Oracle University Podcast

You probably interact with artificial intelligence (AI) more than you realize. So, there’s never been a better time to start figuring out how it all works.

 

Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham as they decode the fundamentals of AI so that anyone, irrespective of their technical background, can leverage the benefits of AI and tap into its infinite potential.

 

Together with Senior Cloud Engineer Nick Commisso, they take you through key AI concepts, common AI tasks and domains, and the primary differences between AI, machine learning, and deep learning.

 

Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/

 

Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community

 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/

 

X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu

 

Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Himanshu Raj, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.

 

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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 Innovation Programs.

Lois: Hi there! Welcome to a new season of the Oracle University Podcast. I’m so excited about this season because we’re going to delve into the world of artificial intelligence. In upcoming episodes, we’ll talk about the fundamentals of artificial intelligence and machine learning. And we’ll discuss neural network architectures, generative AI and large language models, the OCI AI stack, and OCI AI services.

01:06

Nikita: So, if you’re an IT professional who wants to start learning about AI and ML or even if you’re a student who is familiar with OCI or similar cloud services, but have no prior exposure to this field, you’ll want to tune in to these episodes.
Lois: That’s right, Niki. So, let’s get started. Today, we’ll talk about the basics of artificial intelligence with Senior Cloud Engineer Nick Commisso. Hi Nick! Thanks for joining us today. So, let’s start right at the beginning. What is artificial intelligence?

01:36
Nick: Well, the ability of machines to imitate the cognitive abilities and problem solving capabilities of human intelligence can be classified as artificial intelligence or AI. 

01:47

Nikita: Now, when you say capabilities and abilities, what are you referring to?

Nick: Human intelligence is the intellectual capability of humans that allows us to learn new skills through observation and mental digestion, to think through and understand abstract concepts and apply reasoning, to communicate using a language and understand the nonverbal cues, such as facial recognition, tone variation, and body language. 

You can handle objections in real time, even in a complex setting. You can plan for short and long-term situations or projects. And, of course, you can create music and art or invent something new like an original idea. 

If you can replicate any of these human capabilities in machines, this is artificial general intelligence or AGI. So in other words, AGI can mimic human sensory and motor skills, performance, learning, and intelligence, and use these abilities to carry out complicated tasks without human intervention. 

When we apply AGI to solve problems with specific and narrow objectives, we call it artificial intelligence or AI. 

02:55

Lois: It seems like AI is everywhere, Nick. Can you give us some examples of where AI is used?

Nick: AI is all around us, and you've probably interacted with AI, even if you didn't realize it. Some examples of AI can be viewing an image or an object and identifying if that is an apple or an orange. It could be examining an email and classifying it spam or not. It could be writing computer language code or predicting the price of an older car. 

So let's get into some more specifics of AI tasks and the nature of related data. Machine learning, deep learning, and data science are all associated with AI, and it can be confusing to distinguish. 

03:36

Nikita: Why do we need AI? Why’s it important? 

Nick: AI is vital in today's world, and with the amount of data that's generated, it far exceeds the human ability to absorb, interpret, and actually make decisions based on that data. That's where AI comes in handy by enhancing the speed and effectiveness of human efforts. 

So here are two major reasons why we need AI. Number one, we want to eliminate or reduce the amount of routine tasks, and businesses have a lot of routine tasks that need to be done in large numbers. So things like approving a credit card or a bank loan, processing an insurance claim, recommending products to customers are just some example of routine tasks that can be handled. 

And second, we, as humans, need a smart friend who can create stories and poems, designs, create code and music, and have humor, just like us. 

04:33

Lois: I’m onboard with getting help from a smart friend! There are different domains in AI, right, Nick? 

Nick: We have language for language translation; vision, like image classification; speech, like text to speech; product recommendations that can help you cross-sell products; anomaly detection, like detecting fraudulent transactions; learning by reward, like self-driven cars. You have forecasting with weather forecasting. And, of course, generating content like image from text. 

05:03

Lois: There are so many applications. Nick, can you tell us more about these commonly used AI domains like language, audio, speech, and vision?

Nick: Language-related AI tasks can be text related or generative AI. Text-related AI tasks use text as input, and the output can vary depending on the task. Some examples include detecting language, extracting entities in a text, or extracting key phrases and so on. 

Consider the example of translating text. There's many text translation tools where you simply type or paste your text into a given text box, choose your source and target language, and then click translate. 

Now, let's look at the generative AI tasks. They are generative, which means the output text is generated by a model. Some examples are creating text like stories or poems, summarizing a text, answering questions, and so on. Let's take the example of ChatGPT, the most well-known generative chat bot. These bots can create responses from their training on large language models, and they continuously grow through machine learning. 

06:10

Nikita: What can you tell us about using text as data?

Nick: Text is inherently sequential, and text consists of sentences. Sentences can have multiple words, and those words need to be converted to numbers for it to be used to train language models. This is called tokenization. Now, the length of sentences can vary, and all the sentences lengths need to be made equal. This is done through padding. 

Words can have similarities with other words, and sentences can also be similar to other sentences. The similarity can be measured through dot similarity or cosine similarity. We need a way to indicate that similar words or sentences may be close by. This is done through representation called embedding. 

06:56
Nikita: And what about language AI models?

Nick: Language AI models refer to artificial intelligence models that are specifically designed to understand, process, and generate natural language. These models have been trained on vast amounts of textual data that can perform various natural language processing or NLP tasks. 

The task that needs to be performed decides the type of input and output. The deep learning model architectures that are typically used to train models that perform language tasks are recurrent neural networks, which processes data sequentially and stores hidden states, long short-term memory, which processes data sequentially that can retain the context better through the use of gates, and transformers, which processes data in parallel. It uses the concept of self-attention to better understand the context. 

07:48

Lois: And then there’s speech-related AI, right?

Nick: Speech-related AI tasks can be either audio related or generative AI. Speech-related AI tasks use audio or speech as input, and the output can vary depending on the task. For example, speech-to-text conversion or speaker recognition, voice conversion, and so on. Generative AI tasks are generative in nature, so the output audio is generated by a model. For example, you have music composition and speech synthesis. 
Audio or speech is digitized as snapshots taken in time. The sample rate is the number of times in a second an audio sample is taken. Most digital audio have a sampling rate of 44.1 kilohertz, which is also the sampling rate for audio CDs. 
Multiple samples need to be correlated to make sense of the data. For example, listening to a song for a fraction of a second, you won't be able to infer much about the song, and you'll probably need to listen to it a little bit longer. 

Audio and speech AI models are designed to process and understand audio data, including spoken language. These deep-learning model architectures are used to train models that perform language with tasks-- recurrent neural networks, long short-term memory, transformers, variational autoencoders, waveform models, and Siamese networks. All of the models take into consideration the sequential nature of audio. 

09:21
Did you know that Oracle University offers free courses on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure? You’ll find training on everything from cloud computing, database, and security to artificial intelligence and machine learning, all free to subscribers. So, what are you waiting for? Pick a topic, leverage the Oracle University Learning Community to ask questions, and then sit for your certification. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 

09:49

Nikita: Welcome back! Now that we’ve covered language and speech-related tasks, let’s move on to vision-related tasks.
Nick: Vision-related AI tasks could be image related or generative AI. Image-related AI tasks will use an image as an input, and the output depends on the task. Some examples are classifying images, identifying objects in an image, and so on. Facial recognition is one of the most popular image-related tasks that is often used for surveillance and tracking of people in real time, and it's used in a lot of different fields, including security, biometrics, law enforcement, and social media. 
For generative AI tasks, the output image is generated by a model. For example, creating an image from a contextual description, generating images of a specific style or a high resolution, and so on. It can create extremely realistic new images and videos by generating original 3D models of an object, machine components, buildings, medication, people, and even more. 

10:53

Lois: So, then, here again I need to ask, how do images work as data?

Nick: Images consist of pixels, and pixels can be either grayscale or color. And we can't really make out what an image is just by looking at one pixel. 

The task that needs to be performed decides the type of input needed and the output produced. Various architectures have evolved to handle this wide variety of tasks and data. These deep-learning model architectures are typically used to train models that perform vision tasks-- convolutional neural networks, which detects patterns in images; learning hierarchical representations of visual features; YOLO, which is You Only Look Once, processes the image and detects objects within the image; and then you have generative adversarial networks, which generates real-looking images. 

11:43

Nikita: Nick, earlier you mentioned other AI tasks like anomaly detection, recommendations, and forecasting. Could you tell us more about them?

Nick: Anomaly detection. This is time-series data, which is required for anomaly detection, and it can be a single or multivariate for fraud detection, machine failure, etc. 
Recommendations. You can recommend products using data of similar products or users. For recommendations, data of similar products or similar users is required. 

Forecasting. Time-series data is required for forecasting and can be used for things like weather forecasting and predicting the stock price. 

12:22

Lois: Nick, help me understand the difference between artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning. Let’s start with AI. 

Nick: Imagine a self-driving car that can make decisions like a human driver, such as navigating traffic or detecting pedestrians and making safe lane changes. AI refers to the broader concept of creating machines or systems that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. Next, we have machine learning or ML. Visualize a spam email filter that learns to identify and move spam emails to the spam folder, and that's based on the user's interaction and email content. Now, ML is a subset of AI that focuses on the development of algorithms that enable machines to learn from and make predictions or decisions based on data. 

To understand what an algorithm is in the context of machine learning, it refers to a specific set of rules, mathematical equations, or procedures that the machine learning model follows to learn from data and make predictions on. And finally, we have deep learning or DL. Think of an image recognition software that can identify specific objects or animals within images, such as recognizing cats in photos on the internet. DL is a subfield of ML that uses neural networks with many layers, deep neural networks, to learn and make sense of complex patterns in data. 

13:51

Nikita: Are there different types of machine learning?

Nick: There are several types of machine learning, including supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. Supervised learning where the algorithm learns from labeled data, making predictions or classifications. Unsupervised learning is an algorithm that discovers patterns and structures in unlabeled data, such as clustering or dimensionality reduction. And then, you have reinforcement learning, where agents learn to make predictions and decisions by interacting with an environment and receiving rewards or punishments. 

14:27

Lois: Can we do a deep dive into each of these types you just mentioned? We can start with the supervised machine learning algorithm.

Nick: Let's take an example of how a credit card company would approve a credit card. Once the application and documents are submitted, a verification is done, followed by a credit score check and another 10 to 15 days for approval. And how is this done? Sometimes, purely manually or by using a rules engine where you can build rules, give new data, get a decision. 
The drawbacks are slow. You need skilled people to build and update rules, and the rules keep changing. The good thing is that the businesses had a lot of insight as to how the decisions were made. Can we build rules by looking at the past data? 
We all learn by examples. Past data is nothing but a set of examples. Maybe reviewing past credit card approval history can help. Through a process of training, a model can be built that will have a specific intelligence to do a specific task. The heart of training a model is an algorithm that incrementally updates the model by looking at the data samples one by one. 
And once it's built, the model can be used to predict an outcome on a new data. We can train the algorithm with credit card approval history to decide whether to approve a new credit card. And this is what we call supervised machine learning. It's learning from labeled data. 

15:52

Lois: Ok, I see. What about the unsupervised machine learning algorithm?

Nick: Data does not have a specific outcome or a label as we know it. And sometimes, we want to discover trends that the data has for potential insights. Similar data can be grouped into clusters. For example, retail marketing and sales, a retail company may collect information like household size, income, location, and occupation so that the suitable clusters could be identified, like a small family or a high spender and so on. And that data can be used for marketing and sales purposes. 
Regulating streaming services. A streaming service may collect information like viewing sessions, minutes per session, number of unique shows watched, and so on. That can be used to regulate streaming services. Let's look at another example. We all know that fruits and vegetables have different nutritional elements. But do we know which of those fruits and vegetables are similar nutritionally? 

For that, we'll try to cluster fruits and vegetables' nutritional data and try to get some insights into it. This will help us include nutritionally different fruits and vegetables into our daily diets. Exploring patterns and data and grouping similar data into clusters drives unsupervised machine learning. 

17:13

Nikita: And then finally, we come to the reinforcement learning algorithm. 

Nick: How do we learn to play a game, say, chess? We'll make a move or a decision, check to see if it's the right move or feedback, and we'll keep the outcomes in your memory for the next step you take, which is learning. Reinforcement learning is a machine learning approach where a computer program learns to make decisions by trying different actions and receiving feedback. It teaches agents how to solve tasks by trial and error. This approach is used in autonomous car driving and robots as well. 

