Oracle University Podcast

How your employees are hired and onboarded into the organization can determine how well you are able to attract—and more importantly—retain top talent. Listen to Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Cloud Delivery Lead Nigel Wiltshire, as they deep dive into the first life cycle, the Applicant Life Cycle, within Oracle HCM business processes. They discuss how you can leverage the life cycle to optimize your recruitment and onboarding initiatives. 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, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 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. 00:26 Nikita: 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. Lois: Hi there! In our last episode, we were introduced to Human Capital Management business processes by our HCM guru and Cloud Delivery Lead Nigel Wiltshire. That was a great overall introduction and you should give it a listen if you're new to HCM. Nigel's back with us today to talk about the first of the HCM business process life cycles – the Applicant Life Cycle. 01:01 Nikita: Hi Nigel, thanks for joining us today. So first of all, what is the Applicant Life Cycle? Nigel: Hi Niki, Hi Lois. It's great to be back. Thank you for having me. The Applicant Life Cycle is the initial part of the HCM business processes. In a nutshell, it's all about identifying vacancies within an organization and taking appropriate steps to fill those vacancies. Lois: That sounds simple enough! So, how many processes make up this life cycle? 01:27 Nigel: Unlike the three other life cycles that we will be discussing in upcoming episodes, there is just one business process in the Applicant Life Cycle. But within this process, there are many activities. Lois: So one process, but lots going on. OK. Nigel: Right. The business process is called "Recruit to Onboard" and covers the whole process from when the vacancy is identified to the onboarding of the successful candidate to the business. Nikita: And what are the activities within this process, Nigel? 01:52 Nigel: Within Recruit to Onboard, there are six main activities. The first is called "Determine Workforce Need." Lois: So identifying the need to recruit new employees… Nigel: That's right, and this can be as a result of existing employee terminations, or it could stem from a workforce planning exercise, which resulted in the need for additional staff based on company growth and change of operations. Next we have "Drive Candidate Engagement." This activity is where the whole recruitment campaign really starts. It includes the creation of the Job Requisition, where we add all the necessary details to attract the candidate and encourage them to apply to the position. Of course, you want to also attract the best candidates, and so creating an engaging Career Page on your company's website is paramount, making it easy to search for and apply for the relevant job. 02:38 Nigel: The third activity is called "Manage Sourcing" and this is all about making the job requisitions visible to candidates, through various medium. I already alluded to one of them as the organization's own career web pages, something we call the Career Site. Again, configuring that to be vibrant and easy to navigate is key to the success of that medium. Then we have Job Boards, where you can post your vacancy on external job boards for potential candidates to see. This takes all the work of creating a user interface away from the organization, but on the flip side, you have no influence on how the posting looks. 03:12 Lois: That would be places like LinkedIn and Indeed, right? Nigel: That's exactly right, Lois. There are also Recruitment Agencies, whose job is to take your requisition and search for suitable candidates on your behalf. This is often quicker, as they will have potential employees on their books already that they would refer. Finally, there is the concept called "Social Sourcing." For this, you would create a campaign that can include a specific audience, which would help you source candidates for the job. 03:38 Nikita: I'm not really sure I get you, Nigel. Could you give us an example of this, please? Nigel: Sure, Niki. Let's say that you have an opening in Sales. If you create a campaign and include all of the sales team as the audience, they will use their own networks to seek out and refer candidates. This option works extremely well if you have a recruitment bonus scheme, where the referrer gets cold hard cash for recommending an applicant, who subsequently gets taken onboard. Nikita: OK, yeah, I get it now. 04:04 Nigel: The next activity in the Recruit to Onboard process is "Intelligent Screening." Recruiters are usually very experienced and very often able to skim read a resume to ascertain whether an applicant is suitable for the position they applied for. However, this is not infallible and is, therefore, only one method of screening candidates. Before the recruiter takes a look at the resume, it's possible in most applicant tracking systems to set pre-screening questions. 04:29 Lois: And these questions are all regarding that particular job role? Nigel: Some of the questions would be tied to suitability for the job and would be assessing categories such as their abilities, certifications, and experiences. Other questions would be knock-out or disqualification questions, which concentrate more on the applicant's suitability to work, and would include questions around such topics as age, criminal records, and visas. Those candidates that pass the pre-screening questions and subsequent recruiter review would typically go on to be reviewed by the Hiring Manager with a combination of resume review and telephone/face-to-face interview. 05:06 Nigel: Next, we have "Select Candidate and Generate Offer." So, between the Hiring Manager and Recruiter, each candidate would be pushed through the hiring process, where they would be screened, interviewed, checked for background, and so on. There will, of course, be many candidates that do not pass certain phases of the process and are rejected, in the same way that there will be some candidates who have second thoughts and withdraw their application. However, what the recruiting team is aiming for is to get to the point where they can make an offer to the most suitable candidate and once accepted, the final part of the process kicks in. This final process being "Onboard New Hires." What we are aiming to achieve here is a smooth transition from applicant to employee. As a rule, there are tasks that need to be performed by many stakeholders to get the new employee up and running. These fall into three main time frames: pre-boarding tasks, day of hire tasks, and post-boarding tasks. 06:03 Working towards an Oracle Certification this year? Grab all the help you can get. Attend a cert prep live event in the Oracle University Learning Community. And once you're certified, don't forget to visit our exclusive forum for Oracle-certified learners. If you are already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to join the community. You will need to log in first. If you have not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started. 06:34 Nikita: Welcome back. Nigel, you were telling us about the three categories of tasks – pre-boarding, day of hire, and post boarding. Can you tell us a bit more about each of them? Nigel: Sure, Niki. "Pre-boarding tasks," as the name implies, are those that can be, or need to be performed before the employee's first day. These are performed by many different people and can range from a request for more information from the employee, such as Bank Account details, to sending the employee a link to view the company's policies and procedures (although this could be something that the employee does on their first day). It could also be a request to IT so that they can provision user accounts and email addresses, or to Facilities to make sure that the employee has a desk and chair to sit at when they get here, or to the Security team to create an identification badge and/or an access card. 07:24 Nigel: Now, the "Day of Hire tasks" are those that are typically performed by the Employee and Line Manager. For example, the employee may have to collect their ID card from security. They may need to attend orientation training and meet the rest of the team. The manager would be overseeing all of that, and guiding and mentoring the employee through their first, usually nervous, day. "'Post-Boarding tasks" are simply those that guide the employee through their first weeks, until they get comfortable. This may be topped off with an informal meeting between the employee and their line manager, just as a check-in to make sure they are both doing what they need to do in order to onboard the employee. 07:59 Lois: I think I have an idea, but Nigel, can you tell me why the "Recruit to Onboard" process and all its associated activities are so important? Nigel: Well, I guess it's like anything in life. If you don't have a solid plan of action, then all you can hope for is that everything works out smoothly. But by adopting this kind of process, you are giving yourself every possible opportunity to execute your goal, which is to fill the vacancy, with almost military precision. You already know what it is you need, so why would you not look for the most efficient way to achieve it? 08:29 Nigel: In addition, the nature of recruiting often means you have hundreds of candidates applying for a job, and they are not all going to do that at the same time. As a consequence, you may not be able to run them through the hiring process at roughly the same time and speed. Therefore, you end up with some candidates that are at the Review phase, some at Interview, some at Background Checks, and maybe a couple at the Offer phase. This, as you can imagine, makes it very difficult to track who's who and what's what. Therefore, if you don't have a defined strategy, you end up losing track of what's been done and what needs to happen, resulting in a massive headache and you looking like you don't know what you are doing. 09:04 Lois: The two main job roles here are the Hiring Manager and Recruiter, right? So, typically, how is the workload split between the two of them? Nigel: Of course, this varies from company to company, but in general, the rule is that the Hiring Manager kicks off the whole process by registering that there is a need to fill a vacancy. The Recruiter, who actually performs most of the day-to-day management of the recruiting campaign, ensures that the opening is posted to the appropriate medium, and then manages the candidates through the hiring process. 09:34 Nigel: Now along the way, although probably 90% of the work is done by the Recruiter, the Hiring Manager does get involved when needed. This is often in the form of Approvals and Interviews, and as a general figure head in case any decision needs to be made. What you have to understand is that the Hiring Manager is usually the Line Manager for the role being advertised. 09:53 Lois: So, they'll know the job to be filled and who they're looking for in terms of experience and abilities. Nigel: Yes, exactly Lois. The Recruiter, who is not usually directly related to the department with the vacancy, may not know the job, but will have the skills and experience to find the right candidates and, typically, has multiple vacancies to fill from many parts of the business. So, in essence, it's a symbiotic relationship between the Recruiter and the Hiring Manager, and together they strive to fill the vacancy as quickly as possible, with the best candidate that applies. 10:23 Lois: And then, that wraps up this process, I guess? Nigel: Yes, from here the employee is onboarded and becomes part of the Employee Life Cycle. Lois: And we're going to talk about that next week, right? Nigel: Indeed. I'm looking forward to it. Nikita: Thank you so much, Nigel. This has been most informative. Nigel: Thanks for having me. 10:40 Lois: That brings us to the end of this episode. We hope you can take away some useful snippets of information. To learn more about HCM business processes, visit mylearn.oracle.com. And tune in again next week when we'll be talking about the second of the HCM life cycles – The Employee Life Cycle. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 11:03 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

