Juan Loaiza on The Future of Database and Information Technology at Oracle OpenWorld

This afternoon (Monday, September 19) at Oracle OpenWorld, Juan Loaiza of Oracle gave a presentation entitled "The Future of Database and Information Technology." It probably wouldn't surprise you to learn that Loaiza stated that Oracle is delivering the future today, and no one else is. However, it's instructive to see what he said.

Loaiza claimed that some people are stating that "IT doesn't matter" (i.e. is just a commodity that can be bought for less money) and that relational database technology is "good enough." At the same time, business executives are complaining that IT isn't delivering enough value, and that they can't access their data. Loaiza then discussed the silos of data that exist at companies - one company had 4,000 separate databases at one point - and noting that these isolated solutions are causing a huge problem.

Taking the variables of cost, service quality, and access to information, Juan Loaiza advanced three concepts:

• Reduced cost via "total integration"


• Better service quality via an "unlimited/unbreakable platform"


• Better information access via "resilient agility"

Total integration can be realized via

• an infrastructure grid - applications, database (with real application clusters), storage


• database deployments - let multiple applications access data, and use Oracle's transportable tablespaces to port data from other sources


• product stacks - applications, application servers, database, clusterware, and backup from one company - Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and SAP are taking this approach


• content stores - relational database, images, spatial data, XML, and documents all stored together


• business intelligence

The unlimited/unbreakable platform is satisfied by Oracle features such as grid computing, flashback, automated storage management, Data Guard, etc.

When speaking of agility, Loaiza acknowledged that a single change in SQL can ruin a database, leading administrators to lock down the database. When the database is an enterprise-level database, administrators are more prone to lock down the database. This, however, prevents users from ad hoc access to the data. "Resilient agility" allows users to access the data while protecting it against problems (runaway SQL, transactions that reduce access for higher priority transactions).