17:46

Lois: We keep coming across the term “deep learning.” You’ve spoken a bit about it a few times in this episode, but what is deep learning, really? How is it related to machine learning?

Nick: Deep learning is all about extracting features and rules from data. Can we identify if an image is a cat or a dog by looking at just one pixel? Can we write rules to identify a cat or a dog in an image? Can the features and rules be extracted from the raw data, in this case, pixels? 

Deep learning is really useful in this situation. It's a special kind of machine learning that trains super smart computer networks with lots of layers. And these networks can learn things all by themselves from pictures, like figuring out if a picture is a cat or a dog. 

18:28

Lois: I know we’re going to be covering this in detail in an upcoming episode, but before we let you go, can you briefly tell us about generative AI?

Nick: Generative AI, a subset of machine learning, creates diverse content like text, audio, images, and more. These models, often powered by neural networks, learn patterns from existing data to craft fresh and creative output. For instance, ChatGPT generates text-based responses by understanding patterns in text data that it's been trained on. Generative AI plays a vital role in various AI tasks requiring content creation and innovation. 

19:07

Nikita: Thank you, Nick, for sharing your expertise with us. To learn more about AI, go to mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure AI Foundations course. As you complete the course, you’ll find skill checks that you can attempt to solidify your learning. 

Lois: And remember, the AI Foundations course on MyLearn also prepares you for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2023 AI Foundations Associate certification. Both the course and the certification are free, so there’s really no reason NOT to take the leap into AI, right Niki?

Nikita: That’s right, Lois!

Lois: In our next episode, we will look at the fundamentals of machine learning. Until then, this is Lois Houston…

Nikita: And Nikita Abraham signing off!

19:52

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.

How do I get certified in Oracle Autonomous Database? What material can I use to prepare for it? What's the exam like? How long is the certification valid for?

 

If these questions have been keeping you up at night, then join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham in their conversation with Senior Principal OCI Instructor Susan Jang to understand the process of getting certified and begin your learning adventure.

 

Oracle MyLearn: mylearn.oracle.com/

Oracle University Learning Community: education.oracle.com/ou-community

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/

X (formerly Twitter): twitter.com/Oracle_Edu

 

Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.

 

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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 Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor.

Nikita: Hi everyone! If you’ve listened to us these last few weeks, you’ll know we’ve been discussing Oracle Autonomous Database in detail. We looked at Autonomous Database on serverless and dedicated infrastructure.

00:51

Lois: That’s right, Niki. Then, last week, we explored Autonomous Database tools. Today, we thought we’d wrap up our focus on Autonomous Database by talking about the training offered by Oracle University, the associated certification, how to prepare for it, what you should do next, and more.

Nikita: Yeah, we’ll get answers to all the big questions. And we’re going to get them from Susan Jang. Sue is a Senior Principal OCI Instructor with Oracle University. She has created and delivered training in Oracle databases and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for over 20 years. Hi Sue! Thanks for joining us today.

Sue: Happy to be here!

01:29

Lois: Sue, what training does Oracle have on Autonomous Database?
 
Sue: Oracle University offers a professional-level course called the Oracle Autonomous Database Administration Workshop. So, if you want to learn to deploy and administer autonomous databases, this is the one for you. You’ll explore the fundamentals of the autonomous databases, their features, and benefits. You’ll learn about the technical architecture, the tasks that are involved in creating an autonomous database on a shared and on a dedicated Exadata infrastructure. You’ll discover what is the Machine Learning, you’ll discover what is APEX, which is Application Express, and SQL Developer Web, which is all deployed with the Autonomous Database. So basically everything you need to take your skills to the next level and become a proficient database administrator is in this course.

02:28

Nikita: Who can take this course, Sue? 
 
Sue: The course is really for anyone interested in Oracle Autonomous Database, whether you’re a database administrator, a cloud data management professional, or a consultant.

The topics in the course include everything from the features of an Autonomous Database through provisioning, managing, and monitor of the database.

Most people think that just because it is an Autonomous Database, Oracle will do everything for you, and there is nothing a DBA can do or needs to do. But that’s not true.
 
An Oracle Autonomous Database automates the day-to-day DBA tasks, like tuning the database to ensure it is running at performance level or that the backups are done successfully. By letting the Autonomous Database perform those tasks, it gives the database administrator time to fully understand the new features of an Oracle database and figure out how to implement the features that will benefit the DBA’s company.

03:30

Lois: Would a non-database administrator benefit from taking this course?
 
Sue: Yes, Lois. Oracle courses are designed in modules, so you can focus on the modules that meet your needs. For example, if you’re a senior technical manager, you may not need to manage and monitor the Autonomous Database. But still, it’s important to understand its features and architecture to know how other Oracle products integrate with the database.

03:57

Nikita: Right. Talking about the course itself, each module consists of videos that teach different concepts, right?

Sue: Yes, Niki. Each video covers one topic. A group of topics, or I should say a group of related topics, makes up a module.

We know your time is important to you, and your success is important to us. You don’t just want to spend time taking training. You want to know that you’re really understanding the concepts of what you are learning. 

So to help you do this, we have skill checks at the end of most modules. You must successfully answer 80% of the questions to pass these knowledge checks. These checks are an excellent way to ensure that you’re on the right track and have the understanding of each module before you move on to the next one. 

04:48
 
Lois: That’s great. And are there any other resources to help reinforce what’s been learned?
 
Sue: I grew up with this phrase from my Mom. Education was her career. I remember hearing, “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” It’s important to us that you understand the concepts and can actually “do” or “perform” the tasks. 

You'll find several demos in the different modules of the Autonomous Database Administration Workshop. These videos are where the instructor shows you how to perform the tasks so you can reinforce what you learned in the lessons. You’ll find demos on provisioning an autonomous database, creating an autonomous database clone, and configuring disaster recovery, and lots more.
 
Oracle also has what we call LiveLabs. These are a series of hands-on tutorials with step-by-step instructions to guide you through performing the tasks.

05:49

Nikita: I love the idea of LiveLabs. You can follow instructions on how to perform administrative tasks and then practice doing that on your own.

Lois: Yeah, that’s fantastic. OK Sue, say I’ve taken the course. What do I do next? 

Sue: Well, after you’ve taken the course, you’ll want to demonstrate your expertise with a certification. Because you want to get that better job. You want to increase your earning potential. You need to take the certification called the Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud Professional.

We have a couple of resources to help you along the way to ensure you succeed in securing that certification.

In MyLearn, the Oracle University online learning platform, you’ll see that the course, Oracle Autonomous Database Administration Workshop, falls within a learning path called Become an Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud Professional. The course is the first section of this learning path. The next section is a video describing the certification exam and how to prepare for it. The section after that is a practice exam. Now, though it doesn’t have the actual questions, you’ll find the exam will give you a good idea of the type of questions that will be asked in the exam. 

07:10

Lois: OK, so now I’ve done all that, and I’m ready to validate my knowledge and expertise. Tell me more about the certification, Sue.

Sue: To get the certification, you must take an online exam. The duration of the exam is 90 minutes. It’s a Multiple Choice format, and there are 60 questions to the exam. 

By getting this certification, you’re demonstrating to the world that you have the knowledge to provision, manage, and monitor, as well as migrate workloads to the Autonomous Database, on both a shared as well as a dedicated Exadata infrastructure. You will show you have the understanding of the architect of the Autonomous Database and can successfully use the features as well as its workflow, and you are capable of using Autonomous Database tools in developing an Autonomous Database.

08:05

Nikita: Great! So what do I need to do to take the exam?
Sue: We assume you’ve already taken the course (making sure that you’re up to date with the training), that you’ve taken the time to study the topics in depth rather than memorizing superficial information just to pass the exam, looked at the available preparation material, and you’ve also taken the practice exam. I highly recommend that you have the hands-on experience or practice on an Autonomous Database before you take the certification exam.

08:38
Nikita: Hold on, Sue. You said to make sure we’re up to date with the training. How do I do that?

Sue: Technology is ever-changing, and at Oracle, we continually enhance our products to provide features that make them faster or more straightforward to use. So, if you’re taking a course, you may find a small tag that says “New” next to a topic. That indicates that there are some new training that’s been added to the course. So what I’m trying to say is if you’re looking to take some certification, check the course before you register for the exam and to see if there are any “New” tags. If you find them, you can learn what’s new and not have to go through the entire course again. This way, you’re up to date with the training!

09:25

Nikita: Ok. Got it. Tell us more about the certification, Sue.
Sue: If you’re ready, search for the Become An Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud Professional learning path in MyLearn and scroll down to the Oracle Database Cloud Professional exam. Click on the “Register Now” button. You’ll be taken to a page where you’ll see the exam overview, the resources to help you prepare for the exam, a button to register for the exam, and things to do before your exam session. It will also describe what happens after the exam and some exam policies, like what to do if you need to reschedule your exam.
When you’re ready to take the exam, you can schedule the date and time according to when it’s convenient for you. 

10:15

Lois: What’s the actual experience of taking the exam like?

Sue: It’s pretty straightforward. You want to prepare your system a day or two before the exam. You want to ensure you can connect successfully to the test site and that your laptop is plugged in and not running on battery. You want to make sure all other applications are closed before you perform the system test. Now, the system test is really with the test site and consists of testing your microphone, an internet speed test, and your video.

You will also be asked to do a test-exam simulation. You will need to be able to download the simulation exam and answer a few simple true or false questions. Once you have successfully done that, you’re ready to take the test on your laptop on the actual day of the test.

Now, on the day of the test, set up your test environment. For your test environment, what it really entails is that you have an environment that you do not have anything on your desk. You cannot have a second monitor. And it’s best to have a clear wall behind you so that the proctor can see there is nothing around you. And don’t forget to turn off your mobile device.

11:34

Lois: Ok, I’ve taken the test, and I passed. Wohoo! What happens now?

Sue: When you pass the exam, you will receive an email from Oracle with your results as well as a link to Oracle CertView. This is the Oracle certification candidate portal. In CertView, you can download and print your eCertificate. You can share your newly earned badge on places like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, or even email your employer and others a secure link that they can use to confirm and validate your credentials.

12:11

Nikita: Can anyone take the certification?

Sue: Yes, Niki. This certification is available to all candidates, including on-premise database administrators, cloud data management professionals, and consultants.

12:24

Lois: How long is the certification valid? What happens when it expires?

Sue: Certain Oracle credentials require periodic recertification for Oracle to recognize them as "active." For such credentials, you must upgrade to a current version within 12 months following the Oracle credential retirement to keep your certification active.

12:51

Are you planning to become an Oracle Certified Professional this year? Whether you're a seasoned IT pro or just starting your career, getting certified can give you a significant boost. And don't worry, we've got your back. Join us at one of our cert prep live events in the Oracle University Learning Community. You'll get insider tips from seasoned experts and learn from other professionals' experiences. Plus, once you've earned your certification, you'll become part of our exclusive forum for Oracle-certified users. So, what are you waiting for? Head over to mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to jump-start your journey towards certification today!

13:35

Nikita: Welcome back. Sue, what other training can I take after Autonomous Database? 
 
Sue: Now that you have a strong foundation in the database, there is so much more that you can learn in Oracle. You can consider Exadata if you work on a high-performance data workload that’s running mission-critical applications. Look for a learning path called Become an Exadata Service Cloud Administrator, in MyLearn, to help you with that. GoldenGate is also a good choice if you work with data that needs to be shared and replicated, both locally as well as globally. The course for this is called Oracle GoldenGate 19c: Administration/Implementation.  

A hot topic in technology today is generative AI (Artificial Intelligence). You want to learn how to implement data security on different levels when it needs to be shared with large language model providers. 

Perhaps venture beyond the database and learn about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and how its components and the many cloud services work together. Just go to mylearn.oracle.com, and in the field where you see “What do you want to learn?” type in what interests you and let your learning adventure begin!

14:59

Lois: And since you brought up AI, Sue, this is the perfect time to mention that we’ll be focusing on it for the next couple of weeks. We’ll be speaking to some of our colleagues on topics like artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, generative AI, the OCI AI portfolio and more, but we’ll talk more about that next week.

Nikita: Yeah, can’t wait for that. Thank you so much, Sue, for giving us your time today.

Sue: Thanks for having me!

Lois: Until next time, this is Lois Houston…

Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off!

15:29

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.

In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham speak with Oracle Database experts about the various tools you can use with Autonomous Database, including Oracle Application Express (APEX), Oracle Machine Learning, and more.

 

Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/

 

Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community

 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/

 

X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu

 

Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Tamal Chatterjee, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.