12 Sep 202311min

Human Resources Management is an important function in every organization. Without it, companies would not be able to effectively recruit and retain employees or maintain a healthy, accepting workplace. In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, together with Cloud Delivery Lead Nigel Wiltshire, explore how employee management has evolved over time, the key functions within a Human Resources department, and the major players involved. They also look at the end-to-end business processes that are enabled by the Oracle HCM Cloud suite. 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, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 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. 00:26 Lois: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I'm Lois Houston, Director of Product Innovation and Go to Market Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi everyone! Last week, we were joined by Bill Lawson, who gave us a wonderful overview of Oracle's business process training. And today, we have another special guest, Nigel Wiltshire, who is one of our Senior Principal Instructors and Cloud Delivery Leads. We're so lucky that Nigel has agreed to join us for a few episodes this season to tell us all about HCM business processes. Lois: Hey Nigel, we're so happy to have you join us. 01:02 Nigel: Hi Lois. Hi Niki. Lois: I believe that today we're going to discuss HCM as a concept and the typical processes that form the framework for a robust Human Resources operation. Let's begin with the basics. For those that are not familiar with the acronym, what does HCM stand for? 01:19 Nigel: That's probably going to be the easiest question to answer, Lois. HCM is "Human Capital Management." The management of employees has been through many iterations and labels over the years. And back in the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s, the term "Personnel" was generally in use. Come the mid to late 1980s, this changed to the term "Human Resources," which (rightly or wrongly) is interchangeably referred to as "Human Capital Management." 01:47 Nikita: But why did the name change, Nigel? Nigel: In the days of "Personnel," there wasn't really any emphasis on managing and nurturing employees. It mostly centred around the simple task of recording the data necessary for the organization to operate. The thought process and the general concept of employee management has gradually changed for the better over the decades, and now goes beyond just a simple record keeping exercise. The "Personnel" regime tended to be reactionary, with actions only being taken when the situation necessitated it, whereas "Human Capital Management" focuses on proactive management, and by analyzing data, it's possible to anticipate the need for action and even revise processes. 02:27 Nigel: Although the word "Personnel" describes a workforce quite adequately, accepting the "Human" and the "Resources" banners shows an acknowledgment of the humanity and value of a group of employees. Lois: OK. So you said the terms "Human Resources" and "Human Capital Management" are used interchangeably. Are there any differences at all to distinguish between the two? 02:49 Nigel: Human Resources Management primarily focuses on core administrative HR functions such as maintaining employee records and administering processes such as compensation, benefits, and recruiting. Human Capital Management is a broader term that includes the same Human Resources Management functions, as well as strategic functions such as analytics, planning, and performance management. Despite this distinction, most of us are a tad lazy and just lump everything under the same term. Some use Human Resources, some use Human Capital Management, some alternate between the two. 03:23 Nikita: Nigel, why do organizations need to manage their Human Capital? Nigel: Human Resources Management is a very important function in every organization. Without it, companies would not be able to effectively recruit and retain employees, improve, and enhance the organization, and they wouldn't be able to maintain a healthy, accepting workplace culture and environment. Human Resources Management is so important to organizations that many call this function the heart and soul of the business. 03:51 Nigel: With a major shift from just focusing on the organization's needs, to the needs and welfare of the employee, you end up with a happier and more productive employee. Many people are motivated by monetary awards, so a fair compensation package is paramount to the recruitment and retention of these employees. Others, whilst unlikely to work for free, are focused more on their contribution to the business and are interested in career development and progression. Therefore, a robust performance management and clear career path should be developed. Whether an employee approaches their career from a monetary or a job satisfaction point of view, it's all about "worth," and an employee whose worth is satisfied is a happy employee and, therefore, more productive. So, organizations should be able to recognize that people are motivated by different things and have systems and processes in place to facilitate this, essentially bringing the best out of each employee. 04:46 Lois: That's really interesting, Nigel. So, what are the key functions within a Human Resources department? Nigel: Human Resources is a broad subject and as such covers many functional areas. First and foremost is Talent Management. This is the recruitment aspect of the business. Efficient processes here ensure that vacancies are filled as efficiently as possible, by the best applicant identified for the job. The next is Benefits. For those employees that are motivated by cold hard cash, a robust benefits package ensures that employee retention is maintained at a high level, and that rates of attrition are minimized. This could be in the form of medical and/or dental insurance, Savings and Pension schemes, and even simple pleasures of life such as discount vouchers, a subsidized canteen, company-sponsored activities, Pizza Fridays, and last but definitely not least… free coffee on tap. 05:39 Nigel: Next, we have Absence Management, Time and Labor, and Payroll. These provide an efficient way to document the work performed by employees, and as a result the employee is paid what they are owed in a timely manner. It also encompasses the recording of time such as Vacation, Sickness, Maternity, Jury Service… to name just a few. Some of this time may result in the need to adjust the payments made to an employee, which is why it is included in this grouping. We also have Compensation and Rewards. I guess this is the more serious side of the money. Every employee wants to be paid what they are worth, for the job they do and contributions they make. The most basic way to compensate an employee, of course, is their regular salary. However, there are many other rewards and incentives that an organization can offer, such as bonuses, premium pay for working overtime or on a public holiday. Some rewards are based on the job that somebody does, such as Commission, which is a reward typically offered to employees in a Sales role, as an incentive to close deals. 06:43 The Oracle University Learning Community is a great place for you to collaborate and learn with experts, peers, and practitioners. Grow your skills, inspire innovation, and celebrate your successes. The more you participate, the more recognition you can earn. All of your activities, from liking a post to answering questions and sharing with others, will help you earn badges and ranks and be recognized within the community. If you are already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to join the community. You will need to log in first. If you have not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started. 07:24 Nikita: Welcome back. Nigel, you were telling us about all the functional areas within Human Resources… Nigel: As I was saying earlier, some employees are more motivated by job satisfaction and career progression, and the next two areas of HR speak more to them. The first is Performance Management. This is where the organization manages the employee's goals and performance reviews. A healthy and achievable set of goals focuses the employee into doing what they need to do to "get the job done" and to be evaluated on that work. And the second is Learning and Development. In order to progress in their current job, future career aspirations, and also personally, an organization needs to have a mechanism for employees to develop and grow, and to be nurtured in order to not only bring the best out of them, but also to ensure interest in being employed by the business is retained. 08:13 Lois: Yep, we all want that… Nigel: Exactly. And finally, we have Human Resources Planning. In order for larger organizations to thrive, a robust resourcing plan is required. This is generally split into two parts. The first of which is to make sure that each part of the business is resourced according to the workloads. For example, in the retail, manufacturing, and care hospitality industries, workloads are based on "shifts," so it is incumbent on the management team to ensure that each shift is staffed adequately, by planning ahead as well as reacting to the odd curve ball when an employee cannot work due to unpredictable circumstances, like sickness. 08:52 The second part of this function lies with the prediction of possible staff movement and ensures that each part of the business can maintain operational. In some parts of the organization, it may not be imperative for you to be proactive, but in others, this will be the case. We can address this in many ways. The main ones include fostering relationships with employees, which will encourage them to not seek employment elsewhere, and to create Succession Plans or Talent Pools, which will ensure that other employees are nurtured and developed to such an extent that they are able to step up and progress to a vacant position if the need arises. 09:27 Nikita: Wow, you're right, Nigel. There are actually quite a lot of functional areas within HR. I'm guessing all this is not performed by the same person, right? So, who are the key players here? Nigel: You are most definitely right there, Niki. This would be way too much for one person. However, that does depend on several factors, such as the size of the organization, the complexity of the processes developed, and the knowledge and experience of the people performing the duties. For example, in a small business, the number of employees to manage would be minimal and the processes put into place might also be minimal, which might be down to the fact that some processes and record keeping is outsourced to reduce the HR department's wage bill. It could also be that the person employed to run the HR department is deliberately selected because they have experience with a wide range of functions. 10:16 Nigel: That said, it is more typical, especially for larger organizations, to have lots of employees working in the HR department, and the work they do is based on their area of expertise. For instance, managing Payrolls is a very specialist subject and as such it's not unusual to see that as a separate "sub department" within HR. Of course, not all the work has to be undertaken from within the HR department itself. For the last 25 to 30 years, there's been a shift towards Self Service. This means that some of the onus to enter and maintain data is placed firmly with the employee themselves. For instance, if an employee moves house or changes their phone number, it's up to them to update that information in the system. If they wish to take a vacation, again it is up to them to enter and submit the request for consideration. 11:04 Nikita: Ya, that's what we do… Nigel: Yeah right. And there's the employee's Line Manager whose job, from an HR point of view, is to ensure that the employee is keeping the relevant information up-to-date, and to respond to requests made by the employee, such as the previously mentioned vacation requests. In some organizations, it's even the responsibility of the employee's Line Manager to initiate data changes for things like Promotions, Salary Increases, Bonus Awards, and some general Assignment changes, such as working hours. So, we talked about the HR Specialists, the employees, and their line managers. The last group to play their part is the senior managers and directors. Some of them will be involved in overseeing the day-to-day operations within the HR function, such as the HR Manager, Payroll Manager, Compensation Manager, etc, whilst the most senior will have their influence centred around the more strategic side of the house... the planning, the budgeting, the head counts, etc. and often form the buffer between the HR department and the Executive team. 12:04 Lois: So Nigel, let's get down to the nuts and bolts of the HCM business processes. You spoke about all the functional areas that make up HCM, but is there a way to group these functional areas and the processes they encompass? Nigel: Absolutely, Lois. Within HCM, there are four main life cycles… Applicant, Employee, Rewards, and Talent. We're going to be talking about each of these in a lot more detail in our upcoming episodes, but to whet your appetite, let me give you a brief synopsis of those life cycles, the processes they include, and how they interact with each other. 12:38 Nigel: So let us start with the Applicant Life Cycle. As you can imagine, this is the start of the whole HCM process. We need to identify vacancies within the organization, and subsequently seek out suitable applicants to fill those gaps. There's a single process within the Applicant Life Cycle that we call "Recruit to Onboard," which essentially is the whole recruitment campaign, right up to passing them over to HR so they can be converted from an applicant to an employee. At that point, the Employee Life Cycle kicks in. Each employee needs to be managed throughout their time with the organization, which may include Promotions, Transfers, basic assignment changes such as Line Manager Change, or Grade, to name just a couple. We call this the "Hire to Retire" processes. 13:23 However, it doesn't stop there. The processes also include the need to manage absences and the subsequent return to work, which we call "Absence Planning to Productivity" and even the employee's termination with the business should they wish to move on, called "Employee Separation to Workforce Analysis." This leads us directly to the Rewards Life Cycle. 13:42 Lois: And everybody loves rewards! Nigel: Haha! There are four business processes included with this one. The first of which is "Benefits to Payroll," which takes you through the mechanics of setting up benefit programs, which pass through to payroll, so that appropriate deductions can be made for the employee contributions. Then they have "Time Collection to Payroll." This is where the employee records their worked time through various mediums such as Time Cards, Card Readers, Biometric Scanners, Web Clocks, and so on, which again are passed to payroll for processing and payment. We can't forget the "Payroll to Payment" process, as this is the main one that works out the net pay that each employee should receive. Now, as we have already alluded to, the information for this comes from many sources, including Benefits, Compensation, and of course Payroll directly. 14:30 Nigel: The final process in this life cycle is "Reward Planning to Targeted Compensation." I just mentioned that the information for payroll processing can come from many different sources, right? One of those is Compensation, but there is a whole set of activities that constitutes Compensation. We have to consider the employee's base salary, we have to consider whether there are any ad hoc rewards that an employee can receive, and we also need to consider if there is a mechanism for managers to use a spreadsheet to award such compensation as Merit Increases and Bonuses, including the need to set budgets and awards based on models; for example, a percentage increase based on the employee's performance review score. The final life cycle is Talent. This encompasses all aspects of developing and assessing employees and includes processes for "Goal Setting to Performance," "Talent Review to Succession," "Career Planning to Development," and "Employee Insight to Work Life Balance." 15:26 Nikita: Thank you, Nigel, for taking the time to give us these insights into the world of Human Capital Management. We're really looking forward to you taking us through all the different HCM life cycles. To learn more about HCM business processes, visit mylearn.oracle.com. Lois: So, next week, you'll be back with us to dive into the Applicant Life Cycle, which is the first HCM life cycle. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 15:52 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

