Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service

High availability, data model flexibility, elastic scalability… If these words have piqued your interest, then this is the episode for you! Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Autumn Black, as they discuss how Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service is designed for today's most demanding applications, ensuring fast and predictable single-digit millisecond response times at scale, even as throughput requirements change. Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Ranbir Singh, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. ------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript:

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Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started.

Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I'm Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Product Innovation and Go to Market Programs.

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Hi there! Many of today's modern applications face a lot of different challenges. These could be anything from managing data models that are continuously evolving to providing UIs that are highly responsive.

Yeah, and that's because in today's environment, no one wants to go to an interface where they have to wait for minutes or even seconds, really.

Exactly. So innovations have to happen rapidly and they have to keep up with the demands of the customer base.

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Since we discussed the MySQL database in our last episode, we thought it would only make sense to talk about NoSQL next. And we're very happy to have Oracle Database Specialist Autumn Black joining us again. Hi Autumn. What can you tell us about Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service?

The Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service really offers a lot of great properties.

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It's serverless, always on, and fully managed by Oracle. Developers can focus on application development without having to worry about managing servers, storage expansion, cluster deployment, software installation, or even backups. It's fully elastic. You just provision the throughput and storage capacity your application requires. Resources are automatically allocated and they scale accordingly to meet the dynamic workload requirements that you have.

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The service provides predictable low latency for all types of application workload, whether it's at the peak workload or at a very low level of the workload. The latency is always at sub 10 milliseconds. Flexible data model supports document, columnar, and key value formats to capture any of the kinds of data you may have. These data models can interoperate with each other using a single application interface.

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It offers developer-friendly APIs, and it's integrated with popular application development tools. It comes with enterprise-grade security. It's cost-effective. Lastly, and most importantly, it makes hybrid cloud or multi-cloud deployment with Oracle NoSQL Database extremely easy. This enables enterprises to expand their business operations, open up new business potential and opportunities.

Autumn, you said Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service is fully managed by Oracle.

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What does that exactly mean? What are the things that Oracle really handles?

Oracle's responsible for the back-end software and hardware. The developer gets to focus on the application and who can use that application. Today's modern developers are not interested in what's going on behind the scenes. They want to be sure that they can get what they want when they want it.

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Could you tell us about some use cases where we'd see Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service being used?

We see it in mobile applications. We see it in the Internet of Things. We see it in a 360-degree customer view that's extremely prevalent in banking applications. We see it in the user profile management catalog data, such as what you would see maybe on Amazon, content management, online advertising, and big-time real data, social media.

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And we also see it being used in the area of gaming.

We've heard that Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service is extremely developer-friendly. How exactly is it developer-friendly?

You can deploy your application to the data store in a matter of minutes. We have SDKs available in all the popular languages. We have Java, Python, Node.js, Go. We also have Spring.

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We have open standards for our APIs, and we use the SQL language. Many, many folks already know and understand the SQL language and they can easily adapt to our APIs. We basically allow for simple and complex data types. We have our developer tools in Eclipse, IntelliJ, and Visual Studios. And for those who want to play with the service a little bit, you have full access to the service through the UI console.

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Does Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service support different data models?

You get to select that depending upon what you need.

There's fixed schema, right?

Sometimes referred to as a columnar store, sometimes referred to as just straight schema.

And a JSON document?

Sometimes it's referred to as just documents, and sometimes it's referred to as a JSON document. Other times, it gets referred to as schema lists.

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We can store both of these within the same table, and we also have the ability to store a key value, which in some sense is really nothing more than a very simplified JSON document where you sort of have a primary key known as your key. Then you have your value and then oftentimes this value is really nothing more than a JSON document.

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We have complete interoperability between either of these different types of data models.

And what's the pricing like?

Our pricing model is fairly straightforward. You basically pay for what you provision and different workflows can provision different amounts. The provision occurs on a per-table level that we have. We call it a read unit or write unit and storage. And each of those different parameters can be adjusted differently for each of the tables that you have.

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So, it's a very, very simple model, very straightforward. And the cost for each one of those is extremely inexpensive.

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Welcome back. Now that we've covered all of that, let's get down to business. What is Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service? How does it help one's business?