 

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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 Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is

Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor.

Nikita: Hi everyone! We spent the last two episodes exploring Oracle Autonomous Database’s deployment options: Serverless and Dedicated. Today, it’s tool time!

Lois: That’s right, Niki. We’ll be chatting with some of our Database experts on the tools that you can use with the Autonomous Database. We’re going to hear from Patrick Wheeler, Kay Malcolm, Sangeetha Kuppuswamy, and Thea Lazarova.

Nikita: First up, we have Patrick, to take us through two important tools. Patrick, let’s start with Oracle Application Express. What is it and how does it help developers?

01:15

Patrick: Oracle Application Express, also known as APEX-- or perhaps APEX, we're flexible like that-- is a low-code development platform that enables you to build scalable, secure, enterprise apps with world-class features that can be deployed anywhere. Using APEX, developers can quickly develop and deploy compelling apps that solve real problems and provide immediate value. You don't need to be an expert in a vast array of technologies to deliver sophisticated solutions. Focus on solving the problem, and let APEX take care of the rest.

01:52

Lois: I love that it’s so easy to use. OK, so how does Oracle APEX integrate with Oracle Database? What are the benefits of using APEX on Autonomous Database?

Patrick: Oracle APEX is a fully supported, no-cost feature of Oracle Database. If you have Oracle Database, you already have Oracle APEX. You can access APEX from database actions. Oracle APEX on Autonomous Database provides a preconfigured, fully managed, and secure environment to both develop and deploy world-class applications.
Oracle takes care of configuration, tuning, backups, patching, encryption, scaling, and more, leaving you free to focus on solving your business problems. APEX enables your organization to be more agile and develop solutions faster for less cost and with greater consistency. You can adapt to changing requirements with ease, and you can empower professional developers, citizen developers, and everyone else.

02:56

Nikita: So you really don’t need to have a lot of specializations or be an expert to use APEX. That’s so cool! Now, what are the steps involved in creating an application using APEX? 

Patrick: You will be prompted to log in as the administrator at first. Then, you may create workspaces for your respective users and log in with those associated credentials. Application Express provides you with an easy-to-use, browser-based environment to load data, manage database objects, develop REST interfaces, and build applications which look and run great on both desktop and mobile devices.

You can use APEX to develop a wide variety of solutions, import spreadsheets, and develop a single source of truth in minutes. Create compelling data visualizations against your existing data, deploy productivity apps to elegantly solve a business need, or build your next mission-critical data management application. There are no limits on the number of developers or end users for your applications.

04:01

Lois: Patrick, how does APEX use SQL? What role does SQL play in the development of APEX applications? 

Patrick: APEX embraces SQL. Anything you can express with SQL can be easily employed in an APEX application. Application Express also enables low-code development, providing developers with powerful data management and data visualization components that deliver modern, responsive end user experiences out-of-the-box. Instead of writing code by hand, you're able to use intelligent wizards to guide you through the rapid creation of applications and components.

Creating a new application from APEX App Builder is as easy as one, two, three. One, in App Builder, select a project name and appearance. Two, add pages and features to the app. Three, finalize settings, and click Create.

05:00

Nikita: OK. So, the other tool I want to ask you about is Oracle Machine Learning. What can you tell us about it, Patrick?
Patrick: Oracle Machine Learning, or OML, is available with Autonomous Database. A new capability that we've introduced with Oracle Machine Learning is called Automatic Machine Learning, or AutoML. Its goal is to increase data scientist productivity while reducing overall compute time. In addition, AutoML enables non-experts to leverage machine learning by not requiring deep understanding of the algorithms and their settings.

05:37

Lois: And what are the key functions of AutoML?
Patrick: AutoML consists of three main functions: Algorithm Selection, Feature Selection, and Model Tuning. With Automatic Algorithm Selection, the goal is to identify the in-database algorithms that are likely to achieve the highest model quality. Using metalearning, AutoML leverages machine learning itself to help find the best algorithm faster than with exhaustive search.
With Automatic Feature Selection, the goal is to denoise data by eliminating features that don't add value to the model. By identifying the most predicted features and eliminating noise, model accuracy can often be significantly improved with a side benefit of faster model building and scoring.

Automatic Model Tuning tunes algorithm hyperparameters, those parameters that determine the behavior of the algorithm, on the provided data. Auto Model Tuning can significantly improve model accuracy while avoiding manual or exhaustive search techniques, which can be costly both in terms of time and compute resources.

06:44

Lois: How does Oracle Machine Learning leverage the capabilities of Autonomous Database?

Patrick: With Oracle Machine Learning, the full power of the database is accessible with the tremendous performance of parallel processing available, whether the machine learning algorithm is accessed via native database SQL or with OML4Py through Python or R. 

07:07

Nikita: Patrick, talk to us about the Data Insights feature. How does it help analysts uncover hidden patterns and anomalies?
Patrick: A feature I wanted to call the electromagnet, but they didn't let me. An analyst's job can often feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. So throw the switch and all that metallic stuff is going to slam up onto that electromagnet. Sure, there are going to be rusty old nails and screws and nuts and bolts, but there are going to be a few needles as well. It's far easier to pick the needles out of these few bits of metal than go rummaging around in a pile of hay, especially if you have allergies.

That's more or less how our Insights tool works. Load your data, kick off a query, and grab a cup of coffee. Autonomous Database does all the hard work, scouring through this data looking for hidden patterns, anomalies, and outliers. Essentially, we run some analytic queries that predict expected values.
And where the actual values differ significantly from expectation, the tool presents them here. Some of these might be uninteresting or obvious, but some are worthy of further investigation. You get this dashboard of various exceptional data patterns. Drill down on a specific gauge in this dashboard and significant deviations between actual and expected values are highlighted.

08:28

Lois: What a useful feature! Thank you, Patrick. Now, let’s discuss some terms and concepts that are applicable to the Autonomous JSON Database with Kay. Hi Kay, what’s the main focus of the Autonomous JSON Database? How does it support developers in building NoSQL-style applications?

Kay: Autonomous Database supports the JavaScript Object Notation, also known as JSON, natively in the database. It supports applications that use the SODA API to store and retrieve JSON data or SQL queries to store and retrieve data stored in JSON-formatted data. 

Oracle AJD is Oracle ATP, Autonomous Transaction Processing, but it's designed for developing NoSQL-style applications that use JSON documents. You can promote an AJD service to ATP.

09:22

Nikita: What makes the development of NoSQL-style, document-centric applications flexible on AJD? 

Kay: Development of these NoSQL-style, document-centric applications is particularly flexible because the applications use schemaless data. This lets you quickly react to changing application requirements. There's no need to normalize the data into relational tables and no impediment to changing the data structure or organization at any time, in any way. A JSON document has its own internal structure, but no relation is imposed on separate JSON documents.

Nikita: What does AJD do for developers? How does it actually help them?

Kay: So Autonomous JSON Database, or AJD, is designed for you, the developer, to allow you to use simple document APIs and develop applications without having to know anything about SQL. That's a win.

But at the same time, it does give you the ability to create highly complex SQL-based queries for reporting and analysis purposes. It has built-in binary JSON storage type, which is extremely efficient for searching and for updating. It also provides advanced indexing capabilities on the actual JSON data.

It's built on Autonomous Database, so that gives you all of the self-driving capabilities we've been talking about, but you don't need a DBA to look after your database for you. You can do it all yourself.

11:00

Lois: For listeners who may not be familiar with JSON, can you tell us briefly what it is? 

Kay: So I mentioned this earlier, but it's worth mentioning again. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. It was originally developed as a human readable way of providing information to interchange between different programs.

So a JSON document is a set of fields. Each of these fields has a value, and those values can be of various data types. We can have simple strings, we can have integers, we can even have real numbers. We can have Booleans that are true or false. We can have date strings, and we can even have the special value null.

Additionally, values can be objects, and objects are effectively whole JSON documents embedded inside a document. And of course, there's no limit on the nesting. You can nest as far as you like. Finally, we can have a raise, and a raise can have a list of scalar data types or a list of objects.

12:13

Nikita: Kay, how does the concept of schema apply to JSON databases?

Kay: Now, JSON documents are stored in something that we call collections. Each document may have its own schema, its own layout, to the JSON. So does this mean that JSON document databases are schemaless? Hmmm. Well, yes. But there's nothing to fear because you can always use a check constraint to enforce a schema constraint that you wish to introduce to your JSON data.

Lois: Kay, what about indexing capabilities on JSON collections?

Kay: You can create indexes on a JSON collection, and those indexes can be of various types, including our flexible search index, which indexes the entire content of the document within the JSON collection, without having to know anything in advance about the schema of those documents. 

Lois: Thanks Kay!

13:18

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13:54

Nikita: Welcome back! Sangeetha, I want to bring you in to talk about Oracle Text. Now I know that Oracle Database is not only a relational store but also a document store. And you can load text and JSON assets along with your relational assets in a single database. 

When I think about Oracle and databases, SQL development is what immediately comes to mind. So, can you talk a bit about the power of SQL as well as its challenges, especially in schema changes?

Sangeetha: Traditionally, Oracle has been all about SQL development. And with SQL development, it's an incredibly powerful language. But it does take some advanced knowledge to make the best of it.

So SQL requires you to define your schema up front. And making changes to that schema could be a little tricky and sometimes highly bureaucratic task. In contrast, JSON allows you to develop your schema as you go--the schemaless, perhaps schema-later model. By imposing less rigid requirements on the developer, it allows you to be more fluid and Agile development style.

15:09

Lois: How does Oracle Text use SQL to index, search, and analyze text and documents that are stored in the Oracle Database?

Sangeetha: Oracle Text can perform linguistic analyses on documents as well as search text using a variety of strategies, including keyword searching, context queries, Boolean operations, pattern matching, mixed thematic queries, like HTML/XML session searching, and so on.

It can also render search results in various formats, including unformatted text, HTML with term highlighting, and original document format. Oracle Text supports multiple languages and uses advanced relevance-ranking technology to improve search quality. Oracle Text also offers advantage features like classification, clustering, and support for information visualization metaphors.

Oracle Text is now enabled automatically in Autonomous Database. It provides full-text search capabilities over text, XML, JSON content. It also could extend current applications to make better use of textual fields. It builds new applications specifically targeted at document searching.

Now, all of the power of Oracle Database and a familiar development environment, rock-solid autonomous database infrastructure for your text apps, we can deal with text in many different places and many different types of text. So it is not just in the database. We can deal with data that's outside of the database as well.

17:03

Nikita: How does it handle text in various places and formats, both inside and outside the database?

Sangeetha: So in the database, we can be looking a varchar2 column or LOB column or binary LOB columns if we are talking about binary documents such as PDF or Word. Outside of the database, we might have a document on the file system or out on the web with URLs pointing out to the document.

If they are on the file system, then we would have a file name stored in the database table. And if they are on the web, then we should have a URL or a partial URL stored in the database. And we can then fetch the data from the locations and index it in the term documents format.

We recognize many different document formats and extract the text from them automatically. So the basic forms we can deal with-- plain text, HTML, JSON, XML, and then formatted documents like Word docs, PDF documents, PowerPoint documents, and also so many different types of documents. All of those are automatically handled by the system and then processed into the format indexing.

And we are not restricted by the English either here. There are various stages in the index pipeline. A document starts one, and it's taken through the different stages so until it finally reaches the index.

18:44

Lois: You mentioned the indexing pipeline. Can you take us through it?

Sangeetha: So it starts with a data store. That's responsible for actually reaching the document. So once we fetch the document from the data store, we pass it on to the filter. And now the filter is responsible for processing binary documents into indexable text.

So if you have a PDF, let's say a PDF document, that will go through the filter. And that will extract any images and return it into the stream of HTML text ready for indexing. Then we pass it on to the sectioner, which is responsible for identifying things like paragraphs and sentences. The output from the section is fed onto the lexer.

The lexer is responsible for dividing the text into indexable words. The output of the lexer is fed into the index engine, which is responsible for laying out to the indexes on the disk. Storage, word list, and stop list are some additional inputs there.
So storage tells exactly how to lay out the index on disk. Word list which has special preferences like desegmentation. And then stop is a list word that we don't want to index. So each of these stages and inputs can be customized.

Oracle has something known as the extensibility framework, which originally was designed to allow people to extend capabilities of these products by adding new domain indexes. And this is what we've used to implement Oracle Text. So when kernel sees this phrase INDEXTYPE ctxsys.context, it knows to handle all of the hard work creating the index.