5 Sep 202316min

In today's competitive landscape, a comprehensive understanding of business processes is critical to successfully deploying and using Oracle Cloud Applications. Having solid foundational knowledge of business processes can help you understand "how things are done" and apply your learning to the right processes, in the right way, at the right time. Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Bill Lawson, as they talk about how Oracle's business process training can help everyone involved in an implementation project, from project teams and technical teams to end users. 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, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 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. 00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I'm Lois Houston, Director of Product Innovation and Go to Market Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi everyone! We're starting the third season of the Oracle University Podcast today, and this time around, our focus is going to be on Cloud Apps Business Processes. And we're very excited about this episode, which will be an overview of the Business Process training and certification offered by Oracle University. We'll discuss this training at length, learn how it can help you prepare for projects, and find out how everyone involved in an implementation—from project teams to technical teams and end users —can benefit from taking this training. 01:12 Lois: And we're so excited to welcome Bill Lawson back to the podcast today. If you've been following our podcast, you already know Bill from last season. Bill is the Senior Director of Cloud Applications Product Management at Oracle University. His team is in charge of developing new content for Oracle Cloud Applications. So, all the amazing training that helps you successfully implement and operate our cloud apps is created by his team. Thanks so much, Bill, for being with us today. We're really excited to talk with you. 01:41 Bill: I'm happy to be here to kick off this new season, Lois and Niki. Nikita: So, to start Bill, can you tell us a little about the Cloud Apps Business Process training in general? Bill: Think of our Business Process training as Oracle's official collection of courses designed to provide you with a foundational understanding of how end-to-end business process flows are defined. These are based off Oracle Modern Best Practices. So, we have a series of courses that enable learners to have a common foundational reference when implementing Oracle Cloud Applications. Ultimately, the goal of our Oracle Business Process training is to ensure that everybody in the organization, across all the various roles, are all on the same page when, you know, they are discovering and learning more about Oracle Cloud. 02:22 Lois: We already have extensive Cloud Apps training, right? So, why did we decide to create this particular training? What's different about these courses, Bill? Bill: While we do have a very comprehensive modern digital Oracle Cloud Applications training existing today, we felt there was an opportunity to educate our customers on foundational business processes, which are required knowledge to have even before anyone starts their application implementation journey. To meet this important need, we developed Business Process training, which, once again, is defined by Oracle Modern Best Practices and driven by Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. This training will help students by providing them with the skills that are required to maximize the use and impact of those applications in their business. 03:03 Bill: And also providing a common framework for teams to use and to refer to throughout their cloud implementation projects, aligning from the start to accelerate and improve project planning and improving decision-making throughout the cloud implementation cycle. The training also defines end-to-end business process flows and illustrates how organizations and business users across all job roles can best manage day-to-day business activities and tasks, in a format within MyLearn and Cloud Learning Subscriptions that's engaging, easy to digest, and easy to learn. In fact, knowledge of basic business processes will enable students to understand "how things are done" and then apply those right processes, in the right way, at the right time. 03:44 Nikita: And what areas are covered, Bill? Bill: We have training on Oracle Human Capital Management or HCM, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Experience (CX) Sales, Supply Chain Management, which is SCM, and Procurement. In HCM, we show examples of the full suite of HR processes that encompasses all stages of an employee's experience—from the time they apply for a job, to when they're onboarded, ultimately to the last day they're at the company. In our ERP training, learners use how to process, record, and report on finances reports. ERP training is really focused within the financial management area within ERP. Our Sales training teaches how to make the organization sales cycle more effective by gathering all the customer information in one place, increasing productivity, empowering sales reps to sell more, and obtaining accurate information for boosting revenue. 04:36 Bill: Under Supply Chain Management, we have a comprehensive Cloud Applications suite that includes many products such as Inventory Management, Order Management, Manufacturing, and many more. In our business process training, as an example, we cover the processes of forecasting anticipated demand of products and services and planning the supply of materials and components, production, distribution, marketing, and sales in order to meet that demand. And finally, in Procurement, students will learn the business processes encompassing every stage of the procurement life cycle–from the initial stage of onboarding suppliers, to identifying sourcing opportunities and initiating sourcing events, to authoring contracts, to ultimately receiving the product or service and closing out the financials. 05:23 Lois: Wow, that's a lot, Bill! So, let's just say I'm getting started in my career with Cloud Applications. Would you recommend that I take this training or would I need to be more experienced to take it? Bill: Anyone can take this training, Lois. We have learning paths from the beginner to the advanced level within our Cloud Learning Subscriptions today. The business process courses in particular are for any experience level, from the recent college grad to the seasoned professional who just wants to learn more about Oracle Cloud Applications. 05:52 Lois: OK, so let's talk a little more about who this training is best for. Can you expand a little bit on who would benefit the most from the courses? Bill: The training is for anyone who wants to build a strong foundational knowledge of Oracle Cloud Business Processes in order to successfully plan, implement, test, and use Oracle Cloud Applications. You can be a Business Process Owner, a Functional User, an Implementation Project Team Member, an Implementer, a User Acceptance Testing Team Member, or even a University Student. We feel that this knowledge is foundational for success in the cloud. 06:26 Bill: So, for example, a partner implementation team will benefit by gaining an understanding of the modern business process flows supported by Oracle Cloud Applications to gain a solid understanding in order to configure based on the flow. Or say, customer project teams who work with implementation teams and will benefit from defining common approaches and business rules for their organization at the onset of their application implementation to help avoid any delays in the project. In short, having the same fundamental knowledge throughout this training helps ensure everyone is on the same page when discovering, planning, configuring, and executing these business processes in the cloud. 07:09 Want to learn about modern best practices for cloud applications? Oracle University is offering (for a limited time) free Business Process training and certification in the areas of Human Capital Management, Financials, Customer Experience, Supply Chain Management, and Procurement. Oracle Cloud training and certifications empower you to explore limitless possibilities in the cloud landscape. Gain the knowledge and skills needed to design, deploy, secure, and operate modern cloud infrastructure and applications with confidence. Go to education.oracle.com for more details. What are you waiting for? Get certified today! 07:49 Nikita: Welcome back! Bill, could you give us some examples of what I'll learn if I take this Business Process training? Bill: Great question, Niki. Project teams, both business process owners and those involved in executing specific steps in the process, will gain a high-level understanding of how their teams' processes and related tasks will change, and continue to evolve, when moving to the cloud. But it doesn't end there. Project teams will also learn the basics around how organizations manage day-to-day business activities and tasks in such areas as I mentioned earlier… Finance, Human Capital Management, Sales, Supply Chain, and Procurement. They will learn about how Oracle Cloud Applications leverage emerging technologies, such as AI and machine learning, blockchain, and business intelligence, which help drive mission-critical organizational business processes. 08:39 Bill: So, for example, let's take the use case of a recruitment team lead. This training will provide an overview of the best practice steps in an applicant screening process that are enabled in Oracle HCM and how it relates to onboarding and other employee lifecycle processes. This way, users can consider how their team's current screening process steps and related tasks will be impacted as they move to the cloud, as well as how that process can evolve over time when enabled by new technologies. In addition, this training will show how to use machine learning to help screen and prioritize candidate résumés. And with this base understanding, the recruitment team lead can contribute to improving the screening process when using Oracle HCM Recruiting and better the overall collaboration and project planning with their system integrator and other HR project teams. 09:29 Lois: So, you said we have a full suite of Business Process training courses. What's the value in taking training outside of my area of responsibility? Bill: That's such a great question, Lois. You'll see, often in implementation projects, decision-making can be siloed. Business process owners consider the needs of their own team, especially as detailed requirements are documented and considered for each process. As leaders, they want to ensure their teams' needs are thoroughly considered to ensure they can accomplish all that is expected of them. When planning a cloud implementation project, teams need not only consider how their own processes will change but also how the decisions they make in planning, configuring, and implementing Oracle Cloud Applications to suit their own needs will impact other teams and their processes. 10:17 Bill: That's why getting the end-to-end view is so important, we believe. We created this training to ensure that business process owners across the organization, as well as the implementation teams supporting their projects, understand not only their own area of responsibility but are also considerate of the changes, the subsequent impact, on other teams as well. We really want to encourage collaboration from the beginning of the project to improve decision-making at all phases by developing this early-stage awareness and understanding. 10:47 Nikita: I've heard this training is a little different from the video-based training that we have for most of our other Cloud Apps courses. So, what's different about it, Bill? Bill: Yeah, you're right, Niki. So, this training combines a variety of elements, not just videos. We still do have some videos within our business process training. But it also includes rich text articles, descriptive imagery, concepts explained by experts, product demonstrations, and knowledge checks, to bring users the best possible learning experience. 11:16 Nikita: And along with this training, we also offer certifications, right? Bill: Yeah, you're absolutely right, Niki. For Business Process training, we have five associate-level exams included—one for each of the areas I mentioned. One for HCM, one for ERP Financials, Sales, Procurement, and Supply Chain Management. So, earning a Business Process Foundation Associate certification provides the candidate with an industry credential which recognizes a foundational understanding of the business process flows enabled by Oracle Cloud Applications. Our content prepares the candidate to earn that certification. 11:50 Lois: Well, this has been very enlightening, Bill. Thank you so much for joining us today and telling us all about the Business Process training and certifications that are available. Bill: Yeah, you're welcome, Lois. And thanks for having me, Niki. Nikita: To get started on Oracle Business Process training, head over to mylearn.oracle.com. Lois: Well, that's all the time we have for today. Join us next week as we set off on our journey through the HCM business processes with Senior Principal Instructor Nigel Wiltshire. Until next week, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off. 12:22 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

