Open source plays a key role in IT innovation strategy this year and it’s obvious from watching Oracle do its thing. In fact, Recent years have seen the emergence of a system in which the open source and free software are keeping innovation in IT world. This system takes root in some large web companies that do not consider their core system as the owner, but as technologies that they can share with others and pool.

At the Oracle OpenWorld 2013 held from September 22 to 26 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA, the company offered IT organizations with a one stop shop from heterogeneous collection of newer cloud-based solutions, middleware solutions and data sources to legacy applications for IT operational and business processes.

For developers looking to automate some of these processes, Oracle provided tools such as Concurrent Manager and Process Scheduler for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) and PeopleSoft or PL/SQL scripts to automate Oracle database processes.

Managing DB dependent development

How do you manage development when development depends on underlying databases? Databases have no data control like source control for code. Because these development environments depend on databases and those databases are large and/or complex to build the build time can take anywhere between a few days to weeks.

ManageEngine, which offers enterprise IT management solutions including network, server, desktop and application management, announced significant upgrades to the Oracle database monitoring feature in Applications Manager, its application performance monitoring solution.

The latest upgrade improves tuning and troubleshooting of Oracle systems by enhancing real-time visibility into the health and performance of Oracle databases and their related applications. Whenever a business-critical Oracle application or process is underperforming, IT teams tend to point fingers at areas that are not well understood. Applications Manager monitors across the Oracle application stack — and any other heterogeneous set of servers, app servers and databases. The performance insight now offered by Applications Manager reveals exactly what’s running and whether a problem is at the application, database or network level; so, you can solve performance problems faster and spend less time.

Oracle 12c is capable of managing a set of guests or “pluggable databases” beneath its core system. Darryl Smith, Chief Database Architect for EMC IT, shared that Oracle databases allow database administrators to focus on getting in front of the business, understand what their problems are, so that IT can be more agile and responsive.

He said once DBAs know about architecture and other aspects, automation can drive data protection-as-a-service (DPaaS) and DBAs can build automating the full application stack, backups, built in security, and a built-in DevOps model. He added DPaaS can literally set service levels for backup, set priorities, but to leverage DPaaS, DBAs  need to be in control of both backup and recovery, and a tool such as DD Boost helps achieve that.

More automation

Most of the companies today operate in heterogeneous applications and platforms and are looking to more easy way to communicate across different platforms. Products from Oracle like Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft and JDEdwards have been designed for developers to more easily build and manage these cross-application and cross-platform batch processes.

Beyond today’s solutions, one of the goals of developers is to run job scheduler with technologies including Java, Web Services and Oracle Stored Procedures to allow it to hook into third-party applications. Oracle provides DBAs an enterprise automation solution to schedule a PL/SQL, Export or Import task once, but execute it multiple times across different Oracle DBs within a single interface.