20:48

Nikita: Other than text indexing, Oracle Text offers additional operations, right? Can you share some examples of these operations?

Sangeetha: So beyond the text index, other operations that we can do with the Oracle Text, some of which are search related. And some examples of that are these highlighting markups and snippets. Highlighting and markup are very similar. They are ways of fetching these results back with the search. And then it's marked up with highlighting within the document text.
Snippet is very similar, but it's only bringing back the relevant chunks from the document that we are searching for. So rather than getting the whole document back to you, just get a few lines showing this in a context and the theme and extraction. So Oracle Text is capable of figuring out what a text is all about. We have a very large knowledge base of the English language, which will allow you to understand the concepts and the themes in the document.

Then there's entity extraction, which is the ability to find out people, places, dates, times, zip codes, et cetera in the text. So this can be customized with your own user dictionary and your own user rules.

22:14

Lois: Moving on to advanced functionalities, how does Oracle Text utilize machine learning algorithms for document classification? And what are the key types of classifications?
Sangeetha: The text analytics uses machine learning algorithms for document classification. We can process a large set of data documents in a very efficient manner using Oracle's own machine learning algorithms. So you can look at that as basically three different headings. First of all, there's classification. And that comes in two different types-- supervised and unsupervised.

The supervised classification which means in this classification that it provides the training set, a set of documents that have already defined particular characteristics that you're looking for. And then there's unsupervised classification, which allows your system itself to figure out which documents are similar to each other.

It does that by looking at features within the documents. And each of those features are represented as a dimension in a massively high dimensional feature space in documents, which are clustered together according to that nearest and nearness in the dimension in the feature space.

Again, with the named entity recognition, we've already talked about that a little bit. And then finally, there is a sentiment analysis, the ability to identify whether the document is positive or negative within a given particular aspect.

23:56

Nikita: Now, for those who are already Oracle database users, how easy is it to enable text searching within applications using Oracle Text?

Sangeetha: If you're already an Oracle database user, enabling text searching within your applications is quite straightforward. Oracle Text uses the same SQL language as the database. And it integrates seamlessly with your existing SQL. Oracle Text can be used from any programming language which has SQL interface, meaning just about all of them. 

24:32

Lois: OK from Oracle Text, I’d like to move on to Oracle Spatial Studio. Can you tell us more about this tool?

Sangeetha: Spatial Studio is a no-code, self-service application that makes it easy to access the sorts of spatial features that we've been looking at, in particular, in order to get that data prepared to use with spatial, visualizing results in maps and tables, and also doing the analysis and sharing results. Spatial Studios is encoded at no extra cost with Autonomous Database. The studio web application itself has no additional cost and it runs on the server.

25:13

Nikita: Let’s talk a little more about the cost. How does the deployment of Spatial Studio work, in terms of the server it runs on? 

Sangeetha: So, the server that it runs on, if it's running in the Cloud, that computing node, it would have some cost associated with it. It can also run on a free tier with a very small shape, just for evaluation and testing. 

Spatial Studio is also available on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. And there are a couple of self-paced workshops that you can access for installing and using Spatial Studio.

25:47

Lois: And how do developers access and work with Oracle Autonomous Database using Spatial Studio?

Sangeetha: Oracle Spatial Studio allows you to access data in Oracle Database, including Oracle Autonomous Database. You can create connections to Oracle Autonomous Databases, and then you work with the data that's in the database. You can also see Spatial Studio to load data to Oracle Database, including Oracle Autonomous Database.

So, you can load these spreadsheets in common spatial formats. And once you've loaded your data or accessed data that already exists in your Autonomous Database, if that data does not already include native geometrics, Oracle native geometric type, then you can prepare the data if it has addresses or if it has latitude and longitude coordinates as a part of the data.

26:43

Nikita: What about visualizing and analyzing spatial data using Spatial Studio?

Sangeetha: Once you have the data prepared, you can easily drag and drop and start to visualize your data, style it, and look at it in different ways. And then, most importantly, you can start to ask spatial questions, do all kinds of spatial analysis, like we've talked about earlier.

While Spatial Studio provides a GUI that allows you to perform those same kinds of spatial analysis. And then the results can be dropped on the map and visualized so that you can actually see the results of spatial questions that you're asking. When you've done some work, you can save your work in a project that you can return to later, and you can also publish and share the work you've done.

27:34

Lois: Thank you, Sangeetha. For the final part of our conversation today, we’ll talk with Thea. Thea, thanks so much for joining us. Let's get the basics out of the way. How can data be loaded directly into Autonomous Database?
Thea: Data can be loaded directly to ADB through applications such as SQL Developer, which can read data files, such as txt and xls, and load directly into tables in ADB.

27:59

Nikita: I see. And is there a better method to load data into ADB?
Thea: A more efficient and preferred method for loading data into ADB is to stage the data cloud object store, preferably Oracle's, but also supported our Amazon S3 and Azure Blob Storage. Any file type can be staged in object store. Once the data is in object store, Autonomous Database can access a directly. Tools can be used to facilitate the data movement between object store and the database.

28:27

Lois: Are there specific steps or considerations when migrating a physical database to Autonomous?

Thea: A physical database can simply be migrated to autonomous because database must be converted to pluggable database, upgraded to 19C, and encrypted. Additionally, any changes to an Oracle-shipped stored procedures or views must be found and reverted. All uses of container database admin privileges must be removed. And all legacy features that are not supported must be removed, such as legacy LOBs.
Data Pump, expdp/impdp must be used for migrating databases versions 10.1 and above to Autonomous Database as it addresses the issues just mentioned. For online migrations, GoldenGate must be used to keep old and new database in sync.

29:15

Nikita: When you’re choosing the method for migration and loading, what are the factors to keep in mind?

Thea: It's important to segregate the methods by functionality and limitations of use against Autonomous Database. The considerations are as follows. Number one, how large is the database to be imported? Number two, what is the input file format? Number three, does the method support non-Oracle database sources? And number four, does the methods support using Oracle and/or third-party object store?

29:45

Lois: Now, let’s move on to the tools that are available. What does the DBMS_CLOUD functionality do?

Thea: The Oracle Autonomous Database has built-in functionality called DBMS_CLOUD specifically designed so the database can move data back and forth with external sources through a secure and transparent process. DBMS_CLOUD allows data movement from the Oracle object store. Data from any application or data source export to text-- .csv or JSON-- output from third-party data integration tools.

DBMS_CLOUD can also access data stored on Object Storage from the other clouds, AWS S3 and Azure Blob Storage. DBMS_CLOUD does not impose any volume limit, so it's the preferred method to use. SQL*Loader can be used for loading data located on the local client file systems into Autonomous Database. There are limits around OS and client machines when using SQL*Loader.

30:49

Nikita: So then, when should I use Data Pump and SQL Developer for migration?

Thea: Data Pump is the best way to migrate a full or part database into ADB, including databases from previous versions. Because Data Pump will perform the upgrade as part of the export/import process, this is the simplest way to get to ADB from any existing Oracle Database implementation. SQL Developer provides a GUI front end for using data pumps that can automate the whole export and import process from an existing database to ADB.

SQL Developer also includes an import wizard that can be used to import data from several file types into ADB. A very common use of this wizard is for importing Excel files into ADW. Once a credential is created, it can be used to access a file as an external table or to ingest data from the file into a database table. DBMS_CLOUD makes it much easier to use external tables, and the organization external needed in other versions of the Oracle Database are not needed.

31:54

Lois: Thea, what about Oracle Object Store? How does it integrate with Autonomous Database, and what advantages does it offer for staging data?

Thea: Oracle Object Store is directly integrated into Autonomous Database and is the best option for staging data that will be consumed by ADB. Any file type can be stored in object store, including SQL*Loader files, Excel, JSON, Parquet, and, of course, Data Pump DMP files. Flat files stored on object store can also be used as Oracle Database external tables, so they can queried directly from the database as part of a normal DML operation.

Object store is a separate bin storage allocated to the Autonomous Database for database Object Storage, such as tables and indexes. That storage is part of the Exadata system Autonomous Database runs on, and it is automatically allocated and managed. Users do not have direct access to that storage.

32:50

Nikita: I know that one of the main considerations when loading and updating ADB is the network latency between the data source and the ADB. Can you tell us more about this?

Thea: Many ways to measure this latency exist. One is the website cloudharmony.com, which provides many real-time metrics for connectivity between the client and Oracle Cloud Services. It's important to run these tests when determining with Oracle Cloud service location will provide the best connectivity.

The Oracle Cloud Dashboard has an integrated tool that will provide real time and historic latency information between your existing location and any specified Oracle Data Center. When migrating data to Autonomous Database, table statistics are gathered automatically during direct-path load operations. If direct-path load operations are not used, such as with SQL Developer loads, the user can gather statistics manually as needed.

33:44

Lois: And finally, what can you tell us about the Data Migration Service?

Thea: Database Migration Service is a fully managed service for migrating databases to ADB. It provides logical online and offline migration with minimal downtime and validates the environment before migration. We have a requirement that the source database is on Linux. And it would be interesting to see if we are going to have other use cases that we need other non-Linux operating systems.

This requirement is because we are using SSH to directly execute commands on the source database. For this, we are certified on the Linux only. Target in the first release are Autonomous databases, ATP, or ADW, both serverless and dedicated. For agent environment, we require Linux operating system, and this is Linux-safe. In general, we're targeting a number of different use cases-- migrating from on-premise, third-party clouds, Oracle legacy clouds, such as Oracle Classic, or even migrating within OCI Cloud and doing that with or without direct connection.

If you have any direct connection behind a firewall, we support offline migration. If you have a direct connection, we support both offline and online migration. For more information on all migration approaches are available for your particular situation, check out the Oracle Cloud Migration Advisor.

35:06

Nikita: I think we can wind up our episode with that. Thanks to all our experts for giving us their insights. 

Lois: To learn more about the topics we’ve discussed today, visit mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Autonomous Database Administration Workshop. Remember, all of the training is free, so dive right in! Join us next week for another episode of the Oracle University Podcast. Until then, Lois Houston…

Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off!

35:35

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.

The Oracle Autonomous Database Dedicated deployment is a good choice for customers who want to implement a private database cloud in their own dedicated Exadata infrastructure. That dedicated infrastructure can either be in the Oracle Public Cloud or in the customer's own data center via Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer.

 

In a dedicated environment, the Exadata infrastructure is entirely dedicated to the subscribing customer, isolated from other cloud tenants, with no shared processor, storage, and memory resource.

 

In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham speak with Oracle Database experts about how Autonomous Database Dedicated offers greater control of the software and infrastructure life cycle, customizable policies for separation of database workload, software update schedules and versioning, workload consolidation, availability policies, and much more.

 

Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/

Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/

X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu

 

Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Tamal Chatterjee, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.