29 Aug 202312min

With each passing day, more and more data sources are sending greater volumes of data across the globe. For any organization, this combination of structured and unstructured data continues to be a challenge. Data lakehouses link, correlate, and analyze these varied outputs into a single manageable system. In the final episode of the season, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Greg Genovese, discuss Oracle Data Lakehouse, the premier solution for leveraging data to make better, more profitable business decisions. 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: 00;00;00;00 - 00;00;39;03 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. 00;00;39;06 - 00;01;17;11 Hi there! Last week, we spoke about managing Oracle Database with REST APIs and also looked at ADB built-in tools. Today's episode is the last one of the season, and we're going to be joined by Oracle Database Specialist Greg Genovese, who will talk with us about Oracle Data Lakehouse. Hi, Greg. I've heard about data lakes and data warehouses, but what's a lakehouse? Traditionally, when deciding how to best increase their data productivity and liquidity, companies often find themselves having to make a choice between leveraging a data lake or a data warehouse, each of them having their own benefits and drawbacks. 00;01;17;13 - 00;01;43;20 Now, companies no longer need to make that choice. Instead, they can look to a broader strategy that offers highly accurate machine learning capabilities, the flexibility of using open-source services, and the superior data and analytics capabilities of the best-in-class Oracle Database and Data Warehouse. These capabilities are integrated with common identity, data integration, orchestration, and catalog into a unified architecture - the Oracle Lakehouse. 00;01;43;24 - 00;02;12;26 What are the benefits of Oracle Lakehouse? Oracle Lakehouse facilitates ease of data reuse and recombination, maximizing insights from your data and generating several other benefits, including pure cost savings, as well as improving the agility of your current data warehouse by easily extending with new metrics, details, or attributes, which help you better understand your customers, your processes, or your risks, all while using your existing applications. 00;02;13;01 - 00;02;33;09 Is this only for companies that are already using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure? For those of you companies who haven't yet adopted Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, but instead have existing data lakes on AWS or Azure, if you still want to make that data available to the Oracle Autonomous Database, you can reach out to these data lakes using Oracle SQL. 00;02;33;10 - 00;02;57;17 Here at OCI, we feel your experience would not be a productive one if you weren't allowed to use your choice of tools and applications, such as Analytics Cloud, Tableau, Looker, Notebook, REST, Python, and more. Can you tell us more about how Oracle Data Lakehouse works? It combines current data warehouse and data lake components with capabilities to also include external or third-party data. 00;02;57;20 - 00;03;29;04 This effectively eliminates data silos or having to manually move data between data warehouses and data lakes if you leverage both currently. The five key elements of the Oracle Lakehouse are the data warehouse, the data lake for raw data normally used for loading and staging data, managed open-source services to support Spark, Hadoop, and Redis, data integration, moving data depending on use case, and data catalog, which maintains a complete view of the available data for discovery and governance. 00;03;29;07 - 00;03;49;29 With these elements, you can write the data once with any engine and analyze or even build machine learning modules from any of your current data. How did the idea for data lakehouse come about? What was the need for it? Using all data to innovate, this is the challenge, to include all of your data and use it to drive better, more profitable business decisions. 00;03;50;02 - 00;04;14;07 Some data is easy to access, but accessing all of your data and then correlating that data in a way that helps make decisions and drive better outcomes isn't easy. So, the opportunity we've identified here is harnessing the power of all that data and creating a competitive advantage from it. But how do we do that? How do we run and maintain what we've got today efficiently, quickly, and securely? 00;04;14;08 - 00;04;42;02 We have functions that move data from sources to outcomes. The process is taking the source, going through integrations, and connecting the different data. Once we've done this, traditionally, we looked at persistence, processing the data and storing it somewhere to pass along for analysis. This has connected and curated the data for outcomes. The Oracle Lakehouse is a solution leveraging multiple tools and products to get the desired outcomes from this process. 00;04;42;04 - 00;05;05;17 You can use existing data warehouses to start, and the data warehouse, especially the Converged Autonomous Database, allows for storing all types of data. This is for the relational structured data to store in an Oracle autonomous database or warehouse. The Autonomous Data Warehouse is self-managed with better performance and efficiencies to help focus on the analysis and the outcomes of the data. 00;05;05;20 - 00;05;23;12 The unstructured or raw data can be persisted in any data type in its current format within object storage. This can be within an existing data lake, for example. Object storage is an efficient manner to land data where it's needed. 00;05;23;15 - 00;05;52;12 Are you attending Oracle CloudWorld 2023? Learn from experts, network with peers, and find out about the latest innovations when Oracle CloudWorld returns to Las Vegas from September 18 through 21. CloudWorld is the best place to learn about Oracle solutions from the people who build and use them. In addition to your attendance at CloudWorld, your ticket gives you access to Oracle MyLearn and all of the cloud learning subscription content, as well as three free certification exam credits. 00;05;52;18 - 00;06;28;13 This is valid from the week you register through 60 days after the conference. So, what are you waiting for? Register today. Learn more about Oracle CloudWorld at www.oracle.com/cloudworld. Welcome back. Okay, so Greg, you spoke about the start of data lakehouse. Tell us about data integration and analysis. Lakehouse provides for an all encompassing orchestration of integration and is allowing your choice of tools to keep your source of truth and compliance for your data. 00;06;28;16 - 00;07;03;00 Whether you decide to deploy Oracle GoldenGate, the premiere data integration tool, Oracle Data Integration, helping you move data within the lake, or even an open-source or third-party tool, Lakehouse is by design flexible and meant to fit your specific needs. Oracle Analytics Cloud is used to perform predictive analytics, and other third-party tools can read into the data from the database APIs or using SQL. Oracle AI Service has machine learning models that will continue to work with the transactional systems and bring in other data types as well. 00;07;03;03 - 00;07;35;14 OCI Data Science can harness all of the data for better business outcomes and fills in the tools for integration and analysis for the Oracle Data Lakehouse. Within the Autonomous Data Warehouse, we have transactional and dimensional query capabilities, but in our Lakehouse story, we're also very lucky to have products like MySQL HeatWave, the blazing fast in-memory query accelerator, which increases MySQL performance by orders of magnitude for analytics and mixed workloads, all without any changes to your existing applications. 00;07;35;16 - 00;08;00;20 Really, no other cloud provider is going to give you that much choice in the data warehouse bucket and managed open-source components. So, from what I understand, Lakehouse has options for all types of data, but what about understanding and managing the metadata of data sources? The OCI Data Catalog captures whether you're building a schema, building a query from ADW, or building a table that you want to query from a Spark job. 00;08;00;23 - 00;08;26;13 And all that data definition goes into the OCI data catalog. So, wherever this data goes, you'll be able to access it. The data catalog is the source of truth for object store metadata and can regularly harvest the information from the data sources. It also manages the business glossary, providing consistent terms and tags for your data. Discovery of data is a powerful search feature to discover new data sets entirely. 00;08;26;15 - 00;08;50;08 Even with all these capabilities, there are still more being added or enhanced over time. For example, now with OCI Data Flow, you have a serverless Spark service. You can build a Spark job that makes sense from some unstructured data and include it as a part of the Oracle Lakehouse. Enterprises are moving to data flow because you can write, decode, and execute code, and focus on the application, because the challenging part of where this is running is handled through the service components of the Oracle Lakehouse. 00;08;50;11 - 00;09;13;06 I think what we all want, Greg, is faster insights on our data, right? As you put everything together into this architecture. The key thing is that you want to be able to write data once and then combine it with other previously written data, move it around, combine it here and there, and analyze. 00;09;13;09 - 00;09;36;26 So, we have a way to store both structured and unstructured data. You have the object store for unstructured data and write your structured data to a relational database, perhaps MySQL or Oracle database, and you can then leverage the Oracle Data Catalog to have a single way to understand and tag your data. Oracle Data Lakehouse is an open and collaborative approach. 00;09;36;28 - 00;10;04;22 It stores all data in an order that's easy to understand and analyze through a variety of services, as well as AI tools. OCI can accelerate your solution development for your most common Data Lakehouse workloads. You can easily get started from where you are today, and often without writing any new code whatsoever. Within each path, we can work with you at Oracle to highlight the investments we've made that will help accelerate your own Lakehouse transformation. 00;10;04;24 - 00;10;39;11 The Oracle Data Lakehouse is the premier solution for transforming data into better, more profitable business decisions. Remember, it's not just your architecture that's powerful. With Oracle Lakehouse, you can help combine the architecture, data sets, services, and tools across your entire technical landscape into something more valuable than just the sum of its parts. Thank you so much, Greg, for sharing your expertise with us. To learn more about Oracle Data Lakehouse, please visit mylearn.oracle.com and take a look at our Oracle Cloud Data Management Foundations Workshop. 00;10;39;18 - 00;11;04;14 That brings us to the end of this season. Thank you for being with us on this journey. We're very excited about our upcoming season, which will be dedicated to Cloud Applications Business Process training. Until next time, 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. 00;11;04;16 - 00;13;38;07 We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

