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You met someone in a networking event; you exchange business cards; next thing you know, you get all kinds of emails, phone calls, mail - what did you just do? Congratulations, someone is making money on your bizcard. Check this Blog - http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/23/jigsaw-is-a-really-really-bad-idea/ The idea is creepy and insane and swear you will never handout your business card. Not only Jigsaw is selling your information to it's members, you made it to the list generation, so heavy duty marketing is coming in your way - Watch this new Jigsaw list building - http://myjigsawdata.com/jigsaw_lists_webinar.html
BTW, I had an account too, I was excited when I found this, once you get the sense of how cheap it is, you wonder, if you ever want to carry your business cards. Is this ethical? Legal?
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Are they really opposite ends of the spectrum? How about innovating through outsourcing? One of the oldest outsourcing industry is Manufacturing. Toyota has done miracles with its suppliers to innovate for decades. Actually, Toyota calls them partners rather than suppliers. When Toyota designs new components, it selects two or three suppliers, gives them approximate requirements, goals. The best design, price and performing component from a partner is chosen for the entire life of the vehicle. The vagueness in requirements is by design, so, it leaves enough room for suppliers to innovate within the scope of goals. It is true one may not invent an original breakthrough search algorithm or new cool social networking idea with outsourcing, however, there is enormous possibility of innovating other types of products as long as they are riven by some goals - vague goals. Methodical R&D efforts can be outsourced, for example drug discovery, to speed up innovating new products. The flexibility and operational efficiency is great, quality is the next natural evolution of outsourcing. At present, the outsourcing is driven by operational efficiency, in the near future, this will change, and outsourcers are going to be viewed more like partners rather than as contractors.
In a flat world, outsourcers are partners
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The recent article “Extreme Outsourcing” in CIO magazine (May 15th 2007) gives a nice summary of recent thinking in outsourcing.
The old way to think of outsourcing is a way to reduce costs and use cheap labor and outsource the entire projects.
Over the years providers and buyers fine tuned the process and the model has been stabilized, well understood,
World is flat, etc.
Functions (in large) are outsourced for decades, example payroll.
Physical equipments are outsourced – ASP’s and Data Centers
The recent trend is componentized outsourcing – everything is a service – For example, you need to manage databases,
applications as part of supporting an enterprise. Outsource it to the experts who do this most efficiently, maintain
high quality, leverage scale economies, flexible and scale.
The new way to evaluate a candidate for outsourcing is answering “What is the best way to do an IT function or process
without loosing competitive advantage”.
Even better, leverage outsourcing as a competitive advantage at micro function and process level.
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My most recent enlightenment conference – MIT Sloan Sales conference, the first ever conference on Sales organized by the newly formed MIT Sloan Sales club.
The conference is simply awesome – It puts the importance of selling in business on forefront of education. This is something MIT Sloan has been trying for the last few years, to put more real business experience in educational setting. Here are a few “nuggets” -
“Better Sales force defeats better technology every time” – Ken Morse
“This is a Team Sport” – Jim Tobin – CEO of Boston Scientific
“Simplicity is the new Complexity” – Tim Armstrong, VP of Sales, Google
There were interesting panels – how to get marketing and sales stop blaming each other or have them work together better?
“You need strategists and street fighters” - One of the panel Members on Sales Entrepreneurship.
“No Problem, No Sale” – Richard Whitely, author of best seller "The customer driven company: Moving from Talk to Action"
“Handling objections is key to understand your own character” – one of the panel members.
A Close – Put your customer at a slightly discomfort level that is real – Jeff Hoffman, CEO of Basho Strategies
The Cheesecake is superb!!
More on the way..
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On April 30th, 2007, I went to the Oracle Life Sciences Users Group (OLSUG) conference in the fabulous World trade center in Boston. I never had any exposure to BIO IT before; I thought this is a good opportunity to know more about an interesting field. Indeed it is interesting to learn how intense the data mining requirements are for the Bio-informatics field. Most of the attendees have strong background in Biological research with a combination of IT exposure.
I had a chance to talk with a few presenters of the conference. What surprised me is their lack of enthusiasm for increasing the efficiency of their IT staff.
First of all they have large amounts of data, a few terabytes with multiple databases and multiple security and compliance requirements. I got sense that they have hard time pulling the information from several different sources and mine to help their research.
When I asked one of the conference presenters if they have a "process" of managing their databases and IT in general, The answer is, “well, my IT staff takes care of the issues” – mostly firefighting, takes forever to get anything implemented and put into production for real use.