 

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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 I’m joined by Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs.
Lois: Hi there! This is our second episode on Oracle’s Autonomous Database, and today we’re going to spend time discussing Autonomous Database on Dedicated Infrastructure. We’ll be talking with three of our colleagues: Maria Colgan, Kamryn Vinson, and Kay Malcolm.
00:53
Nikita: Maria is a Distinguished Product Manager for Oracle Database, Kamryn is a Database Product Manager, and Kay is a Senior Director of Database Product Management. 
Lois: Hi Maria! Thanks for joining us today. We know that Oracle Autonomous Database offers two deployment choices: serverless and dedicated Exadata infrastructure. We spoke about serverless infrastructure last week but for anyone who missed that episode, can you give us a quick recap of what it is?
01:22
Maria: With Autonomous Database Serverless, Oracle automates all aspects of the infrastructure and database management for you. That includes provisioning, configuring, monitoring, backing up, and tuning. You simply select what type of database you want, maybe a data warehouse, transaction processing, or a JSON document store, which region in the Oracle Public Cloud you want that database deployed, and the base compute and storage resources necessary. Oracle automatically takes care of everything else. Once provisioned, the database can be instantly scaled through our UI, our APIs, or automatically based on your workload needs. All scaling activities happen completely online while the database remains open for business.
02:11
Nikita: Ok, so now that we know what serverless is, let’s move on to dedicated infrastructure. What can you tell us about it?
Maria: Autonomous Database Dedicated allows customers to implement a private database cloud running on their own dedicated Exadata infrastructure. That dedicated infrastructure can be in Oracle’s Public Cloud or in the customer's own data center via Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer. It makes an ideal platform to consolidate multiple databases regardless of their workload type or their size. And it also allows you to offer database as a service within your enterprise.
02:50
Lois: What are the primary benefits of Autonomous Database Dedicated infrastructure?
Maria: With the dedicated deployment option, you must first subscribe to Dedicated Exadata Cloud Infrastructure that is isolated from other tenants with no shared processors, memory, network, or storage resources.
This infrastructure choice offers greater control of both the software and the infrastructure life cycle. Customers can specify their own policies for workload separation, software update schedules, and availability. One of the key benefits of an autonomous database is a lower total cost of ownership through more automation and operational delegation to Oracle. Remember it’s a fully managed service. All database operations, such as backup, software updates, upgrades, OS maintenance, incident management, and health monitoring, will be automatically done for you by Oracle. Its maximum availability architecture protects you from any hardware failures and in the event of a full outage, the service will be automatically failed over to your standby site. Built-in application continuity ensures zero downtime during the standard software update or in the event of a failover. 
04:09
Nikita: And how is this billed? 
Maria: Autonomous Database also has true pay-per-use billing so even when autoscale is enabled, you’ll only pay for those additional resources when you use them. And we make it incredibly simple to develop on this environment with managed developer add-ons like our low code development environment, APEX, and our REST data services. This means you don’t need any additional development environments in order to get started with a new application.
04:40
Lois: Ok. So, it looks like the dedicated option offers more control and customization. Maria, how do we access a dedicated database over a network?
Maria: The network path is through a VCN, or Virtual Cloud Network, and the subnet that's defined by the Exadata infrastructure hosting the database. By default, this subnet is defined as private, meaning, there's no public internet access to those databases. This ensures only your company can access your Exadata infrastructure and your databases.
Autonomous Database Dedicated can also take advantage of network services provided by OCI, including subnets or VCN peering, as well as connections to on-prem databases through the IP secure VPN and FastConnect dedicated corporate network connections.
05:33
Maria: You can also take advantage of the Oracle Microsoft partnership that enables customers to connect their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources and Microsoft Azure resources through a dedicated private connection. However, for some customers, a move to the public cloud is just not possible. Perhaps it's due to industry regulations, performance concerns, or integration with legacy on-prem applications. For these types of customers, Exadata Cloud@Customer should meet their requirements for strict data sovereignty and security by delivering high-performance Exadata Cloud Services capabilities in their data center behind their own firewall.
06:16
Nikita: What are the benefits of Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer? How’s it different?
Maria: Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer provides the same service as Autonomous Database Dedicated in the public cloud.
So you get the same simplicity, agility, and performance, and elasticity that you get in the cloud. But it also provides a very fast and simple transition to an autonomous cloud because you can easily migrate on-prem databases to Exadata Cloud@Customer. Once the database is migrated, any existing applications can simply reconnect to that new database and run without any application changes being needed. And the data will leave your data center, so making it a very safe way to adopt a cloud model.
07:04
Lois: So, how do we manage communication to and from the public cloud?
Maria: Each Cloud@Customer rack includes two local control plane servers to manage the communication to and from the public cloud. The local control plane acts on behalf of requests from the public cloud, keeping communications consolidated and secure. Platform control plane commands are sent to the Exadata Cloud@Customer system through a dedicated WebSocket secure tunnel. 
Oracle Cloud operations staff use that same tunnel to monitor the autonomous database on Exadata Cloud@Customer both for maintenance and for troubleshooting. The two remote, control plane servers installed in the Exadata Cloud@Customer rack host that secure tunnel endpoint and act as a gateway for access to the infrastructure. They also host components that orchestrate the cloud automation, aggregates and routes telemetry messages from the Exadata Cloud@Customer platform to the Oracle Support Service infrastructure. And they also host images for server patching.
08:13
Maria: The Exadata Database Server is connected to the customer-managed switches via either 10 gigabit or 25 gigabit Ethernet. Customers have access to the customer Virtual Machine, or VM, via a pair of layer 2 network connections that are implemented as Virtual Network Interface Cards, or vNICs. They're also tagged VLAN. The physical network connections are implemented for high availability in an active standby configuration.
Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer provides the best of both worlds-- all of the automation including patching, backing up, scaling, and management of a database that you get with a cloud service, but without the data ever leaving the customer's data center.
09:01
Nikita: That's interesting. And, what happens if a dedicated database loses network connectivity to the OCI control plane?
Maria: In the event an autonomous database on Exadata Cloud@Customer loses network connectivity to the OCI control plane, the Autonomous Database will actually continue to be available for your applications. And operations such as backups and autoscaling will not be impacted in that loss of network connectivity.
However, the management and monitoring of the Autonomous Database via the OCI console and APIs as well as access by the Oracle Cloud operations team will not be available until that network is reconnected.
09:43
Maria: The capability suspended in the case of a lost network connection include, as I said, infrastructure management-- so that's the manual scaling of an Autonomous Database via the UI or our OCI CLI, or REST APIs, as well as Terraform scripts. They won't be available. Neither will the ability for Oracle Cloud ops to access and perform maintenance activities, such as patching. Nor will we be able to monitor the Oracle infrastructure during the time where the system is not connected.
10:20
Lois: That’s good to know, Maria. What about data encryption and backup options?
Maria: All Oracle Autonomous Databases encrypt data at REST. Data is automatically encrypted as it's written to the storage. But this encryption is transparent to authorized users and applications because the database automatically decrypts the data when it's being read from the storage. There are several options for backing up the Autonomous Database Cloud@Customer including using a Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance, or ZDLRA. You can back it up to locally mounted NFS storage or back it up to the Oracle Public Cloud.
10:57
Nikita: I want to ask you about the typical workflow for Autonomous Database Dedicated infrastructure. What are the main steps here?
Maria: In the typical workflow, the fleet administrator role performs the following steps. They provision the Exadata infrastructure by specifying its size, availability domain, and region within the Oracle Cloud. Once the hardware has been provisioned, the fleet administrator partitions the system by provisioning clusters and container databases. Then the developers, DBAs, or anyone who needs a database can provision databases within those container databases.
Billing is based on the size of the Exadata infrastructure that's provisioned. So whether that's a quarter rack, half rack, or full rack. It also depends on the number of CPUs that are being consumed. Remember, it's also possible for customers to use their existing Oracle database licenses with this service to reduce the cost.
11:53
Lois: And what Exadata infrastructure models and shapes does Autonomous Database Dedicated support?
Maria: That's the X7, X8, and X8M and you can get all of those in either a quarter, half, or full Exadata rack. Currently, you can create a maximum of 12 VM clusters on an Autonomous Database Dedicated infrastructure.
We also advise that you limit the number of databases you provision to meet your preferred SLA. To meet the high availability SLA, we recommend a maximum of 100 databases. To meet the extreme availability SLA, we recommend a maximum of 25 databases.
12:35
Nikita: Ok, so now that I know all this, how do I actually get started with Autonomous Database on dedicated infrastructure?
Maria: You need to increase your service limit to include that Exadata infrastructure and then you need to create the fleet and DBA service roles. You also need to create the necessary network model, VM clusters, and container databases for your organization.
Finally, you need to provide access to the end users who want to create and use those Autonomous databases. Autonomous Database requires a subscription to that Exadata infrastructure for a minimum of 48 hours. But once subscribed, you can test out ideas and then terminate the subscription with no ongoing costs. While subscribed, you can control where you place the resources to perhaps manage latency sensitive applications.
13:29
Maria: You can also have control over patching schedules, software versions, so you can be sure that you're testing exactly what you need to. You can also migrate databases to the Autonomous Database via our export, import capabilities via the object store or through Data Pump or Golden Gate. As with any Autonomous Database, once it's provisioned, you've got full access to both autoscaling and all our cloning capabilities. 
13:57
Lois: Maria, I've heard you talk about the importance of clean role separation in managing a private cloud. Can you elaborate on that, please?
Maria: A successful private cloud is set up and managed using clean role separation between the fleet administration group and the developers, or DBA groups. The fleet administration group establishes the governance constraints, including things like budgeting, capacity compliance, and SLAs, according to the business structure. The physical resources are also logically grouped to align with this business structure, and then groups of users are given self-service access to the resources within these groups. So a good example of this would be that the developers and DBA groups use self-service database resources within these constraints.
14:46
Nikita: I see. So, what exactly does a fleet administrator do?
Maria: Fleet administrators allocate budget by department and are responsible for the creation, monitoring, and management of the autonomous exadata infrastructure, the autonomous exadata VM clusters, and the autonomous container databases. To perform these duties, the fleet administrators must have an Oracle Cloud account or user, and that user must have permissions to manage these resources and be permitted to use network resources that need to be specified when you create these other resources.
15:24
Nikita: And what about database administrators?

Maria: Database administrators create, monitor, and manage autonomous databases. They, too, need to have an Oracle Cloud account or be an Oracle Cloud user. Now, those accounts need to have the necessary permissions in order to create and access databases. They also need to be able to access autonomous backups and have permission to access the autonomous container databases, inside which these autonomous databases will be created, and have all of the necessary permissions to be able to create those databases, as I said.
While creating autonomous databases, the database administrators will define and gain access to an admin user account inside the database. It's through this account that they will actually get the necessary permissions to be able to create and control database users. 
16:24
Lois: How do developers fit into the picture?
Maria: Database users and developers who write applications that will use or access an autonomous database don't actually need Oracle Cloud accounts. They'll actually be given the network connectivity and authorization information they need to access those databases by the database administrators.
16:45
Lois: Maria, you mentioned the various ways to manage the lifecycle of an autonomous dedicated service. Can you tell us more about that?
Maria: You can manage the lifecycle of an autonomous dedicated service through the Cloud UI, Command Line Interface, through our REST APIs, or through one of the several language SDKs. The lifecycle operations that you can manage include capacity planning and setup, the provisioning and partitioning of exadata infrastructure, the provisioning and management of databases, the scaling of CPU storage and other resources, the scheduling of updates for the infrastructure, the VMs, and the database, as well as monitoring through event notifications. 
17:30
Lois: And how do policies come into play?
Maria: OCI allows fine-grained control over resources through the application of policies to groups. These policies are applicable to any member of the group.
For Oracle Autonomous Database on dedicated infrastructure, the resources in question are autonomous exadata infrastructure, autonomous container databases, autonomous databases, and autonomous backups. 
Lois: Thanks so much, Maria. That was great information.
18:05
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18:44
Nikita: Welcome back! Hi Kamryn, thanks for joining us on the podcast. So, in an Autonomous Database environment where most DBA tasks are automated, what exactly does an application DBA do?
Kamryn: While Autonomous Database automates most of the repetitive tasks that DBAs perform, the application DBA will still want to monitor and diagnose databases for applications to maintain the highest performance and the greatest security possible.
Tasks the application DBA performs includes operations on databases, cloning, movement, monitoring, and creating alerts. When required, the application DBA performs low-level diagnostics for application performance and looks for insights on performance and capacity trends. 
19:36
Nikita: I see. And which tools do they use for these tasks?
Kamryn: There are several tools at the application DBA's disposal, including Enterprise Manager, Performance Hub, and the OCI Console.
For Autonomous Dedicated, all the database operations are exposed through the console UI and available through REST API calls, including provisioning, stop/start, lifecycle operations for dedicated database types, unscheduled on-demand backups and restores, CPU scaling and storage management, providing connectivity information, including wallets, scheduling updates.
20:17
Lois: So, Kamryn, what tools can DBAs use for deeper exploration?
Kamryn: For deeper exploration of the databases themselves, Autonomous Database DBAs can use SQL Developer Web, Performance Hub, and Enterprise Manager.
20:31
Nikita: Let’s bring Kay into the conversation. Hi Kay! With Autonomous Database Dedicated, I’ve heard that customers have more control over patching. Can you tell us a little more about that?
Kay: With Autonomous Database Dedicated, customers get to determine the update or patching schedule if they wish. Oracle automatically manages all patching activity, but with the ADB-Dedicated service, customers have the option of customizing the patching schedule. You can specify which month in every quarter you want, which week in that month, which day in that month, and which patching window within that day. You can also dynamically change the scheduled patching date and time for a specific database if the originally scheduled time becomes inconvenient.