22 Aug 202311min

In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham are joined by Cloud Engineer Nick Commisso to talk about managing Oracle Database with REST APIs. They also look at Autonomous Database built-in tools, which are pre-assembled, pre-configured, and pre-deployed, delivering a consistent user experience. 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, Deepak Modi, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00;00;00;00 - 00;00;39;06 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 Lois Houston, Director of Product Innovation and Go to Market Programs with Oracle University. And with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. 00;00;39;12 - 00;01;04;12 Hello again! Last week, we discussed Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Maximum Availability Architecture. And in today's episode, we'll talk about managing Oracle Database with REST APIs and also look at Autonomous Database built-in tools with our Cloud Engineer Nick Commisso. Hi Nick, thanks for being back on the podcast. What is Oracle REST Data Services? What do you use it for? 00;01;04;14 - 00;01;31;07 Oracle is not just a relational database anymore. And the REST APIs can be deployed with Oracle REST Data Services or ORDS to handle all of these data format models. And you can use ORDS for application development and accessing the data and can be used as a powerful tool for automating management, lifecycle, provisioning, and data-dictionary-type use. 00;01;31;09 - 00;02;02;02 Oracle Cloud offers full REST APIs for DBAs and developers who would prefer to interact with Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud services programmatically over REST rather than log in to the cloud console and click through screens. This provides a mechanism for developing customized deployment and management scripts that can be saved and reused for deployments, setting gold standards, and storing entire application infrastructure stacks as version-controlled code. 00;02;02;08 - 00;02;35;15 I think before we move on, it's important to clarify. For anyone who doesn't already know, what is REST? How do Oracle Cloud Infrastructure APIs use REST and HTTPS? REST is combined with HTTPS, but is not a protocol. REST is an acronym for Representational Stateless Transfer. The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure APIs are typical REST APIs that use HTTPS requests and responses and support HTTPS and SSL protocol TLS 1.2, the most secure industry standards. 00;02;35;15 - 00;03;18;17 Calls to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using REST APIs can be written in popular scripting languages such as Node.js, Python, Ruby, Perl, Java, C#, Bash, or Curl. The way you interact with your data are the API calls via HTTP - GET to access your data and stored procedures. PUT to update your data. POST to insert your data and execute PL/SQL. And DELETE to remove your data. When making an HTTP request with Oracle REST Data Services, how does the process flow from the request to accessing data in the database? 00;03;18;17 - 00;03;46;21 A person, process, or computer gets ready to make an HTTP request. You need to tell the request where the thing or data is, and the request will get into the web tier where ORDS is running. ORDS then translates the REST request to a SQL statement and accesses the table to get the information requested. 00;03;46;24 - 00;04;13;11 The result normally comes back as a JSON, but can also return an HTML, binary, and CSV. With all of these requests, a collection of connections to the database or connection pool is used and all of the data might not return, depending on the device asking. The results set up links to get more data, but each each time, this links to get another request through the connection pool. 00;04;13;13 - 00;04;41;06 The default size of the connection pool are 10 and it depends how fast is the database code that's tied to the APIs. But 10 probably isn't enough. Because of the results and connection pooling, it shouldn't be long-running code when using APIs. What is the architecture of Oracle REST Data Services? Can you tell us about the integration with components like Java servlets, Tomcat, WebLogic, and Apache? 00;04;41;08 - 00;05;13;24 Also, how does ORDS enable authentication and access to data in the Oracle database through REST calls? ORDS runs in a Java servlet. Or it can be run within Tomcat or WebLogic for E-Business or Fusion. The request comes into the web server and ORDS handles the request. ORDS is included in your Oracle database license. This is a simplified view of your architecture, but there's normally a load balancer in front of the Apache server to handle the requests coming in. 00;05;13;27 - 00;05;50;09 The REST service is already hooked up into the database. Authentication with the web server and the hooks are there to be accessing the data. The code and the data is already in the database in the APEX apps. And the REST calls allow for you to access the data. It harnesses the Oracle database. In order to manage your database with automation, along with minimal human interaction, you need to use ORDS and the REST APIs that are enabled for database management to provision, control, and monitor the Oracle database. 00;05;50;11 - 00;06;20;22 You need an Oracle database for ORDS to work. ORDS can run anywhere that Oracle can run and is easily plugged into the Oracle Database Management pipeline. What are some key features and functionalities offered by the Oracle Database REST APIs? There are over 600 REST endpoints provided to manage and monitor your Oracle database. These are supported starting from 11gR2 up to the current version of the database. 00;06;20;25 - 00;06;51;14 The REST APIs have general information, data dictionary, monitoring, performance, and lifecycle management. Can you give us some examples of specific details that are accessible through the REST APIs? For performance, there's Top SQL, ASH, and AWR reports. For monitoring, you can look at sessions, locks, waits, and alert logs. Lifecycle will allow you to manage multitenant for provisioning PDBs. 00;06;51;16 - 00;07;16;08 And let's not forget about the data dictionary tables where you can report on objects and database operations. And how do you get started with ORDS? To get started using ORDS, you need to install ORDS. You run the installer and there are configuration files that are also created that can be adjusted later. You need the information about connection to the database where you want ORDS installed. 00;07;16;10 - 00;07;47;08 What goes into the database is the schema, ORDS_METADATA, and a user, ORDS_PUBLIC_USER. Are you attending Oracle CloudWorld 2023? Learn from experts, network with peers, and find out about the latest innovations when Oracle CloudWorld returns to Las Vegas from September 18 through 21. CloudWorld is the best place to learn about Oracle solutions from the people who build and use them. 00;07;47;08 - 00;08;15;02 In addition to your attendance at CloudWorld, your ticket gives you access to Oracle MyLearn and all of the cloud learning subscription content as well as three free certification exam credits. This is valid from the week you register through 60 days after the conference. So, what are you waiting for? Register today. Learn more about Oracle CloudWorld at www.oracle.com/cloudworld. 00;08;15;04 - 00;08;48;14 Welcome back. Let's move on to Oracle's data toolset. Nick, what are the key tools offered by Oracle for data analysis and integration? Oracle Data Integrator or ODI is an enterprise class data integration tool with extract, load, and transform, or ELT architecture. Enterprise Data Quality or EDQ is a sophisticated, powerful tool for profiling, cleaning, and preparing your data. 00;08;48;17 - 00;09;24;14 Analytic views built into Oracle database provides a common framework for defining universally accessible semantic models. Oracle Analytics Cloud, or OAC, is the perfect complement, providing beautiful and insightful analysis of this data. So, how do these tools come together? For our traditional market, this is a comprehensive and compelling suite of tools. Enterprise class tools for an enterprise class market. With autonomous database, we deliver an integrated platform. 00;09;24;17 - 00;09;47;24 It's not a single tool with the customer left to buy the other tools that we need, nor is it a solution delivered in kit form with the customer left to cobble it all together. It's pre-assembled, preconfigured, and pre-deployed. There is a consistent user experience with built-in best practices. It's like having an expert in a box there to guide you. 00;09;47;26 - 00;10;12;15 Components are defined in the common database layer so that they can be shared by all users in all tools. And the metadata? And all of this metadata is brought together in the catalog. So, it's not just the tools that are integrated, it's the data too, a business model spanning data sources that can be federated when appropriate and defined in a common data catalog, which eliminates silos. 00;10;12;17 - 00;10;49;24 The result is renewed confidence in data lineage and impact analysis. In other words, we have collaboration by design. This built-in collaboration between specialists eliminates silos. For example, hierarchies recognized automatically in the data preparation phase are defined in the database itself, are immediately accessible to the data analysts for aggregation purposes. Additional semantic modeling by the analysts, perhaps defining sophisticated calculations, such as percentage change since last year, and again, defined in the database itself, can be accessed by the data scientist. 00;10;49;27 - 00;11;15;19 This provides a great headstart in developing predictive models that, in turn, can be used by the CRM developer who might want to augment a customer view with the most suitable campaign to discuss during the next meeting. So, autonomous database comes with a sophisticated suite of tools pre-installed. 00;11;15;20 - 00;11;40;10 So, it's basically an open platform with open standards. If you want to speak SQL, speak SQL, so do we. We speak Python too, if that's your preference. Whether your data is in a CSV file or a JSON format, it's going to be comfortably at home in autonomous database. Using the language of your choice, analyze your data using whatever tool you're most comfortable with. 00;11;40;17 - 00;12;00;18 The whole idea is that there should be nothing new to learn. Thanks, Nick, for joining us today. To learn more about ADB built-in tools, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and get started on our free Oracle Cloud Data Management Foundations Workshop. Next week will be our last episode of the season where we'll look at Oracle Data Lakehouse. 00;12;00;21 - 00;14;47;18 Until then, this is Nikita Abraham and Lois Houston 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. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

