% Faster Disks – 600 GB SAS Disks at 6 Gigabits/second

o        200% Faster Memory – DDR3 memory

o        125% More Memory – 72 Gigabytes per database server

o        100% Faster Network – 40 Gigabits/second InfiniBand

o        Raw disk capacity of 100 TB (SAS) or 336 TB (SATA) per rack

·         Software from Oracle

o        Features the world’s first flash-enabled database - Oracle 11g Release 2

o        Hybrid columnar compression for 10-50 times data compression

o        Scans on compressed data for even faster query execution

o        Storage Indexes to further reduce disk I/Os

o        Offloading of query processing to storage using Smart Scans

o        Smart scans of Data Mining models in storage servers

o        Applications running on the  Sun Oracle Database Machine achieve up to 1 Million I/O Operations per Second to Flash Storage

Bradley D. Brown Sun, oracle

Each year at Oracle Open World, Oracle makes a big announcement.  2 years ago, the big annoucement was how Oracle squashed Red Hat by providing OS support for half of Red Hat’s going rate for support.  Oracle could easily do it for half price - Red Hat was doing all of Oracle’s R&D on the OS.  What a brilliant move against open sourcing your software.  Last year there were many big annoucements.  I predicted Oracle’s big annoucement would be that they were going to offer up Oracle through Amazon’s Cloud offering.  That was one of MANY annoucements - in fact, there were so many annoucements that the cloud offering went almost unnoticed.  Much to my surprise, I haven’t heard any great success stories about this offering in the last year either.  The big annoucement last year was the HP / Oracle hardware offering - a massive parallel processing computer for data warehousing.  Interesting, but didn’t wow me personally.  I haven’t personally “played” with one - have you? 

So what will the annoucements be this year?  It used to be one annoucement - now clearly it’s now going to be many BIG annoucements.  With all of the acquisitions, it’s no wonder.  What’s the big recent annoucement - Oracle purchasing Sun of course.  So what does that mean for open source?  Who was the largest open source vendor or all?  Sun?  Sun had purchased the best open source DBs (in my opinion) - MySQL.  Sun started much of the open source revolution with none other than Java.  Java’s an open source programming language.  What’s this annoucement mean for Java and all of the products based on Java?  Oracle’s purchased MANY such products.  From BEAs product lines to Java Containers to so much more.  In fact they have thrown out more software than most companies will ever own or write in a lifetime.  Oracle was partnering into the hardware world last year…and now they are in the hardware business.  They’ve made it clear that they are gunning for IBM.  So will they purchase HP next?  Flip (Platinum Software) predicted many years ago (almost 15 now) that it would all come down to a couple of vendors - he usually mentioned IBM and Oracle (and Platinum of course).  CA’s still around aren’t they! Who’s next?  When will the SEC step in?

I wish I could dream up a prediction for this coming OOW.  I’m confident that Oracle will announce something big at OOW.  It’s only about 4 weeks away!  What will the annoucement be?  Who will be crushed this year?  Who will be celebrating?  Oracle’s already annouced that their Exadata box is available on their Sun hardware: 

Announcing the World’s First OLTP Database Machine
with Sun FlashFire Technology

You are invited to attend this exclusive live Webcast in which Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will unveil an innovative new product, the world’s first OLTP database machine with Sun FlashFire technology. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn firsthand how the partnership between Oracle and Sun can benefit your business now and in the future.

Who: Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle, and John Fowler, EVP, Sun
When: Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 1 p.m. PT/4 p.m. ET

Register now to watch the live Webcast.

After the event, we invite you to watch the Webcast on demand at your convenience.

Larry is 65 this year - maybe he’s going to annouce that’s going to take some time away from the business?  Will that be the big annoucement?

Bradley D. Brown Sun, oracle

I created a white paper out of the content in the below posts.  If you would like the 5 part series in one document, you can download it Recession-Proof Agile SOA White Paper.  Enjoy!

Bradley D. Brown agile, soa agile soa

Your Guide Along the SOA Adoption Path

I’ve been talking about Agile SOA, which is an iterative method of working with the business and IT to develop services that better serve the business.  In other words, using our methodology, you’re building an optimized business with assets you already own!  Not all at once – not over night…very much via releases over time.  This is powerful.

So let’s talk about how some customers have implemented our methodology and software.

You can see in the figure that we recommend implementing services in iterations.

Real World Examples

We’re going to take a look at some real world examples now.

Bombay Stock Exchange 

Legacy Modernization

First, let’s talk about a Periscope example.  The Bombay Stock Exchange uses Periscope.  They have a lot of data on Stratus platforms.  They wanted to do ad-hoc reporting on that data.  But there weren’t tools like Cognos, Brio, etc. that work on those platforms.  Periscope makes the Stratus data appear in an Oracle database – as if it’s Oracle data.  So any tool that can access Oracle can report on the Stratus data.  This simplifies life for the exchange.

Exchange:

–        Stratus system – high uptime requirements

–        Ad hoc reporting through Periscope

–        Simplifies access and control/auditing

IntelliReal

B2B Integration

One of our customers is in the real estate intelligence business.  We created a number of services around existing business logic and data.  The services were initially used to develop a UI that was used by most of their customers.  When customers asked for customization of the UI, our customer would offer that everything they saw in UI was simply a service that they could use as they saw fit.  The B2B customers would then use the exact same services to develop their own user interfaces, workflow processes or integrate applications.  What you see here are examples of how different companies used the exact same data.

The beauty of building services was that we could use our own services for the UI. 

In this first figure, you can see that this is from the IntelliReal site.  Enter an address and pick your report type.  This call the respective service that often generates a PDF and other times returns data.

 After entering an address and requesting a detailed online report, the user can see a list of objects that exist for this property.

The following figure is a PDF that gets generated when a user requests an Intelligent Property Report.  One service returns the data for this PDF and another service formats the data and generates a PDF.  This way customers can call the data service if they wish to generate a similar report in a different format.

And this figure shows the geosearch functionality.  Via Google Maps all of the homes in a neighborhood are displayed and then can be slice and diced as the user sees fit.  For example, the user can see the data by the number of bedrooms in a home or the style of home, acreage and the like.

And this figure shows the geosearch functionality.  Via Google Maps all of the homes in a neighborhood are displayed and then can be slice and diced as the user sees fit.  For example, the user can see the data by the number of bedrooms in a home or the style of home, acreage and the like.

The figures below all represent ways that different customers used the same data as above.  They similar call the same services that IntelliReal uses internally and then they graph the data however they choose.  For example, you can see that this page shows a simple Google map for a property and a few details about the property.

Another vendor had their own mapping package to display the data on a map.  You can see they displayed an index, range for the property value and so forth.

As I mentioned above, IntelliReal displayed the market volatility data in a heat  map.  This customer wanted to graph the data for a specific property and then to put it into a table at the bottom.

Bradley D. Brown agile, soa agile, soa