M2M and Oracle Legacy

Money-to-Miracle (M2M) is my tongue-in-cheek way of saying that you might need assistance from consultants, thereby spending money, thereby giving my fantastic company money.

So I predicted in the original YPDNR paper that you would need (expensive and specialised) consultants if you were going to use RAC.

Was that true? And if yes, is it still true?

RAC was introduced in Oracle9i, making it RAC version 1.0. Conventional wisdom has it that you should attempt not to run any software in version 1.0.

Fortunately, RAC was based solidly on OPS, which was partly put into version 5 (five!) of Oracle and officially introduced in version 6.0.35 a.k.a. version 6.2, and so it worked pretty much as planned from the beginning. But you certainly needed special skills setting it up and, to a lesser extent, running it. Those skills were hard to come by back then. So yes, M2M.

With the RAC implementations of Oracle10g (especially 10gR2) many things have become much easier, including installation and administration. Also, due to the perhaps 1500 RAC installations worldwide , there are now more RAC-trained people than ever before.

However, something happened: The Oracle DBA world has become a legacy world. It’s the same (older and older) people meeting each other at the conferences and writing to each other in magazines and on mailing lists.

No new, fresh faces show up. Our children want to write game software or design mobile phones instead of becoming Mainframe tape operators or Oracle DBA’s.

Also, the old DBA’s are beginning to either leave the field because they see a brighter future somewhere else, or because they retire or are being diluted, working with other databases, managing application servers and handling storage issues as well as being an Oracle DBA.

Combine that with the surge in IT-spending we’re experiencing at the time of writing (2006), and you can perhaps see the irony in companies hiring super experts from Miracle for ordinary DBA tasks. They cannot find the qualified people anymore.

There’s money in Legacy for years to come, make no mistake about that, and we’re talking a lot of money and we’re talking a lot of years. Just stay on top, stay focused, and don’t get scared about all those other people around you learning all sorts of new programming languages and databases.

Take pride in the fact that Oracle is still by far the best database on the market. Just as the IBM Mainframe or the AS400 are still by far the most stable IT platforms on the market, or the fact that VMS is a fantastic operating system.

So perhaps Oracle is the mainframe of databases, and perhaps PL/SQL is the Cobol of databases – but you won’t find a more stable, scalable, tuneable and widely used platform for database-centric solutions.

According to my Second Law, Oracle will, therefore, be replaced with something less stable and performing. That happens to all technologies that reach a state of perfection.

So you probably don’t need the same amount of specialised consulting skills for setting up and running RAC. But the ordinary skills just got harder to find. Which is why I quote the famous Vera Lynn song to new RAC customers:

We'll meet again,
Don't know where,
Don't know when,
But I know
We'll meet again
Some sunny day.