21:22
Lois: That's great! So, how often are updates published, and what options do customers have when it comes to applying these updates?
Kay: Every quarter, updates are published to the console, and OCI notifications are sent out. ADB-Dedicated allows for greater control over updates by allowing you to choose to apply the current update or stay with the previous version and skip to the next release. And the latest update can be applied immediately. This provides fleet administrators with the option to maintain test and production systems at different patch levels.
A fleet administrator or a database admin sets up the software version policy at the Autonomous Container Database level during provisioning, although the defaults can be modified at any time for an existing Autonomous Container Database. At the bottom of the Autonomous Exadata Infrastructure provisioning screen, you will see a Configure the Automatic Maintenance section, where you should click the Modify Schedule. 
22:34
Nikita: What happens if a customer doesn't customize their patching schedule?
Kay: If you do not customize a schedule, it behaves like Autonomous Serverless, and Oracle will set a schedule for you. ADB-Dedicated customers get to choose the patching schedule that fits their business. 
22:52
Lois: Back to you, Kamryn, I know a bit about Transparent Data Encryption, but I'm curious to learn more. Can you tell me what it does and how it helps protect data?
Kamryn: Transparent Data Encryption, TDE, enables you to encrypt sensitive data that you store in tables and tablespaces. After the data is encrypted, this data is transparently decrypted for authorized users or applications when they access this data. TDE helps protect data stored on media, also called data at rest. If the storage media or data file is stolen, Oracle database uses authentication, authorization, and auditing mechanisms to secure data in the database, but not in the operating system data files where data is stored. To protect these data files, Oracle database provides TDE. 
23:45
Nikita: That sounds important for data security. So, how does TDE protect data files?
Kamryn: TDE encrypts sensitive data stored in data files. To prevent unauthorized decryption, TDE stores the encryption keys in a security module external to the database called a keystore.
You can configure Oracle Key Vault as part of the TDE implementation. This enables you to centrally manage TDE key stores, called TDE wallets, in Oracle Key Vault in your enterprise. For example, you can upload a software keystore to Oracle Key Vault and then make the contents of this keystore available to other TDE-enabled databases.
24:28
Lois: What about Oracle Autonomous Database? How does it handle encryption?
Kamryn: Oracle Autonomous Database uses always-on encryption that protects data at rest and in transit. All data stored in Oracle Cloud and network communication with Oracle Cloud is encrypted by default. Encryption cannot be turned off.
By default, Oracle Autonomous Database creates and manages all the master encryption keys used to protect your data, storing them in a secure PKCS 12 keystore on the same Exadata systems where the databases reside. If your company's security policies require, Oracle Autonomous Database can instead use keys you create and manage. Customers can control key generation and rotation of the keys.
25:19
Kamryn: The Autonomous databases you create automatically use customer-managed keys because the Autonomous container database in which they are created is configured to use customer-managed keys. Thus, those users who create and manage Autonomous databases do not have to worry about configuring their databases to use customer-managed keys.
25:41
Nikita: Thank you so much, Kamryn, Kay, and Maria for taking the time to give us your insights. To learn more about provisioning Autonomous Database Dedicated resources, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Autonomous Database Administration Workshop.
Lois: In our next episode, we will discuss Autonomous Database tools. Until then, this is Lois Houston…
Nikita: …and Nikita Abraham signing off.
26:07
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.

Want to quickly provision your autonomous database? Then look no further than Oracle Autonomous Database Serverless, one of the two deployment choices offered by Oracle Autonomous Database.

 

Autonomous Database Serverless delegates all operational decisions to Oracle, providing you with a completely autonomous experience.

 

Join hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Oracle Database experts, as they discuss how serverless infrastructure eliminates the need to configure any hardware or install any software because Autonomous Database handles provisioning the database, backing it up, patching and upgrading it, and growing or shrinking it for you.

 

Oracle Autonomous Database Episode: https://oracleuniversitypodcast.libsyn.com/oracle-autonomous-database

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Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/

X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu

 

Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Rajeev Grover, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.

 

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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 Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor.

Nikita: Hi everyone! Welcome back to a new season of the Oracle University Podcast. This time, our focus is going to be on Oracle Autonomous Database. We’ve got a jam-packed season planned with some very special guests joining us.

00:52

Lois: If you’re a regular listener of the podcast, you’ll remember that we’d spoken a bit about Autonomous Database last year. That was a really good introductory episode so if you missed it, you might want to check it out. 

Nikita: Yeah, we’ll post a link to the episode in today’s show notes so you can find it easily.

01:07

Lois: Right, Niki. So, for today’s episode, we wanted to focus on Autonomous Database on Serverless Infrastructure and we reached out to three experts in the field: Hannah Nguyen,  Sean Stacey, and Kay Malcolm. Hannah is an Associate Cloud Engineer, Sean, a Director of Platform Technology Solutions, and Kay, who’s been on the podcast before, is Senior Director of Database Product Management. For this episode, we’ll be sharing portions of our conversations with them. So, let’s get started.

01:38

Nikita: Hi Hannah! How does Oracle Cloud handle the process of provisioning an Autonomous Database?  

Hannah: The Oracle Cloud automates the process of provisioning an Autonomous Database, and it automatically provisions for you a highly scalable, highly secure, and a highly available database very simply out of the box.

01:56

Lois: Hannah, what are the components and architecture involved when provisioning an Autonomous Database in Oracle Cloud?

Hannah: Provisioning the database involves very few steps. But it's important to understand the components that are part of the provisioned environment. When provisioning a database, the number of CPUs in increments of 1 for serverless, storage in increments of 1 terabyte, and backup are automatically provisioned and enabled in the database. In the background, an Oracle 19c pluggable database is being added to the container database that manages all the user's Autonomous Databases. Because this Autonomous Database runs on Exadata systems, Real Application Clusters is also provisioned in the background to support the on-demand CPU scalability of the service. This is transparent to the user and administrator of the service. But be aware it is there.

02:49

Nikita: Ok…So, what sort of flexibility does the Autonomous Database provide when it comes to managing resource usage and costs, you know… especially in terms of starting, stopping, and scaling instances?

Hannah: The Autonomous Database allows you to start your instance very rapidly on demand. It also allows you to stop your instance on demand as well to conserve resources and to pause billing. Do be aware that when you do pause billing, you will not be charged for any CPU cycles because your instance will be stopped. However, you'll still be incurring charges for your monthly billing for your storage. In addition to allowing you to start and stop your instance on demand, it's also possible to scale your database instance on demand as well. All of this can be done very easily using the Database Cloud Console.

03:36

Lois: What about scaling in the Autonomous Database?

Hannah: So you can scale up your OCPUs without touching your storage and scale it back down, and you can do the same with your storage. In addition to that, you can also set up autoscaling. So the database, whenever it detects the need, will automatically scale up to three times the base level number of OCPUs that you have allocated or provisioned for the Autonomous Database.

04:00

Nikita: Is autoscaling available for all tiers? 

Hannah: Autoscaling is not available for an always free database, but it is enabled by default for other tiered environments. Changing the setting does not require downtime. So this can also be set dynamically. One of the advantages of autoscaling is cost because you're billed based on the average number of OCPUs consumed during an hour.

04:23

Lois: Thanks, Hannah! Now, let’s bring Sean into the conversation. Hey Sean, I want to talk about moving an autonomous database resource. When or why would I need to move an autonomous database resource from one compartment to another?

Sean: There may be a business requirement where you need to move an autonomous database resource, serverless resource, from one compartment to another. Perhaps, there's a different subnet that you would like to move that autonomous database to, or perhaps there's some business applications that are within or accessible or available in that other compartment that you wish to move your autonomous database to take advantage of.

04:58

Nikita: And how simple is this process of moving an autonomous database from one compartment to another? What happens to the backups during this transition?

Sean: The way you can do this is simply to take an autonomous database and move it from compartment A to compartment B. And when you do so, the backups, or the automatic backups that are associated with that autonomous database, will be moved with that autonomous database as well.

05:21

Lois: Is there anything that I need to keep in mind when I’m moving an autonomous database between compartments? 

Sean: A couple of things to be aware of when doing this is, first of all, you must have the appropriate privileges in that compartment in order to move that autonomous database both from the source compartment to the target compartment. In addition to that, once the autonomous database is moved to this new compartment, any policies or anything that's defined in that compartment to govern the authorization and privileges of that said user in that compartment will be applied immediately to that new autonomous database that has been moved into that new compartment.

05:59

Nikita: Sean, I want to ask you about cloning in Autonomous Database. What are the different types of clones that can be created? 

Sean: It's possible to create a new Autonomous Database as a clone of an existing Autonomous Database. This can be done as a full copy of that existing Autonomous Database, or it can be done as a metadata copy, where the objects and tables are cloned, but they are empty. So there's no rows in the tables. And this clone can be taken from a live running Autonomous Database or even from a backup. So you can take a backup and clone that to a completely new database.

06:35

Lois: But why would you clone in the first place? What are the benefits of this? 

Sean: When cloning or when creating this clone, it can be created in a completely new compartment from where the source Autonomous Database was originally located. So it's a nice way of moving one database to another compartment to allow developers or another community of users to have access to that environment.

06:58

Nikita: I know that along with having a full clone, you can also have a refreshable clone. Can you tell us more about that? Who is responsible for this?

Sean: It's possible to create a refreshable clone from an Autonomous Database. And this is one that would be synced with that source database up to so many days.

The task of keeping that refreshable clone in sync with that source database rests upon the shoulders of the administrator. The administrator is the person who is responsible for performing that sync operation. Now, actually performing the operation is very simple, it's point and click. And it's an automated process from the database console.

And also be aware that refreshable clones can trail the source database or source Autonomous Database up to seven days. After that period of time, the refreshable clone, if it has not been refreshed or kept in sync with that source database, it will become a standalone, read-only copy of that original source database.

08:00

Nikita: Ok Sean, so if you had to give us the key takeaways on cloning an Autonomous Database, what would they be? 

Sean: It's very easy and a lot of flexibility when it comes to cloning an Autonomous Database. We have different models that you can take from a live running database instance with zero impact on your workload or from a backup. It can be a full copy, or it can be a metadata copy, as well as a refreshable, read-only clone of a source database.

08:33

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If you are already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to begin your journey. If you have not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started. 

09:12

Nikita: Welcome back! Thank you, Sean, and hi Kay! I want to ask you about events and notifications in Autonomous Database. Where do they really come in handy? 

Kay: Events can be used for a variety of notifications, including admin password expiration, ADB services going down, and wallet expiration warnings. There's this service, and it's called the notifications service. It's part of OCI. And this service provides you with the ability to broadcast messages to distributed components using a publish and subscribe model. These notifications can be used to notify you when event rules or alarms are triggered or simply to directly publish a message.

In addition to this, there's also something that's called a topic. This is a communication channel for sending messages to subscribers in the topic. You can manage these topics and their subscriptions really easy. It's not hard to do at all.

10:14

Lois: Kay, I want to ask you about backing up Autonomous Databases. How does Autonomous Database handle backups?

Kay: Autonomous Database automatically backs up your database for you. The retention period for backups is 60 days. You can restore and recover your database to any point in time during this retention period.

You can initiate recovery for your Autonomous Database by using the cloud console or an API call. Autonomous Database automatically restores and recovers your database to the point in time that you specify.

In addition to a point in time recovery, we can also perform a restore from a specific backup set. 

10:59

Lois: Kay, you spoke about automatic backups, but what about manual backups? 

Kay: You can do manual backups using the cloud console, for example, if you want to take a backup say before a major change to make restoring and recovery faster. These manual backups are put in your cloud object storage bucket.

11:20

Nikita: Are there any special instructions that we need to follow when configuring a manual backup?

Kay: The manual backup configuration tasks are a one-time operation. Once this is configured, you can go ahead, trigger your manual backup any time you wish after that. When creating the object storage bucket for the manual backups, it is really important-- so I don't want you to forget-- that the name format for the bucket and the object storage follows this naming convention. It should be backup underscore database name. And it's not the display name here when I say database name.

12:00

Kay: In addition to that, the object name has to be all lowercase. So three rules. Backup underscore database name, and the specific database name is not the display name. It has to be in lowercase. Once you've created your object storage bucket to meet these rules, you then go ahead and set a database property. Default_backup_bucket. This points to the object storage URL and it's using the Swift protocol. Once you've got your object storage bucket mapped and you've created your mapping to the object storage location, you then need to go ahead and create a database credential inside your database. You may have already had this in place for other purposes, like maybe you were loading data, you were using Data Pump, et cetera. If you don't, you would need to create this specifically for your manual backups. Once you've done so, you can then go ahead and set your property to that default credential that you created. So once you follow these steps as I pointed out, you only have to do it one time. Once it's configured, you can go ahead and use it from now on for your manual backups.

13:21

Lois: Kay, the last topic I want to talk about before we let you go is Autonomous Data Guard. Can you tell us about it?

Kay: Autonomous Data Guard monitors the primary database, in other words, the database that you're using right now. 

