Sam Lucido, Technical Marketing Lead For Oracle, EMC, discussed the Oracle-EMC partnership and the changing trends of DBAs with theCUBE co-host Dave Vellante, at EMC World 2014 earlier this month.

The interview started with Vellante inquired Lucido what he thinks about the vibe at EMC World. Lucido shared his thoughts saying that Oracle DBAs and storage administrators are very excited on development surrounding off-layer storage. Vellante wondered what the current challenges are for DBAs these days, to which Lucido said that there is an open infrastructure strategy where EMC applies to everything. With the new range of plugins, the Oracle Database can now look into the storage and see, for example, whether storage admins apply tools to their infrastructure, he explains. He added that EMC provides tools for these.

“We have three tools for DBAs. We have DB Classify, OEM 12c plugin and My Trend Report that people can use and two of these tools OEM 12c plugin and My Trend Report are free for storage administrators and DBA,” he said.

Vellante shared the results of a recent study based on the time spent by DBAs on various activities. He shared that DBAs are spending a lots of time on little things such as data sharing, disk partition, managed data source, database management, capacity planning and almost twenty percent of their time on other activities.

Discussing the statistics that reveal how database administrators spend their time, Lucido said that two types of virtualization–namely performance and storage optimized for database–are new trends that are saving half of the time spent by storage and database administrators. These tools provide real time analysis of storage usage.

“The virtualization technology is simplifying the performance and configuration of data center and greatly reduces the routine tasks,” he added.

Automation is worrying DBAs but adding value

Vellante said that there is a lot of talk about automation, but at the same time DBAs are worrying and nervous about automation as that could lead to loss of jobs. Lucido replied that automation is creating a little bit of tension but at the same time it is adding values.

Businesses are re-directing the efforts taken by routine tasks into more growth related activities by spinning new applications or tuning the existing enterprise applications. DBAs are so locked into database activities that they don’t find time to fine tune production databases. Automation and virtualization help them improve the production database.

Lucido further said that Oracle DBAs now need to learn more than just database. They need to learn database plus virtualization, database plus replication technology.

When asked how an event like EMCWorld is leveraging DBAs, Lucido said that Oracle DBAs have come to the event to learn how new technologies can be utilized in database in terms of performance, how to collaborate with storage administrators and how automation can help increase the productivity.

Best practices for DBAs

Vellante referred to the Wikibon study, “Duplicating Public Cloud Economics for Oracle DBAs” and said that database appliance, converged infrastructure, virtualization, flash first, offload backup and DR, array-based replication and integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager are some best practice elements in order of value contributed to DBA productivity.

To the question as how these technologies are affecting DBAs, Lucido said Oracle DBAs and storage administrators want to know the guidelines and best practices of each part of these stacks and they want to learn how these tools can be used in productivity.