IT Adaptability To Change Critical For Organisations

In an insightful conversation with Biztech2.0, Seema Ambastha, director – Sales Consulting, Database Technologies, Oracle India, talks about change assurance in a database.

What are some of the business challenges that make features such as change assurance in a database important for enterprises?

As Alfred Einstein once said, ‘Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal’. Change is top most on the minds of most data centre managers and one of the constant aspects for consideration in today’s business environment. Organisations could face changes due to several factors like the regulatory framework, reorganisation, competitive threat, new windows of opportunities, new technology and mergers and acquisitions. CEOs and CIOs are not looking at IT as a cost-cutting tool any more. They want IT to bring efficiency to their organisation. They expect IT to ensure that their organisation adapts to the changing ecosystem and business environment. The ability of IT to adapt to change is critical for the organisation to adapt and profit from change. There are numerous examples of upgrades that have not resulted in profitable businesses or have turned into flawed implementations resulting in IT disasters, and ultimately leading to organisational collapse.

There are numerous reasons for the data centre manager’s inability to gauge the impact of a given change. In many cases, there has not been enough time to test whether the changes have adversely affected existing functionality or not. It is not uncommon for organisations to be in a situation where they don’t have enough people with expertise available to perform the required testing. It could also happen that IT Managers do not have enough information to gain adequate confidence in the state of the system. In many organisations, the testing process uses a simulated workload that does not reflect the true production environment. It is a combination of these factors that leave IT managers struggling with the un-enviable role of managing an unpredictable change. On the one hand, they have to implement the change, while on the other hand they do not know the implications of the change.

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How does Oracle address this concern? What are the tools that an enterprise can use to test change assurance and database security?

Through our close association and interaction with customers, Oracle has been able to identify that one of their biggest pain points is migration, whether they’re migrating to a new version of the database, a new version of an operating system, or even a new version of their own database-based internal application. Oracle Database 11g provides a number of technologies and functionalities to lower the cost and the risk of change at every stage in the lifecycle of change management. The ‘Change Assurance’ features in the Oracle Database 11g help the customer better manage the change process - whether it is migration, an upgrade or change of any other sort. The change need not be just within the database – it helps in evaluating OS upgrades and other environmental changes.

Oracle Database 11g provides Snapshot Standby Database; Real Application Testing; Database Replay; Performance Analyser and SQL Plan Management.

How does ‘Real Application Testing’ differ from competing products or technologies?

The weakest link in current testing methodologies is the simulated workload. Firstly, the simulated workload is only a subset of the production workload. Secondly, this simulated workload does not replicate production workload characteristics like concurrency. The key difference in ‘Real Application Testing’ is that all external client requests directed to the database can be captured – so the real workload is captured and can then be replayed on a test system. Instead of performing limited testing using handcrafted or expensive third party tools, one can fully stress test changes using actual production workloads and concurrency levels. With ‘Real Application Testing’, customers can reduce risk of change and lower the time it takes to test changes from months to weeks.

Who would be interested in these ‘Change Assurance’ features?

Change management is one of the core capabilities, which every data centre manager needs to possess. Any environment that needs to be highly available with low tolerance to failures can significantly benefit from these features. Not only database configuration change, but any hardware change or even application change can be evaluated using these ‘Change Assurance’ features.

What is unique about 11g as compared to the competition?

Oracle Database is the only database designed for grid computing. Oracle Database 11g is designed to be effectively deployed on everything from small blade servers to the biggest SMP servers and clusters of all sizes. It features automated management capabilities for easy, cost-effective operations. Oracle Database 11g’s unique ability to manage all kinds of data ranging from traditional business information to XML and 3D spatial information makes it the ideal choice to power transaction processing, data warehousing, and content management applications.