Lois: So, if ADB goes down…

Kay: Then the standby instance will automatically become the primary instance.
There's no manual intervention required. So failover from the primary database to that standby database I mentioned, it's completely seamless and it doesn't require any additional wallets to be downloaded or any new URLs to access APEX or Oracle Machine Learning. Even Oracle REST Data Services. All the URLs and all the wallets, everything that you need to authenticate, to connect to your database, they all remain the same for you if you have to failover to your standby database.

14:19

Lois: And what happens after a failover occurs?

Kay: After performing a failover, a new standby for your primary will automatically be provisioned. So in other words, in performing a failover your standby does become your new primary. Any new standby is made for that primary. I know, it's kind of interesting. So currently, the standby database is created in the same region as the primary database. For better resilience, if your database is provisioned, it would be available on AD1 or Availability Domain 1. My secondary, or my standby, would be provisioned on a different availability domain.

15:10

Nikita: But there’s also the possibility of manual failover, right? What are the differences between automatic and manual failover scenarios? When would you recommend using each?

Kay: So in the case of the automatic failover scenario following a disastrous situation, if the primary ADB becomes completely unavailable, the switchover button will turn to a failover button. Because remember, this is a disaster. Automatic failover is automatically triggered. There's no user action required. So if you're asleep and something happens, you're protected. There's no user action required, but automatic failover is allowed to succeed only when no data loss will occur.
 
15:57

Nikita: For manual failover scenarios in the rare case when an automatic failover is unsuccessful, the switchover button will become a failover button and the user can trigger a manual failover should they wish to do so. The system automatically recovers as much data as possible, minimizing any potential data loss. But you can see anywhere from a few seconds or minutes of data loss. Now, you should only perform a manual failover in a true disaster scenario, expecting the fact that a few minutes of potential data loss could occur, to ensure that your database is back online as soon as possible. 

16:44

Lois: Thank you so much, Kay. This conversation has been so educational for us. And thank you once again to Hannah and Sean. To learn more about Autonomous Database, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Autonomous Database Administration Workshop.

Nikita: Thanks for joining us today. In our next episode, we will discuss Autonomous Database on Dedicated Infrastructure. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham…

Lois: …and Lois Houston signing off.

17:12

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.

In today’s digital economy, data is a form of capital. Given the mission-critical role that it has, having a robust data management strategy is now more crucial than ever.

 

Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Kay Malcolm, as they talk about the various Oracle Database offerings and discuss how to actually use them to efficiently manage data across a diverse but unified data tier.

 

Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/

Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community

X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/

 

Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Ranbir Singh, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.

 

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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 Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor.
Nikita: Hi there. If you’ve been following along with us these past few weeks, you’ll know we’ve been revisiting our most popular episodes of the year. 
Lois: Right, and today’s episode is the last one of the Best of 2023 series. It’s a throwback to our conversation on Oracle’s Data Management strategy and offerings with Kay Malcolm, Senior Director of Database Product Management at Oracle.
Nikita: We’d often heard Kay say that Oracle’s data management strategy is simply complete and completely simple. And so we began by asking her what she meant by that.
01:09
Kay: It's a fun play on words, right? App development paradigms are in a rapid state of transformation. Modern app development is simplifying and accelerating how you deploy applications. Also simplifying how data models and data analytics are used. Oracle data management embraces modern app development and transformations that go beyond technology changes. It presents a simply complete solution that is completely simple. Immediately you can see benefits of the easiest and most productive platform for developing and running modern app and analytics.
01:54
Kay: Oracle Database is a converged database that provides best of breed support for all different data models and workloads that you need. When you have converged support for application development, you eliminate data fragmentation. You can perform unique queries and transactions that span any data and create value across all data types and build into your applications. 
02:24
Nikita: When you say all data types, this can include both structured and unstructured data, right?
Kay: This also includes structured and unstructured data. The Oracle converged database has the best of breed for JSON, graph, and text while including other data types, relations, blockchain, spatial, and others.
Now that we have the ability to access any data type, we have various workloads and converged data management that supports all modern transactional and analytical workloads. We have the unique ability to run any combination of workloads on any combination of data. Simply complete for analytics means the ability to include all of the transactions, including key value, IoT, or Internet of Things, along with operational data warehouse and lake and machine learning.
03:27
Kay: Oracle's decentralized database architecture makes decentralized apps simple to deploy and operate. This architecture makes it simple to use decentralized app development techniques like coding events, data events, API driven development, low code, and geo distribution. Autonomous Database or ADB now supports the Mongo database API adding more tools for architectural support.
Autonomous Database or ADB has a set of automated tools to manage, provision, tune, and patch. It provides solutions for difficult database engineering with auto indexing and partitioning and is elastic. You can automatically scale up or down based on the workload. Autonomous Database is also very productive. It allows for focus on the data for solving business problems. ADB has self-service tools for analytics, data access, and it simplifies these difficult data engineering architectures.
04:43
Lois: OK…so can you tell us about running modern apps and analytics?
Kay: Running applications means thinking about all the operational concerns and solving how to support mission-critical applications. Traditionally, this is where Oracle excels with high availability, security, operational solutions that have been proven over the years.
Now, having developer tools and the ability to scale and reduce risk simplifies the development process without having to use complex sharding and data protection. Mission-critical capabilities that are needed for the applications are already provided in the functionality of the Oracle Data Management architecture. Disaster recovery, replication, backups, and security are all part of the Oracle Autonomous Database.
05:42
Kay: Even complex business-critical applications are supported by the operational security and availability of Oracle ADB. Transparently, it provides automated solutions for minimizing risk, dealing with complexity, and availability for all applications. Oracle's big picture data management strategy is simply complete and completely simple with the converged database, data management tools, and the best platform.
It is focused on providing a platform that allows for modern app development across all data types, workloads, and development styles. It is completely scalable, available, and secure, leveraging the database technologies developed over several years. And it's available consistently across the environment. It is the simplest to use because of the available tools and running completely mission critical applications.
06:50
Nikita: Ah, so that’s how we come to…
Kay: Simply complete and completely simple. Easy to remember and easy to incorporate into your existing architectures. 
Lois: OK. So Kay, can you talk a little bit more about Autonomous Database?
07:04
Kay: Let's compare Autonomous Database to how you ran the database on premise. How you ran the database on the cloud using our earlier Cloud Services, Database Cloud Services, and Oracle Exadata Cloud Service. The key thing to understand is Autonomous Database, or ADB, is a fully managed service. We fully manage the infrastructure. We fully manage the database for you.
In on premise, you manage everything-- the infrastructure, the database, everything. We also have a service in between that that we call a co-managed service. Here we manage the infrastructure, and you manage the database. That service is important for customers who are not yet up to 19c. Or they might be running a packaged application like E-Business Suite. But for the rest of you, ADB is really the place you want to go.
08:09
Nikita: And why is that?
Kay: Because it's fully managed and, because it's fully managed, is a much, much lower cost way to go. So when you talk to your boss about why he wants to move to ADB, they often care about the bottom line. They want to know like, am I going to lower my costs?
And with ADB, because we take care of a lot of the tedious chores that DBAs normally have to do and because we take care of best practices, configurations, we can do things at a really low cost. 
08:49
Lois: Kay, what does it take for a customer to move to Oracle’s Autonomous Database? 
Kay: We've got a tool that helps you look at your current database on prem. This tool will analyze what features you're using and let you know, hey, you know you're doing something that's not supported for ADB, for example.
Like if you're running some release before 19c, we don't support it. If you're doing stuff like putting database tables in the system or sys schema, we don't support it. You know, there are a few things that very few customers do that we don't support. And this tool will flag those for you.
And then the next step, it's pretty simple. You just use our Data Pump import/export tool to move your data out of your database on prem into the object store on the Cloud. And then you simply import-- you know how to use Data Pump to import-- the data off the file and the object store into the database. Then you're done. Pretty simple process.
09:57
Nikita: Do we assist our customers with data migration from on-prem to Cloud?
Kay: More recently have come out with a new service on our Cloud called the Database Migration Service. With Autonomous Database Migration Service, you can just point us at your source database on prem or even on some other cloud. Whatever it is, we will take care of everything from there and move that, go through all the steps and move your database to ADB on the Cloud.
Even better, we now are working with our Applications customers to make it really easy for them to move their packaged applications to Autonomous Database. The Oracle development teams that built JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel have now all certified that those packaged applications can run with Autonomous Database no problem. Our EBS team is working on it. And that'll be coming soon, sometime next year.
11:02
Lois: So, if I am an Apps customer, is there a special service for me?
Kay: We have a fully managed service available on our Cloud that lets you take your entire application stack on the middle tier and the database tier, move it to our Cloud. Move the database part to Autonomous Database. And they will also manage your middle tier for you.
11:32
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12:11
Nikita: Welcome back! Kay, can you talk a bit about APEX? 
Kay: We have this great tool called APEX or Application Express. We have a version of Autonomous Database just for any APEX application. 
Well, APEX is a low-code tool. It is our low-code tool that lets you rapidly build data-driven applications where the data is in the Oracle Database, really easy and really rapidly. We estimate at least 10 times faster than doing traditional coding to build your applications. What we're seeing is much, much higher productivity than that. Sometimes 40, even 50 times faster coding.
13:01
Kay: Out of the box, it comes with really nice tools for building things-- your classical forms and reporting kinds of workloads. It gives you things like faceted search and capabilities to do things like see on an e-commerce website where you get to choose things like dimensions, like I want a product where the cost is in this range. And, you know, it might have some other attributes. And it can very quickly filter that data for you and return the best results.
And it's a really nice tool for iterating. Now, if your user interface doesn't look quite right, it's very easy to tweak colors and backgrounds and themes. Another reason it's so productive is that the whole middle tier part of your application is fully automated for you. You don't have to do anything about connection management or state management. You don't have to worry about mapping data types from some other 3GL programming language to data types. All of that is done for you.
The combination of ADB and APEX really rocks.
14:17
Lois: Do we have Extract, Transform, and Load capabilities in our ADB?
Kay: We have ETL transformation tools. Again, they let you specify transformations in a drag-and-drop fashion on the screen. We have all sorts of other tools and, in the service, the full power of the converged analytic technologies, things like graph analytics, spatial analytics, machine learning. All of this is built into this new platform.
Now, a big, new capability around machine learning is something that we call AutoML. That lets any data scientists give us a data set, tell us what the key feature is that they want to analyze, and what the predictions are. And we will come up with a machine learning model for them out of the box. Really that easy. Plus, we have the low-code tool APEX that I mentioned earlier.
15:17
Kay: So this environment is really powerful for doing more than traditional data warehouses. We can build data lakes. We are integrated with the object stores on Oracle Cloud and also on other clouds. And we can do massively parallel querying of data in the core database itself and the data lake.
15:38
Nikita: Beyond the database tech, there’s the business side, right? How easy do we make a customer’s path to ADB from a business standpoint, a decision-making standpoint?
Kay: So if you're an existing Oracle customer, you have an existing Oracle Database license you're using on prem, we have something called BYOL, Bring Your Own License, to OCI. We have the Cloud Lift Service. This huge cloud engineering team across all regions of the world will help you move your existing on-prem database to ADB for free.
16:16
Kay: And then, finally, we announced fairly recently something called the Support Rewards Program. This is something our customers are really excited about. It lets them translate their spending on OCI to a reduction in their support bill. So if you're a customer using OCI, you get a $0.25 to $0.33 reward for every dollar you spend on Oracle's Cloud.
You can then take that money from your rewards and apply it to your bill for customer support, for your technology support even, like the database. And this is exactly what customers want as they move their investment to the cloud. They want to lower the costs of paying for their on-prem support.
Now, we've talked about money. This lowers costs greatly. So ADB has lots of value. But the big thing I think to think about is really that it lowers costs. It lowers that cost via automation, higher productivity, less downtime, all sorts of areas.  
17:22
Lois: You make a very convincing case for ADB, Kay.
Kay: ADB is a great place to go. Take those existing Oracle Databases you have. Move and modernize them to a modern cloud infrastructure that's going to give you all the benefits of cloud, including agility and lower cost.
So on our Cloud, we have something called the Always Free Autonomous Database Service. This service lets you get your hands on ADB. Try it out for yourself. You don't have to believe what we claim about how great this technology is.
And we have other technologies like Live Labs that you can find on developer.oracle.com/livelabs that lets you do all kinds of exercises on this Always Free ADB infrastructure. Really get your hands dirty. And see for yourself how productive it can be. 
18:16
Nikita: Thanks, Kay, for telling us about ADB and our database offerings. To learn more about this, head over mylearn.oracle.com, create a profile if you don’t already have one, and get started on our free Oracle Cloud Data Management Foundations Workshop.
Lois: We hope you’ve enjoyed revisiting some of our most popular episodes these past few weeks. We’re kicking off the new year with a new season of the Oracle University Podcast. And this time around, it’ll be on Oracle Autonomous Database so make sure you don’t miss it. Until next week, this is Lois Houston…
Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off!
18:52
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.