I asked another question, do you remember what your DBA did for the past 30 days, other than those incidents of firefighting – an instantaneous NO with a grin.
When I asked would you rather know what your DBA’s have been fighting with and not pay thousands for Oracle Enterprise Manager? One presenter looked indifferent, as they have deep pockets. At the same time, they are worried about getting results from their research within the budget and within a time frame – a misalignment of IT and business (research) goals.
One of the presenter agreed that, their IT staff efficiency can be improved by 25% or more if we take care of their databases. Managed services can cut down the data management cost by 50% or less. This helps their existing DBA staff to channel their efforts in helping their research goals rather than dealing with day to day mundane data management tasks. The macro affect of this efficiency is much larger - faster adoption of technologies, more focus on their core business activities and processes.
Oracle presented Oracle Life Sciences Platform - I did not see any specific technologies that help Life Sciences; all the technology features they presented are generic features of Oracle 10g like InterMedia, Text, Indexing, RAC, Dataguard, Warehouse Builder, Statistical functions, etc.
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Tags: Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle Remote DBA, ASMM, Automatic Shared Memory Management, DB_KEEP_CACHE_SIZE, DB_RECYCLE_CACHE_SIZE, DB_nK_CACHE_SIZE, LOG_BUFFER, FIXED SGA and STREAMS_POOL_SIZE, v$sga_dynamic_components, Oracle Managed Services, Oracle DBA, Oracle 10g, Oracle Database Monitor
Overview
In 9i, Shared Pool and Default Buffer Cache SGA parameters are made Dynamic. Alter system command can be used to modify these parameters. The total size of SGA is limited by SGA_MAX_SIZE.
When the size of these parameters are adjusted using “alter system” freed memory need to be reallocated manually.
In 10g ASMM relieves DBA from manually sizing SGA.
When ASMM is enabled shared pool, large pool, java pool and DB Cache components of SGA are dynamically sized by Oracle.
Following Benefits can be achieved by ASMM
- Allocation of memory to the right component of SGA based on current activity
- Reducing the chance of memory errors
Configuration
ASMM can be enabled by setting SGA_TARGET initialization parameter. To disable it SGA_TARGET should be set to zero and following manual parameters should be configured.
- DB_KEEP_CACHE_SIZE,
- DB_RECYCLE_CACHE_SIZE,
- DB_nK_CACHE_SIZE,
- LOG_BUFFER,
- FIXED SGA and
- STREAMS_POOL_SIZE
Even when ASMM is enabled individual SGA components can be changed using alter system command.
Related Views:
v$sga_dynamic_components
Conclusion:
10g manages memory efficiently by adapting to current workload
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“Find out how to use DBMS_SCHEDULER package to Schedule Jobs in 10g"
Oracle is paying attention !!!!
Prayers about job scheduling have been answered in 10g with DBMS_SCHEDULER.
Overview
Scheduling jobs using DBMS_SCHEDULER involves following steps:
1) Creating Schedule
2) Creating Program
3) Creating Job
Privileges:
Following privileges should be granted to user to create jobs/programs/schedules
1) CREATE [ANY] JOB
2) EXECUTE ANY PROGRAM
3) EXECUTE ANY CLASS
4) MANAGE SCHEDULER
Step1: Creating Schedule
A schedule specifies when and how many times a job is executed . The same schedule can be used by multiple jobs.When scheduling repeat intervals or a job, you can specify either a PL/SQL expression or a calendaring expression.
Eg - Calendaring Syntax
begin
dbms_scheduler.create_schedule (schedule_name => 'WEEKDAYS_1800', start_date=> trunc(sysdate)+18/24, repeat_interval=> 'FREQ=DAILY; BYDAY=MON,TUE,WED,THU,FRI; BYHOUR=18;', comments=>'Run at 6pm on weekdays');
end;
Step2: Creating Program
A program is a collection of Metadata about what is run by the scheduler. This includes information such as the program name, the type of program, information about arguments passed to the program. The program determines what should be run.
begin
dbms_scheduler.create_program ( program_name => 'demo_program' ,program_type => 'STORED_PROCEDURE' ,program_action => 'package.procedure' ,number_of_arguments => 1 ,enabled => FALSE ,comments => 'Progam to be run');
end;
/
Step3: Creating Job
A job specifies what (Program) needs to execute and when (Schedule).