Well, really, it's a client server architecture. On the client side, an application interacts with NoSQL drivers, or sometimes more commonly referred to as our SDK. So, you develop the application.

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And then at compile time, you include the SDK in that. Drivers are available for Java, Python, Node.js, Go, Spring, and C-Sharp. So then the application runs and it does database operations like insert, update, query, delete against the NoSQL tables that are stored on the server side. So from the developer's point of view, that's all they need to know. It's extremely simple. NoSQL tables can be created in seconds.

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Developers can start right away to develop and deploy their applications. Businesses can focus on rapid innovations to better serve their customer's needs and expectations.

So what you're saying is developers and IT don't need to manage any computing, infrastructure, or software updates.

The NoSQL service comes with the high availability built in. So, all of the underlying compute services and software maintenance, all of that is fully managed by Oracle, which is hosting the NoSQL tables.

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Database administrators will work on the authentication, the roles, the privileges, and the other types of access that are used to access the tables.

Autumn, earlier on, we spoke about how easy it is to use Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service to develop your application. Can you talk about how NoSQL drivers connect to tables and perform database operations?

So, each table has a couple of different key components.

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The first one is the data component. So, it consists of a table definition or flexible data model, supports columnar key value or document models. We support many different data types, including integer, string, binary, long double, array, JSON, record, and a few others. Each column can be defined by a particular data type.

So that could be integers, strings, and JSON columns, right?

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Then we have a primary key which is identified. The primary key sort of doubles as the shard key and the shard key can be either a sort of complete copy of the primary key, or you can have a multicolumn key where some of those columns is your primary key and then other columns in that are your shard key.

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The other component of a table is the capacity that is provisioned.

What's an example of this?

We have three units. We have write units, read units, and we have storage. Storage is expressed in gigabytes and this is the maximum amount of storage that is allocated for this particular table. Reads and writes are expressed in units. Each of those units represents a one kilobyte read or write for every second.

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So, if you have an application where you wanted to do multiple reads a second, then you would allocate multiple read units for that particular table. And these can be dynamically adjusted.

What are the different ways in which you can experience Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service?

The first is accessing the cloud service to the service UI, probably more commonly referred to as the UI console.

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The UI console provides basic capability. You can create and delete tables and then you can execute very simple, straightforward SQL statements against your table. If you want a richer experience, where you have an application that's developed. And then through all of our SDKs, you'll have the full experience and you'll be able to do the complete set of SQL statements that we offer. And then finally, we have what we call the NoSQL Cloud Simulator, essentially a single process version of our cloud.

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It's very easy to use. Many of our customers use that for test and development, and the beauty with using that for testing development is there's no cost to you. There's no cost from the cloud service. You can develop your application, you can test it, and once you're ready to deploy it in the cloud, you might be able to do part of it through the UI or you could do it through your application.

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Autumn, what makes Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service different?

Well, there's a seamless multimodel. You have key value, fixed schema, you have schema-less, all at the same data store. The seamless SQL interoperates amongst any of these different kinds of data models. You have tunable ACID, you have shard local full ACID, you have parent tables for easy multiobject ACID. You can carefully balance the trade-offs of ACID and scale.

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There is a fully managed cloud service. The throughput is provisioned, there is no lock-in. You have the ability to run as a fully managed service or you can take the NoSQL Database, run it anywhere. And if you want to run it in a hybrid environment, you can do that as well.

Are there some additional resources that Oracle has, you know, where people can go to get more information?

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I know we have the Developers Blog and blogs.oracle.com, but is there anything else?

We have the Cloud Customer Connect, the developer community that we have for NoSQL. This gets monitored. We really have developers around the globe on the team so really this does get 24/7 coverage and we try to be very responsive to any types of questions that get posted on the forum and then we supply answers for all those questions.

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Thank you so much, Autumn, for joining us through these last two episodes. We've learned so much from you.

Learn more about the service by visiting mylearn.oracle.com and taking a look at our Oracle Cloud Data Management Foundations Workshop. You can also take skill checks to test your understanding of this topic.

That brings us to the end of this episode.

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In our next episode, we'll be joined by a very special guest who will talk about MySQL Document Store, a NoSQL solution that's built on top of MySQL. More on that next week. Until then, this is Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham signing off.

That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes.

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