15 Aug 202312min

Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Alex Bouchereau, as they talk about Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture, which provides architecture, configuration, and lifecycle best practices for Oracle Databases. 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: 00;00;00;00 - 00;00;39;11 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 I'm joined by Lois Houston, Director of Product Innovation and Go to Market Programs. 00;00;39;18 - 00;01;12;09 Hi, everyone. Last week, we discussed Oracle's Maximum Security Architecture, and today, we're moving on to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Maximum Availability Architecture. To take us through this, we're once again joined by Oracle Database Specialist Alex Bouchereau. Welcome, Alex. We're so happy you're becoming a regular on our podcast. So, to start, what is OCI Maximum Availability Architecture? Now, before we actually jump into the specifics, it's important to understand the problem we're trying to address. 00;01;12;11 - 00;01;38;01 And that is database downtime and data protection. We don't want any data loss and the impact of both of these types of occurrences can be significant. Now, $350K on average of costs of downtime per hour, 87 hours average amount of downtime per year is pretty significant. So, it's a very, very common occurrence. It's $10 million for a single outage, depending on how critical the application is. 00;01;38;03 - 00;02;02;28 And 91% of companies have experienced unplanned data center outages, which means this occurs fairly often. So, what can we do about this? How do we address the problem of data loss? It's important to understand a different terminology first. So, we'll start with high availability. High availability provides redundant components to go ahead and ensure your service is uninterrupted in case of a type of hardware failure. 00;02;03;01 - 00;02;24;24 So, if one server goes down, the other servers will be up. Ideally, you'll have a cluster to go ahead and provide that level of redundancy. And then we talk about scalability. Depending upon the workload, you want to ensure that you still have your performance. So, as your application becomes more popular and more end users go ahead and join it, the workload increases. 00;02;24;26 - 00;02;42;28 So, you want to ensure that the performance is not impacted at all. So, if we want to go ahead and minimize the time of our planned maintenance, which happens more often and a lot more often than unplanned outages, we need to do so in a rolling fashion. And that's where rolling upgrades, rolling patches, and all these types of features come into play. 00;02;42;29 - 00;03;10;20 Okay, so just to recap, the key terms you spoke about were high availability, which is if one server goes down, others will be up, scalability, which is even if the workload increases, performance isn't impacted, and rolling updates, which is managing planned updates seamlessly with no downtime. Great. What's next? Disaster recovery. So, we move from high availability to disaster recovery, protecting us from a complete site outage. 00;03;10;27 - 00;03;35;02 So, if the site goes down entirely, we want to have a redundant site to be able to failover to. That's where disaster recovery comes into play. And then how do we measure downtime and data loss? So, we do so with Recovery Point Objectives, or RPOs, measuring data loss and Recovery Time Objectives, or RTOs, measuring our downtime. 00;03;35;05 - 00;04;00;22 Alex, when you say measure downtime, how do we actually do that? Well, we use a technique called chaos engineering. Essentially, it's an art form at the end of the day because it's constantly evolving and changing over time. We're proactively breaking things in the system and we're testing how our failover, how our resiliency, and how our switchovers, and how everything goes ahead and works under the covers with all our different features. 00;04;00;23 - 00;04;21;28 A lot of components can suffer an outage, right? We have networks and servers, storage, and all these different components can fail. But also human error. Someone can delete a table. You could delete a bunch of rows. So, they can make a mistake on the system as well. That occurs very often. Data corruption and then, of course, power failures. 00;04;22;00 - 00;04;45;03 Godzilla could attack and take out the entire data center. Godzilla! Ha! And you want to be able to go ahead and have a disaster recovery in place. And then there's all kinds of maintenance activities that happen with application updates. You might want to reorganize the data without changing the application and the small, little optimizations. And these can all happen in isolation and or in combination with each other. 00;04;45;05 - 00;05;19;03 And so chaos engineers take all this into consideration and build out the use cases to go ahead and test the system. Do we have some best practices in place for this, then? Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture, MAA, is Oracle's best practice blueprint based on proven Oracle high availability technologies, end-to-end validation, expert recommendations, and customer experiences. The key goal of MAA is to achieve optimal high availability, data protection, and disaster recovery for Oracle customers at the lowest cost and complexity. 00;05;19;05 - 00;05;54;07 MAA consists of reference architectures for various buckets of HA service-level agreements, configuration practices, and HA lifecycle operational best practices, and are applicable for non-engineered systems, engineered systems, non-cloud, and cloud deployments. Availability of data and applications is an important element of every IT strategy. At Oracle, we've used our decades of enterprise experience to develop an all-encompassing framework that we can all call Oracle MAA, for Maximum Availability Architecture. 00;05;54;07 - 00;06;20;21 And how was Oracle's Maximum Availability Architecture developed? Oracle MAA starts with customer insights and expert recommendations. These have been collected from our huge pool of customers and community of database architects, software engineers, and database strategists. Over the years, this has helped the Oracle MAA development team gain a deep and complete understanding of various kinds of events that can affect availability. 00;06;20;24 - 00;06;48;11 Through this, they have developed an array of availability reference architectures. These reference architectures acknowledge not all data or applications require the same protection and that there are real tradeoffs in terms of cost and effort that should be considered. Whatever your availability goals may be for a database or related applications, Oracle has the product functionality and guidance to ensure you can make the right decision with full knowledge of the tradeoffs in terms of downtime, data loss, and costs. 00;06;48;11 - 00;07;04;01 These reference architectures use a wide array of our HA features, configurations, and operational practices. 00;07;04;03 - 00;07;29;04 Want to get the inside scoop on Oracle University? Head on over to the all-new Oracle University Learning Community. Attend exclusive events. Read up on the latest news. Get firsthand access to new products and stay up-to-date with upcoming certification opportunities. If you're already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to mylearn.oracle.com to join the community. You will need to log in first. If you've not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started. 00;07;29;04 - 00;07;57;19 Join the community today. Welcome back. Alex, you were telling us about how Oracle MAA or Maximum Availability Architecture has reference architectures that use a series of high availability features and configurations. But, how do these help our customers? They help our end customers achieve primarily four goals. 00;07;57;22 - 00;08;29;29 Number one, data protection, reducing data loss through flashback and absolute data protection through zero data loss recovery appliance. Number two, active replication, which allows customers to connect their applications to replicated sites in an active-active HA solution through Active Data Guard and GoldenGate. Number three, scale out, which allows customers the ability to scale compute nodes linearly through RAC, ASM, and Sharding. 00;08;30;01 - 00;08;58;19 Four, continuous availability. This allows transparent failovers of services across sites distributed locally or remote, through AC and GDS. These features and solutions allow customers to mitigate not only planned events, such as software upgrades, data schema changes, and patching, but also unplanned events, such as hardware failures and software crashes due to bugs. Finally, customers have various deployment choices on which we can deploy these HA solutions. 00;08;58;22 - 00;09;25;02 The insights, recommendations, reference architectures, features, configurations, best practices, and deployment choices combine to form a holistic blueprint, which allows customers to successfully achieve their high availability goals. What are the different technologies that come into play here? Well, we'll start with RAC. So, RAC is a clustering technology spread through different nodes across the different servers, so you don't have a single point of failure. 00;09;25;05 - 00;09;46;13 From a scalability standpoint and performance standpoint, you get a lot of benefit associated with that. You constantly add a new node whenever you want to without experiencing any downtime. So, you have that flexibility at this point. And if any type of outage occurs, all the committed transactions are going to be protected and we'll go ahead and we'll move that session over to a new service. 00;09;46;15 - 00;10;07;27 So, from that point, we want to go ahead and also protect our in-flight transactions. So, when it comes to in-flight transactions, how are we going to protect those in addition to the RAC nodes? Well, we can go ahead and do so with another piece of technology that's built into RAC, and that's the Transparent Application Continuity feature. So, this feature is going to expand the capabilities of RAC. 00;10;08;03 - 00;10;28;18 It's a feature of RAC to go ahead and protect our in-flight transactions so our application doesn't experience those transactions failing and coming back up to the layer, or even up to the end users. We want to capture those. We want to replay them. So that's what application continuity does. It allows us to go in and do that. 00;10;28;21 - 00;10;51;03 It supports a whole bunch of different technologies, from Java, .NET, PHP. You don't have to make any changes to the application. All you have to do is use the correct driver and have the connection string appropriately configured and everything else is happening in the database. What about for disaster recovery? Active Data Guard is the Oracle solution for disaster recovery. 00;10;51;05 - 00;11;29;08 It eliminates a single point of failure by providing one or more synchronized physical replicas of the production database. It uses Oracle Aware Replication to efficiently use network bandwidth and provide unique levels of data protection. It provides data availability with fast, manual, or automatic failover to standby should a primary fail and fast switch over to a standby for the purpose of minimizing planned downtime as well. An Active Data Guard standby is open, read only, while it is being synchronized, providing advanced features for data protection, availability, and protection offload. 00;11;29;08 - 00;11;50;23 We have different database services, right? We have our Oracle Database Cloud servers, we have Exadata Cloud servers, and we have Autonomous Database. Do they all have varying technologies built into them? All of them are Database Aware architecture at the end of the day. And the Oracle Database Cloud Service, you have the choice of single instance, or you can go ahead and choose between RAC as well. 00;11;50;25 - 00;12;23;25 You can use quick migration via Zero Downtime Migration, or ZDM for short. We have automated backups built in, and you can set up cross-regional or cross availability to do any DR with Active Data Guard through our control play. And we build on that with Exadata Cloud Service by going ahead and changing the foundation to Exadata, with all the rich benefits of performance, scalability, and optimizations for the Oracle Database, and all the different HA and DR technologies that run within it, to the cloud. 00;12;23;27 - 00;12;50;22 Very easy to go ahead and move from Exadata on-premise to Exadata Cloud Service. And you have choices. You can do the public cloud, or you can do Cloud@Customer or ExaCC, as we call it, to go ahead and run Exadata within your own data center--Exadata Cloud Service and your own data center. And building on top of that, we have Autonomous, which also builds on top of that Exadata infrastructure. 00;12;50;25 - 00;13;19;12 And we have two flavors of that. We have shared and we have dedicated, depending upon your requirements. And is all of this managed by Oracle? Now, at this point, everything's managed by Oracle and things like Data Guard can be configured. We call it Autonomous Data Guard in the Autonomous Database. With a simple two clicks, you can set up cross-regional or cross availability domain VR. And then everything is built, of course, from a high-available multitenant RAC infrastructure. 00;13;19;15 - 00;13;48;02 So, it's using all other technologies and optimizations that we've been talking about. Thanks, Alex, for listing out the different offerings we have. I think we can wind up for today. Any final thoughts? So high availability, disaster recovery, absolute requirements. Everybody should have it. Everybody should think of it ahead of time. We have different blueprints, different tiers of our MAA architecture that map different RTO and RPO requirements depending upon your needs. 00;13;48;04 - 00;14;12;01 And those may change over time. And finally, the business continuity we can provide with MAA is for both planned maintenance and unplanned outage events. So, it's for both. And that's a critical part to this as well. Thank you, Alex, for spending this time with us. That's it for this episode. Next week, we'll talk about managing Oracle Database with REST APIs, and ADB built-in tools. 00;14;12;04 - 00;16;57;28 Until then, this is Nikita Abraham and Lois Houston 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. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