What Can be:
Predefined Program
PL/SQL Block
External Programs - Shells Scripts, C Programs, Java Apps etc
You can specify the program (what) and schedule (When) as part of the job definition, or you can use an existing program or schedule instead.
Job Attributes define how jobs are handled during job execution
-Job Class: Specifies what resources are allocated to the job.
-Auto Drop: When set , the job definition will be deleted after the job is executed
-Restartable: In the case of a failure, job will automatically be restarted
-Scheduler limit: if the delay in starting the job is larger than the interval specified, then the job will not be started.
-Max runs: specifies the maximum number of times this job can run.
Eg:
Creating a job to run "DEMO_PROGRAM" using "WEEKDAYS_1800" program:
begin
dbms_scheduler.create_job( job_name => 'DEMO_JOB' , program_name =>'DEMO_PROGRAM' , schedule_name =>'WEEKDAYS_1800' , enabled => TRUE , comments => 'Run demo program every week day at 18:00');
end;
Related Dictionary Views:
[DBA | ALL | USER ] _Scheduler_jobs
[DBA | ALL | USER ] _scheduler_jobs_args
[DBA | ALL | USER ] _scheduler_running_jobs
[DBA | ALL ] _scheduler_job_classes
[DBA | ALL | USER ] _scheduler_job_log
[DBA | ALL | USER ] _scheduler_job_run_details
[DBA | ALL | USER ] _scheduler _programs
[DBA | ALL | USER ] _scheduler_program_args
Conclusion
DBMS_SCHEDULER is leaps and bounds ahead of its precursor DBMS_JOB.
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How do you mesaure your Consulting Project Success?
The simplest answer is, satisfied customer, on time, on budget delivery. OK, this is good enough to get an outsourced consulting company's pay check.
How about 6 months and 1 year from delivery?
Usually consultants train the employees to manage new applications. More than often, when an issue arises, employees take way too long to troubleshoot and resolve the issue. This leaves a disgruntled user and frustrated IT staff.
How about Managed Services
There is nothing new here, it has been tried and has some success. Managed services never reached the level of general IT consulting. There is a huge potential to break into this market if the value proposition is right.
Consulting + Managed Services = Winning Formula
1. Create a process to invlove manged services as part of development, testing and rolling out into production phase.
2. Develop your own management tools, avoid high price off the shelf tools. What you need is not full fledged, click and fix kind of tools, rather comprehensive view of applications that are being managed. Generate proactive tasks to avoid big problems with automatic issue creation based on thresholds of metrics.
3. Use your knowledge of the application (If you implemented), technology and leverage your tools to affectively manage applications.
4. It is a new stream of revenue.
5. Use subscription pricing - a constant and steady stream of revenue.
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1. Inherent problem with online support – Using electronic media for support greatly helped improve customer service in the past decade. This new medium of services also brought in potential new strategies for “competition”.
2. Enterprise Applications market is mature; it is a game of market share. It is obvious the consolidation binge of Oracle is to buy into new market with brand names. SAP has been the 800-pound gorilla in this segment – Now we have two of them and some puppies.
3. SAP and safe passage – Establishes pipeline for long sales cycle – 5 to 10 years long. The inherent nature of enterprise software market is maturity, high switching costs, relationship selling. With safe passage, SAP is establishing a long term pipeline and establishing relationships. When it is time to renew license, SAP has an opportunity to switch them to their own products.
4. Services – the Cash Cow - Oracle, SAP or any other product companies make more money on services than on product licensing. They are going after “Services” $$$.
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Subscription Pricing (SaaS); Manage Databases as Groups
Expensive - Costs almost as much as a database server itself - Get rid off licensing - Go subscription pricing, SAAS!!
The most frustrating thing for a DBA is to keep a close watch on every database that he/she controls. The tools in the market today lets you everything we do in our tool and lot more. However none of them provide ability for group view, for example space usage across a group of databases. To check tablespace space usage across 10 different databases one has to click atleast 10 - 30 times. With Vega DbMon you can group databases and monitor them as a group.
The existing tools are very heavy duty - have lot of functionality - do everything from Database monitoring, administration, Application Management.
Most of the times, DBA's use very limited functionality of these complex tools - Target specific Users and Functionality
Technology - Obsolete those windows based tools - Go browser based and Flash Graphs and Charts to minimize resource usage.
This tool is very useful if you are a DBA or have group of DBA's and have lot of databases to manage. You can assign group of databases to group of DBA's - an m to m access.
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