This article, part one of a three-part series, explores a DBAs journey to APEX.

The frenetic pace of application development in modern IT organizations means it’s not unusual to demand an application be built with minimal requirement gathering—literally, from a napkin-based sketch—to a working first draft of the app within extremely short time frames—even a weekend!—with production deployment to follow just a few days later.
This article – the first in a series – demonstrates a real-life application development scenario: the creation of a mobile application that gives election canvassers a tool to identify, classify and inform voters in a huge suburban Chicago voting district – using the latest Oracle application development UI, data modeling tools, and database technology. Along the way, we’ll show how Oracle APEX makes short work of building a working application while the Oracle DBA leverages her newest tools—SQL Developer and Data Modeler—to build a secure, reliable, scalable application for her development team.

This article, part one of a three-part series, explores a DBAs journey to APEX.

The frenetic pace of application development in modern IT organizations means it’s not unusual to demand an application be built with minimal requirement gathering—literally, from a napkin-based sketch—to a working first draft of the app within extremely short time frames—even a weekend!—with production deployment to follow just a few days later.
This article – the first in a series – demonstrates a real-life application development scenario: the creation of a mobile application that gives election canvassers a tool to identify, classify and inform voters in a huge suburban Chicago voting district – using the latest Oracle application development UI, data modeling tools, and database technology. Along the way, we’ll show how Oracle APEX makes short work of building a working application while the Oracle DBA leverages her newest tools—SQL Developer and Data Modeler—to build a secure, reliable, scalable application for her development team.

There are several methods used and developed over the years/decades since the Oracle Database has been around to migrate or clone your databases. Most of the methods have required us to use Data Guard or GoldenGate to achieve the same with minimal downtime or RMAN Backup files/Database Datafiles for regular cloning.

With the 12cR1 version of the database, remote cloning was introduced but still required to place the source non-CDB or PDB into Read-Only mode before initiating the cloning. With 12cR2, one has the ability to clone a database (also known as hot-cloning) without the restriction of read-only or downtime on the source. Also, hot-cloning can be achieved without an existing backup of the source.

The term DevOps – or the methodology that promotes closer collaboration between development and IT operations teams – was coined nearly 10 years ago by Patrick DeBois. In this article from DBTA, part of a larger series with IOUG’s SELECT, IT execs share their predictions on DevOps in 2019. Predictions include the rise of DevOps in data science, a deepened focus on functions, the role of automation and more.

Don't be afraid to look outside of your discipline. There is room to change and grow your career. Learn how Jonathan Gennick started as a programmer, became a database administrator, and ultimately decided to explore sales.

We’ve all been there. When the rubber meets the road, it seems like the database, operations and development teams are never quite in-sync. No matter how thoroughly executed, tested, documented and validated, something in the production environment is never quite the same as the lower environments – be it a hardware inconsistency, a code mismatch, or even the dreaded typoed command. To add insult to injury, code always seems to change between the time it leaves a developer’s laptop and when it is deployed to a mission-critical system.
Solving these issues is the primary motivator behind DevOps. Often misinterpreted as a buzzword endorsing development teams taking over platform and infrastructure roles, DevOps is all about development and operational modernization. Rather than operating as siloed, asynchronous teams as has been the norm for decades, DevOps represents a fundamental, holistic, organization-wide shift not only in processes and tools, but in people and culture.