8 Aug 202314min

Because of how valuable your data is, protecting it against theft and unauthorized use is perhaps your biggest challenge. Databases need more security than the bare minimum. In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Greg Genovese, talk about how Oracle's data-driven security features work together to create a maximum security architecture. 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: 00;00;00;00 - 00;00;38;18 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 Lois Houston, Director of Product Innovation and Go to Market Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. 00;00;38;20 - 00;01;01;20 Hello again! In today's episode, we're going to talk with Oracle Database Specialist Greg Genovese about Oracle's Maximum Security Architecture. Hi, Greg. Thanks for joining us today. We have so much sensitive information in our databases so I get why a data thief would try to attack and steal data. But how do they actually do it? Databases don't just operate in a vacuum. 00;01;01;23 - 00;01;26;01 A database is accessed often through a firewall by users and applications. Speaking of those firewalls, if an attacker has managed to penetrate into the internal network, they may choose to go after data traveling over that network. This type of attack is much less likely to be detected than attempts to access the database directly. Another popular attack is against the underlying data files, database backups, or database exports. 00;01;26;04 - 00;01;49;19 Here again, if the attacker is successful, they may be able to steal the entire database without even having to try to log in. Oh my goodness! That sounds terrible. If none of those options work, perhaps the database has an unpatched vulnerability. In many cases, there are automated attack toolkits that help exploit these vulnerabilities. 00;01;49;21 - 00;02;18;29 And let's not forget those non-production copies of the database. What's a non-production copy of a database? In many systems, the test and development instances are effectively just clones of production and are hardly ever monitored as closely as production databases. In most cases, there are copies of database for test, development, stage, and user acceptance testing or UAT. Databases persist data into a storage medium and run on servers with operating systems and peripherals. 00;02;19;02 - 00;02;49;16 All of these are managed by administrators. And administrators are a hacker's favorite point of attack. If they can compromise an admin account, they are in with elevated privileges and in most cases zero controls over what they can do. If the attackers can't compromise an admin account, they can often compromise an end user account. Lower privileges, but often still with access to the data or able to be used as a stepping stone to get that access. 00;02;49;19 - 00;03;20;20 Also, applications make an attractive target too. They are frequently more exposed than a database or database server and often even available from outside of the corporate firewall. That's a lot, Greg. There are just so many points of attack. So then how do I keep my database safe? Securing an Oracle Database is much like securing any other system. You are protecting your data, which could be intellectual property, financial data, personal data about your customers or your staff, or most likely a combination of all three of these things. 00;03;20;22 - 00;03;44;06 Because data is valuable, you need to guard against its theft and misuse. This data is used for business purposes and that means users and applications connect to the database and you need to safeguard that data with security controls that restrict access to the data according to your corporate policy. To do this, you'll need to do three things: assess, detect, and prevent. 00;03;44;06 - 00;04;17;01 Assess, detect, prevent. Okay. But how do you assess and what are you actually assessing? Assess the system to determine its current state and develop a remediation plan. Is the system configured properly? Are patches applied regularly? How are user privileges managed? And are you enforcing these privileges? What types and how much sensitive data is the system holding? Your existing investment in the Oracle Database gives you the features and utilities you need to assess your database and identify areas for improvement and risk reduction. 00;04;17;01 - 00;04;53;21 And how do you detect and prevent? Detect attempts to access data outside of policy and identify anomalies in data access. Almost all database activity is repetitive, so anomalies are frequently a leading-edge indicator of attempted data theft. Prevent access to the data that doesn't go through the database control mechanisms, sniffing traffic over the network, reading the underlying data storage layer, or misuse of database exports and backups. Block inappropriate access to data through control mechanisms that consider the context of the access, not just the identity of the account accessing the data. 00;04;53;21 - 00;05;10;23 Oracle provides industry-leading capabilities for each of these security control objectives. Our team can help you identify the right technical enforcement for virtually any control objective. 00;05;10;25 - 00;05;40;14 Have you been wanting to earn an Oracle certification? Well, there's never been a better time than the present. Now through August 31st, you can choose from over 20 different Oracle certifications and take up to four exams for free, including foundation, associate, and professional level Oracle Cloud Infrastructure certifications. You can also learn and get certified on Oracle Cloud Applications Business Processes for Human Capital Management, Financials, Customer Experience, Supply Chain, and Procurement. 00;05;40;17 - 00;06;07;09 And did I mention this was all free? Oracle Cloud training and certifications empower you to explore limitless possibilities in the cloud landscape. Gain the knowledge and skills needed to design, deploy, secure, and operate modern cloud infrastructure and applications with confidence. You can go to education.oracle.com for more details. What are you waiting for? Get certified today. 00;06;07;12 - 00;06;34;19 Welcome back! Greg, I'm sure every database has a basic level of security, right? There are some things we expect to always be done. What we call the baseline security posture. Establishing the baseline security posture involves several types of different controls. We'll assess the system state, prevent unauthorized activity, and detect activity that is relevant to our security controls. Our first control is assessing the database configuration. 00;06;34;22 - 00;06;59;08 We want to ensure that we haven't made configuration decisions that introduce unnecessary risk into the environment. We'll also check to make sure that the database is current on all security patches. And how do we check this? For this, we have two tools available to us: Database Security Assessment tool or DBSAT and Data Safe. DBSAT is a free utility available for download via My Oracle Support. 00;06;59;08 - 00;07;23;28 Data Safe is a cloud service that is included at no additional cost with Oracle Cloud Database Services. Data Safe is also available for on-prem databases, but there is an additional cost for those. Users and applications connect to the database. We want to ensure that if they are connecting with username and password, we're practicing good password discipline. We also want to consider the use of strong authentication. 00;07;24;00 - 00;07;50;10 Your Oracle database supports Kerberos, TKI certificate, and multi-factor authentication. We'll want to make sure that those users are really able to connect to the database, identifying dormant accounts and checking to be sure we haven't granted privileges that don't make sense in our environment. Here again, DBSAT and Data Safe help by pointing out the use of such things like select any table privileges or grants of the DBA roles. 00;07;50;12 - 00;08;15;06 We should also check that database accounts are actually using the privileges we grant. Is there any way to monitor the privileges we grant? Privilege analysis monitors privilege usage, and can report on privileges that an account has which are not being used. We can then remove those unnecessary privileges, reducing the attack surface presented by those users. Note that privilege analysis is only available for Oracle Enterprise Edition Database. 00;08;15;09 - 00;08;47;03 It is not present in Oracle Standard Edition. Users are inserting and updating data and also retrieving data. That data is traveling over the network, and in most cases, we want you to encrypt the data to reduce the chances that an attacker can simply sniff the network to steal data. And are there different types of encryption? The Oracle database supports two different types of network encryption, native network encryption, which is certificate lists and usually requiring zero change to the applications to implement. And industry standard certificate-based TLS. 00;08;47;05 - 00;09;12;12 Depending on how many users connect to our database and how many databases we have, we may want to implement centralized authentication. Your Oracle database supports two types of centralized user management. One feature, Enterprise User Security, is available on all currently-supported database versions and allows the Oracle database to consult an Oracle LDAP directory for users and role membership. 00;09;12;14 - 00;09;46;13 The other feature, centrally managed users, was new in Oracle 18c and allows the Oracle database to connect to Microsoft Active Directory for users and role membership. Is there a way for us to know what users are doing? For this, we use database auditing. The Oracle database offers a comprehensive auditing capability, and you will usually want to audit database connections, especially failed logins, as well as data control language, including creation of users and privilege grants, and data definition language like creation of stored procedures, database links, and more. 00;09;46;16 - 00;10;16;06 All of these are fairly rare in most databases, so this level of auditing presents minimal performance impact. Finally, we want to make sure that we know what sensitive data resides in the database. Is the baseline security posture appropriate for the level of risk presented by the data? Or should we do more to protect our data? Here we return to DBSAT or Data Safe, which allow us to scan the database for sensitive data reporting on what types of data are found and how much of it there is. 00;10;16;06 - 00;10;41;24 All of the controls we've talked about so far are baseline. These are things we think any database should do and everything we've discussed so far can be done without additional costs, products, or options. But what if I want more than normal baseline security? Maybe my database contains personal information, financial information, intellectual property, or something else that requires more than just basic security. 00;10;41;25 - 00;11;08;13 Since that data is eventually being persisted on disk, in backups, and in exports, we'll want to protect it from attack there. Here is where transparent data encryption comes into play. If we encrypt data, that means there is an encryption key that we need to protect and distribute securely. For this, we can use Oracle Key Vault. Remember, those administrators with privileges and access to special data? We'll want to protect against them as well. 00;11;08;15 - 00;11;40;17 And for this, we'll use Database Vault. Could you tell us more about Database Vault? Database Vault lets us separate the duties of database administration from access to the data within the database. Database Vault also protects against a compromised application server, locking down application accounts so they can only access data from within the normal context of the application. When data is accessed from outside of the application, we may want to provide additional protection for high value data columns like credit card numbers or taxpayer IDs. 00;11;40;19 - 00;12;07;01 For this, we can use data redaction to hide sensitive data on the fly as it leaves the database. And for those non-production clones, the database we talked about, we'll simply remove sensitive data from them, replacing it with realistic looking "safe data" that does not present a security risk, but still allows application development and testing to continue. We can either use Data Safe or Enterprise Manager's data masking and subsetting pack. 00;12;07;03 - 00;12;30;02 We seem to have done a lot to protect the database, but is there a way to detect attempts to break in and steal data? For that, we'll configure auditing within the database and feed audit events to a centralized audit vault for analysis, reporting, and even alert generation. We'll also use database firewall to examine incoming connections and SQL statements for anomalies and violation of policy. 00;12;30;04 - 00;13;00;15 And if we choose to, we can go one step further and actually block out policy activity with the firewall. And of course, events from the database firewall flow into the audit vault server for analysis, reporting and again, alert generation. We've talked about assessing security, detecting inappropriate activity, and preventing unauthorized access to data. But there is a fourth type of database security control that is unique to databases called database-driven security. 00;13;00;17 - 00;13;27;15 These controls are used to provide fine-grained access control at the data row or column levels. Oracle database provides a variety of data-driven security features, including Real Application Security and Label Security. All these controls, working together, create the maximum security architecture or MSA. Not every database requires the full MSA, but many databases require something much more than just standard baseline security protocols. 00;13;27;17 - 00;13;52;13 Thanks, Greg, for joining us today. To learn more about Oracle's Maximum Security Architecture, visit mylearn.oracle.com and head over to the Oracle Cloud Data Management Foundations Workshop. That brings us to the end of this episode. Join us next week for a discussion on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Maximum Availability Architecture. Until then, this is Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham signing off. 00;13;52;15 - 00;16;33;21 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

