Platform As A Service - Private Cloud

Sometime back, Oracle has published this white paper.

This gives a clear vision of where Oracle is heading in the technological direction of Cloud Computing.

By standardization on the technology stack for enterprise application and fusion middleware enhancements, the PaaS seems the natural direction for enterprises in medium term.

Link to my past blog post on Private Clouds Here.

SOA Governance standalone? or merge with IT Management?

"Governance" in general and SOA Governance in particular has been a buzz word for sometime now.

My definition for Governance is making sure that a "thing" works as it is supposed to work. Replace the "thing" with SOA, IT, state, country etc.,

One of the emerging trends for past few years is "Business Transaction Management" for managing the composite IT applications configuration, performance and "Governance"

Traditionally the IT management tools and frameworks have looked at the IT as operations management, quality management, performance management, configuration management etc., disciplines.

In this trend the problem of IT management is from a business point of view. That is good. So, what is happenning in the technology?

1. Application Performance Management
2. Composite Application Management using run time discovery of relationships between the components (services) of the application
3. Business transaction management tools

Here is the question:

Will the new trend merge in traditional IT Management tools?
or
A standalone set of new SOA Governance tools emerge due to the new trend?

Based on my "UNIX" philosophy, I think an integrated set of tools that consist of traditional IT management with the new SOA Governance would be a best fit to tailor to the needs of contemporary corporates!

Let us wait and see....

Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC)

Oracle has introduced a new data storage technology in Exadata V2 called Hybrid Columnar Compression. This method uses a "compression unit" that is made of several rows; it is physically stored in compressed "column vectors" in multiple blocks of storage.

There are two flavors of columnar compression that are optimized for "QUERY" (warehouse compression better for executing queries) and "ARCHIVE" (best data storage for archive compression)

Each of the QUERY and ARCHIVE come with another modifier to set the "LOW" or "HIGH" compression mode.

This technical white paper gives an overview of the new technology.

This article on Oracle Magazine may also be useful in understanding this new feature.

More data can be stored in "less" space. Good!