1 Aug 202314min

In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham are joined by MySQL Developer Advocate Scott Stroz to talk about MySQL Document Store, a NoSQL solution built on top of MySQL. Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community MySQL: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/ Oracle MySQL Blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. --------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00;00;00;00 - 00;00;38;19 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 Lois Houston, Director of Product Innovation and Go to Market Programs with Oracle University. And with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. 00;00;38;22 - 00;00;59;15 Hi, everyone! For the last two weeks, we've been talking about MySQL and NoSQL. And in today's special episode, we're going to dive a little deeper and focus on MySQL Document Store with MySQL Developer Advocate Scott Stroz. Hi, Scott! Thanks for being here today. Why don't you tell us a little more about yourself? Hi, Niki. Hi, Lois. 00;00;59;19 - 00;01;16;10 I'm happy to be here with you guys. Like you said, I'm a developer advocate for MySQL. I've been a software developer for over 20 years. In that time frame, MySQL is the only thing in my development stack that hasn't changed. I used MySQL in my first job as a web developer, and I still use it today. 00;01;16;12 - 00;01;41;26 And for those who may not know, the best way to describe what a developer advocate does is our job is to make developers better at their job. Scott, we discussed NoSQL last week, but for anyone who missed that episode, can you give us a high-level explanation of what NoSQL means? Before I can explain NoSQL, we should probably go over what we mean by a relational database. 00;01;41;27 - 00;02;06;10 In a relational database, data is stored in tables. Each table consists of multiple columns, and each column holds a specific data type - a string, a number, a date, etc. In many cases, the data in one table relates to data in another table. This is where the relational part comes from and data is stored in rows or records. In a relational database, data is often very structured. 00;02;06;12 - 00;02;31;29 SQL or structured query language is used to retrieve, update, add, or delete rows from the database, and NoSQL database at its most basic level is a storage mechanism that does not use the table structure I just mentioned. Data is often stored as JSON documents, as a blob of text. Our audience may find it interesting that NoSQL does not necessarily mean there is no SQL used at all. 00;02;32;01 - 00;02;58;25 In some cases, NoSQL actually stands for not only SQL. Interesting. So, what are JSON documents? JSON is an acronym for JavaScript Object Notation and it is a textual representation of a data structure. JSON objects are wrapped in curly braces and consist of key-value pairs. The values can be simple, such as strings or numbers, or they can also be other JSON objects or arrays. 00;02;58;28 - 00;03;21;09 JSON arrays are wrapped in brackets and consist of comma-separated values that can be simple values again, such as numbers or strings. But they can also be other JSON objects or other arrays. This means that data in JSON objects can be nested with many levels. The best thing about JSON is that it's ubiquitous and can be used in almost any programing language. 00;03;21;11 - 00;03;41;21 I say almost every because I've not used every programing language. So, I'm covering myself just in case there's one out there that doesn't have JSON support. That's pretty good. Okay. It's easy to pick up on how to read it as well. When I first started using JSON, it was like trying to read The Matrix. But now I can read JSON just as easy as I can read a book. 00;03;41;22 - 00;04;03;08 Why would a developer choose to use a NoSQL solution? Can you give us a few examples of that? That is a great question, Niki. When starting out a new project, when a data structure doesn't exist, it may make sense to use a NoSQL solution. In other words, if the schema changes frequently, it may make sense not to have a schema. 00;04;03;10 - 00;04;22;25 Then, once the scheme is matured, the data can be parsed out into a relational database model. I come from the school of thought that all data should be in tables and columns with the proper relationships defined and be very structured. But here's the thing that took me a while to accept. Not all data is structured and not all data needs to be related to other data. 00;04;23;00 - 00;04;49;12 Things like application configuration or user preferences most likely don't need to be stored in a relational database and may work best being stored as JSON. One of the biggest uses of storing JSON is ingesting data from third-party sources. Many applications use external APIs to retrieve data. In those cases, we have no control over the schema that's used for that data. 00;04;49;15 - 00;05;08;28 In trying to account for changes in the schema that will inevitably come is going to be a difficult task. So, storing that data in JSON makes a lot more sense. That makes sense. And then you can handle the JSON as you need to. Okay, let's get to our main topic of discussion for today. What is MySQL Document Store? 00;05;09;00 - 00;05;35;09 MySQL Document Store is a NoSQL implementation built on top of MySQL. JSON documents are stored in a MySQL database table using the InnoDB storage engine. CRUD operations - create, retrieve, update, and delete - are abstracted from the developer through an easy-to-use API. Application developers, whether it's web applications, mobile applications, or native operating system applications, communicate with MySQL Document Store over the X-protocol, which uses port 33060 instead of the standard port 3306. 00;05;35;11 - 00;06;00;10 The nomenclature of NoSQL databases differs from relational databases, right? Can you explain some of the basic terms that are used? Developers who come from a relational database background may initially be confused by some of the terms used to describe the structure where the documents are stored. 00;06;00;12 - 00;06;23;04 I know I was. We use three main terms to describe the structure of MySQL document store – schema, collection, and document. In relational database parlance, a schema would be akin to a database. A collection would be the same as a table, and a document, the actual JSON that we're storing, would be like a row in that table. 00;06;23;07 - 00;06;56;07 So, what happens under the covers when using MySQL Document Store? So, any time we use the document store API, the commands are turned into SQL commands that are then executed on the database server. When developers use the MySQL Document Store API to create a new schema, behind the scenes, MySQL creates a new database, which should be the same as running a SQL query to create a new database. When a new collection is created, MySQL creates a new table in the database using a create table query, and it adds three columns to that table. 00;06;56;09 - 00;07;24;09 The first is _id. This column serves as the primary key when a document is saved to the database, and the key named _id is not provided. MySQL autogenerates the id, saves it to this column, and then also injects it into the JSON document. The next column is doc. This column stores the JSON documents using the JSON data type. And then the last column is _json_schema. 00;07;24;12 - 00;07;57;09 And it's used to validate the schema of documents that are added to the collection. CRUD operations follow the same process. For instance, when we make a call to the API to retrieve documents, on the backend, that command is converted into a SELECT statement using native JSON functions to return the document. If developers want to see what commands are executed when using MySQL Document Store, they can enable the general log setting and then view the log after executing API commands. 00;07;57;12 - 00;08;25;29 Are you attending Oracle CloudWorld 2023? Learn from experts, network with peers, and find out about the latest innovations when Oracle CloudWorld returns to Las Vegas from September 18 through 21. CloudWorld is the best place to learn about Oracle solutions from the people who build and use them. In addition to your attendance at CloudWorld, your ticket gives you access to Oracle MyLearn and all of the cloud learning subscription content as well as three free certification exam credits. 00;08;26;03 - 00;08;53;11 This is valid from the week you register through 60 days after the conference. So, what are you waiting for? Register today! Learn more about Oracle CloudWorld at www.oracle.com/cloudworld. Welcome back! Scott, just before the break, you mentioned something about schema validation. Isn't being schema-less one of the advantages of using a NoSQL solution? 00;08;53;15 - 00;09;16;22 Being schema-less is one of the features of NoSQL databases that developers like more than others. There may be times when we must ensure that documents added to a collection match a certain syntax or schema. For example, we may want to ensure that documents always have a specific key or that a particular key, if it exists, is numeric or some other data type. 00;09;16;24 - 00;09;38;20 When the collection is created, we can define those rules using a JSON object with a specific syntax. On the backend, MySQL will create a check constraint using that JSON and any time a document is saved to a collection, it's validated to ensure it matches the rules or schema we define. If the document does not adhere to that schema, MySQL will throw an error. 00;09;38;22 - 00;10;00;13 What do developers need to do to start using MySQL Document Store. In terms of configuring MySQL? They don't need to do anything. The X-plugin, which is what's used for communication between the server and the client, has been installed by default since version 8.0.1. So, if they're using a newer version of MySQL 8, they already have access to Document Store. 00;10;00;15 - 00;10;24;28 You may need to make some changes to the network infrastructure to allow traffic over port 33060, but for a network administrator, that should be easy to accomplish. MySQL Document Store is also available on all editions. It's available in Enterprise Edition and the Community Edition as well. And I should note that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is currently the only cloud provider supporting MySQL Document Store for their MySQL cloud implementations. 00;10;25;00 - 00;10;48;27 Scott, what programing languages are supported for use with MySQL Document Store? There are quite a few languages that are supported. We have connectors or SDKs, as some people call them, or Java, which also works with other Java-based languages, such as Groovy and Kotlin. We also have connectors for C++, Python, PHP, .Net, Node.js and MySQL Shell. 00;10;49;00 - 00;11;14;18 Our listeners have probably heard of most of these with the exception of MySQL Shell. What is that? MySQL Shell is a command line interface that allows us to connect to and manage MySQL database instances. We can use it to create document store schemas and collections easily, but it can do so much more. We can manage to configure MySQL instances, including creating and configuring server replication and clustering. 00;11;14;20 - 00;11;39;15 It even offers a sandbox feature where we can quickly spin up MySQL instances for testing, replication, and clustering configuration without the need to stand up full MySQL server instances. There are three modes in MySQL Shell. By default, MySQL Shell starts in JavaScript mode where the commands we use follow JavaScript syntax. There is a Python mode where the commands we use follow Python syntax. 00;11;39;17 - 00;12;05;17 And finally, there is SQL mode where we can run standard SQL queries. SQL mode functions very much like the older MySQL command line client. And what are the advantages of using MySQL Document Store? I think the best feature of MySQL Document Store is that because the documents are stored in a database table using the JSON data type, we can use native SQL to run complex queries for reports and analytics. 00;12;05;19 - 00;12;27;13 MySQL has quite a few native functions for working with JSON, which can help extract data from a document store easier than in other solutions. Another big advantage is that MySQL Document Store is fully ACID compliant because the JSON documents are stored using the InnoDB storage engine. What does it mean for a database to be ACID compliant? 00;12;27;15 - 00;12;55;27 In databases, data is updated, added, deleted, etc. in transactions or steps. Sometimes, these transactions are a single query. Other times they may be multiple queries run in succession. Thezacronym ACID, which stands for atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability, ensures that these transactions are processed in a reliable manner. Atomicity guarantees that each transaction is treated as a single unit. 00;12;55;29 - 00;13;30;24 If one part of the transaction fails, the entire transaction fails. Consistency ensures that every part of the transaction follows all database constraints. If the data in every part of the transaction violates these constraints, the entire transaction fails. Isolation means that transactions are run in isolation so that they do not interfere with each other. And finally, durability means that once a transaction is committed, meaning all parts of the transaction is succeeded, that the data is written to the database. Database is considered ACID compliant when it adheres to all of this. 00;13;30;26 - 00;13;55;16 Before we let you go, if people want more information about MySQL Document Store, where can they find it? I think the best place to get more information is from the documentation on the MySQL site at dev.mysql.com/doc. There are also quite a few posts about MySQL Document Store on the MySQL blog at blogs.oracle.com/mysql. 00;13;55;19 - 00;14;15;06 Wonderful! Thank you so much, Scott, for taking the time to be with us today. Oh, thanks for having me. Well, folks, that brings us to the end of this episode. We hope you've learned something new and that you'll join us next week for a discussion on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's maximum security architecture. Until then, this is Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham signing off. 00;14;15;09 - 00;16;57;25 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

25 Jul 202314min