In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Rohit Rahi, look at two important services that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides: Compute and Load Balancing. They also discuss the basics of instances.

 

Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/

Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community

X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/

 

Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Kiran BR, David Wright, the OU Podcast Team, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.

 

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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 Innovation Programs.
Lois: Hi there. You’re listening to our Best of 2023 series, where over the last few weeks, we’ve been revisiting our most popular episodes of the year.
00:47
Nikita: In today’s episode, which is #5 of 6, we’ll listen in to a conversation Lois and I had earlier this year with Rohit Rahi, Vice President of CSS OU Cloud Delivery, on OCI Compute and Load Balancing. We began by asking Rohit why one would use Load Balancer.
Lois: So let’s get right to it!
01:06
Rohit: You would use Load Balancer to achieve high availability and also achieve scalability. 
So typically the way Load Balancer works is, they're also referred to as Reverse Proxies, you would have a Load Balancer, which would be used accessed by multiple clients, various clients. And these clients would hit the Load Balancer, and the Load Balancer would proxy that traffic to the various backend servers. So in this way, it not only protects the various backend servers, but also provides high availability. In case a particular backend server is not available, the application can still be up and running. And then it also provides scalability because if lots of clients start hitting the Load Balancer, you could easily add more backend servers. And there are several other advanced capabilities like SSL termination and SSL passthrough and a lot of other advanced features. 
So the first type of Load Balancer we have in OCI is a layer 7 Load Balancer. Layer 7 basically means it understands HTTP and HTTPS. That's the OSI model. And then there are various capabilities available here. 
02:13
Nikita: The Load Balancer comes in two different shapes, right? Can you tell us a little about that?
Rohit: One is called a flexible shape where you define the minimum and the maximum and you define the range. And your Load Balancer can achieve any kind of-- support any kind of traffic in that particular range, going from 10 Mbps all the way to 8 Gbps. 
The second kind of shape is called dynamic where you predefine the shapes. So you have micro, small, medium, large, and you predefine the shape. And you don't have to warm up your Load Balancer. If the traffic comes to that particular shape, the Load Balancer automatically scales. 
02:53
Rohit: You can always do a public and a private Load Balancer. Public means Load Balancer is available on the web. Private means your multiple tiers, like a web tier, can talk to your database tier and balance the traffic between them, but both tiers don't have to be public. 
A Load Balancer is highly available, highly scalable by design.
03:12
Lois: And what about the second type of Load Balancer?
Rohit: The second kind of Load Balancer we have in OCI is called the Network Load Balancer. And as the name specify, Network Load Balancer operates at layer 4, layer 3, and layer 4 so it understands TCP, UDP, also supports ICMP. Again, like HTTP Load Balancer, it has both public and a private option, so you could create a public Network Load Balancer or a private Network Load Balancer. It's highly available, highly scalable, all those features are supported. 
03:42
Nikita: Now, why would you use Network Load Balancer over an HTTP Load Balancer? 
Rohit: The primary reason you would use it is it's much faster than HTTP Load Balancer. It has much lower latency. So if performance is a key criteria for you, go with Network Load Balancer. 
On the contrary, the HTTP Load Balancer has higher level intelligence because it can look at the packets, it can inspect the packets, and it gets that intelligence. So if you're looking for that kind of routing intelligence, then go with HTTP Load Balancer. 
04:15
Rohit: So OCI Compute service provides you virtual machines and bare metal servers to meet your compute and application requirements. The three defining characteristics of this service include this scalability, high performance, and lower pricing.
So the first thing in the OCI Compute service is you have this notion of flexible shape. What does it mean? Well, it means you could choose your own course, your CPU processors, and you could also choose your own memory. Literally, there are thousands and thousands of configurations you can choose from.
04:49
Lois: But what’s the use of doing this? 
Rohit: The use of doing this is you could select the right machine type by using our flexible shapes. 
And in the cloud, there's this notion of T-shirt sizing. So you have a small, medium, large kind of shapes, and your application has to fit those shapes. And sometimes you overprovision or underprovision, and you have to go through that painful process of changing your machine types. We hope with this flexible shapes, you don't have to do that. 
05:20
Rohit: If you still want to use the traditional approach, we have virtual machines, we have bare metal servers, and we have dedicated host. And you could use either one of them or all of them. And bare metal servers basically means you get a full machine, a full server which is completely dedicated to you. Dedicated host basically means that you get a full dedicated bare metal machine. But on top of that, you could run virtual machines. 
Not only this, but OCI is only one of the two cloud providers to provide you options on processors. So you can run AMD-based instances, you could run Intel-based instances, and you could also run Arm-based instances-- are really a powerful thing for mobile computing. The phones you are using today are probably running on Arm processors. Now, Arm is coming into the data centers.
06:16
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06:48
Nikita: What can you tell us about the pricing of this, Rohit?
Rohit: On the pricing side, the service implements pay-as-you-go pricing. We are 50% cheaper than any other cloud out there, just to begin with. And not only that, you could use something like a Preemptable VMs to reduce your cost by more than 50% from your regular instances. 
Preemptable VMs are low cost, short lived VMs suited for batch jobs and fault tolerant workloads. These are similar to regular instances, but priced 50% lower. So you can use them to reduce your cost further.
So when we say an instance, what we mean is a compute host. And it has several dependencies. So let's look at them. 
07:31
Rohit: So you have an Oracle Cloud region here. A region is comprised of multiple ADs. An AD is nothing but a data center.
The first dependency the compute service has or compute hosts have is on Virtual Cloud Network. So in order to spin up a compute instance, you need a Virtual Cloud Network.
You have a network divided into smaller portions called subnets. So you have a subnetwork here, and you need to create these before you can spin up a compute host. 
08:00
Rohit: Now you can spin up a compute host. It's a physical construct. Networking is a virtual construct. So how are they related? Within a compute host, you have a physical network interface card, and you virtualize that card. We give you this virtual NIC. And that virtual NIC is placed inside the subnet.
And that's the association for the compute host. And that's where the private IP for the compute host comes from, because every compute host or VM you are running, or a bare metal machine, has a private IP address. 
Now, there is another set of dependency the compute instances have, and that's to the boot volume and the boot disk and the block volumes. 
08:42
Lois: What does that mean, exactly? 
Rohit: Well, each of these compute hosts you are spinning up has an operating system. And the image that's used to launch an instance determines its operating system and other software. So you have this concept of an image that comes from this network storage disk called a boot disk. So it doesn't stay on the compute host, it's actually living on the network somewhere. 
And you also have data, like file systems, etc. You're working on the compute instances. They also live on the network. So there is the data disks and operating system disks together. There's a service called block volume service which the compute host uses to run its operating system and run its data disks. Now, these are remote storage. 
09:33
Rohit: There is one more feature which is really relevant when you are talking about compute instances, and that's live migration. We know that computers fail all the time. So how do we make sure that whatever compute host you are running is always up and running, itself? So we have this feature called live migrate. And the idea here is if one of the compute hosts goes down, there's a problem, we would migrate your VM to another host in our data center, and it will be transparent to you. There are multiple options you provide-- whether opt-in or opt-out-- you can choose from. But the idea is we migrate your virtual machines so you can live-migrate between hosts without rebooting. This keeps your applications running even during maintenance events. To achieve this in your own data centers is a not-so-trivial task, but we make that seamless within OCI. 
10:22
Nikita: Thanks for that, Rohit. To learn more about OCI, please visit mylearn.oracle.com, create a profile if you don’t already have one, and get started on our free OCI Foundations training. 
Lois: You will find skill checks that you can take throughout the course to ensure that you are on the right track.
Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. Join us next week for our final throwback episode. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham...
Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off!
10:54
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.

When you work with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, one of the first steps is to set up a virtual cloud network (VCN) for your cloud resources. In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Rohit Rahi, discuss Oracle’s Virtual Cloud Network, VCN routing, and security.

 

Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/

Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community

X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/

 

Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Kiran BR, Rashmi Panda, David Wright, the OU Podcast Team, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.

 

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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 Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor.
Nikita: Hi everyone. We hope you’ve been enjoying these last few weeks as we’ve been revisiting our most popular episodes of the year. 
00:47
Lois: Today’s episode is the fourth of six we’ll have in this series and it’s a throwback to a conversation with Rohit Rahi, our Vice President of CSS OU Cloud Delivery, talking about Networking in OCI. We began by asking Rohit to explain what a Virtual Cloud Network is. Let’s listen in.
01:06
Rohit: At its core, it's a private software defined network you create in Oracle Cloud. It's used for secure communication. Whether instances talking to each other, instances talking to on-premises environments, or instances talking to other instances in different regions, you would use Virtual Cloud Network. 
It lives in an OCI region. Like we said, it's a regional service. It's highly available, massively scalable, and secure. And we take care of these things for you. So before we dive deep into the VCN and all the characteristics and all the features it has, let's look at some of the basic stuff. 
01:44
Rohit: So the first thing is VCN has an address space. In this case, you see this address space is denoted in a CIDR notation. CIDR stands for classless interdomain routing. 
The VCN has an IP addressing range. And what that means is you have an address range. You take that range. And you can break it down into smaller networks which are called subnetworks. And these subnetworks are where you would instantiate your compute instances. 
02:16
Nikita: And what can you tell us about the different mechanisms that exist inside a VCN? 
Rohit: So first, there is a notion of internet gateway. This is a gateway which is massively scalable, highly available, and is used for communication to anything on the internet. 
So if you have a web server which wants to talk to other websites on the web being able to be accessed publicly, you would use an internet gateway. So going to the internet and coming back from the internet. You also have this highly available, massively scalable router called NAT gateway. And it is used for providing NAT as a service. 
02:53
Rohit: So what this means is the traffic is unidirectional. It can go from your private subnets to the internet. But users from the internet cannot use the NAT gateway to reach your instances running in a private subnet. So the idea with the NAT gateway is to enable outbound communication to the internet, but block inbound communications or connections initiated from the internet. 
Then we have another router which is called Service Gateway. And the idea is it lets resources in VCN access public OCI services such as object storage, but without using an internet or NAT gateway. So these are the three scenarios-- Internet gateway for internet, NAT gateway also for internet but unidirectional, and Service gateway for accessing OCI public services, which are available on the internet but accessing them in a secure manner. 
And then the other construct is called Dynamic Routing Gateway. This is a virtual router that provides a path for private traffic between your VCN and destinations other than the internet. 
04:00
Lois: So what can these destinations be? 
Rohit: Well, this can be your on-premises environment. VCN uses route tables to send traffic out of the VCN to the internet, to on-premises networks, or to peered VCN, and we look at each of these scenarios. 
Route tables consist of a set of route rules. Each rule specifies a destination CIDR block and a route target. Think about route target as the next hop for the traffic that matches that destination CIDR block. 
Now, one thing to keep in mind is traffic within the VCN subnet is automatically handled by the VCN local routing.
04:44
Lois: Want to get the inside scoop on Oracle University?
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Join the Community today!
05:20
Nikita: Getting back to our discussion… if you have multiple networks, how do they talk to each other? 
Rohit: So there are two scenarios which are possible here. If the networks are within the same OCI region, they can talk to each other through a mechanism called local peering. If the two networks are in two different OCI data center regions, then you have the same concept, a similar concept, but it's a remote peering now. And instead of using local peering, now you're using the Dynamic Routing Gateways. Remember we talked about Dynamic Routing Gateways used for on-premises communication, anything which is not for internet. So this is also a use case for Dynamic Routing Gateway enabling communication between networks in different regions. 
06:05
Rohit: So within VCN, you have this concept of security list. Think about security list as firewall rules associated with a subnet and applied to all instances inside the subnet. So what does it look like? The security list consists of rules that specify the type of traffic allowed in or out of the subnet. This applies to a given instance, whether it is talking with another instance in the VCN or a host outside the VCN. 
There's also another concept, which is called network security groups, or NSG. These are very similar construct as security list, but the key difference is these apply only to a set of virtual network interface cards in a single VCN. And another big difference here is NSGs can be the source or destination in the rules. Contrast this with the security list rules where you specify a CIDR, only a CIDR, as the source or destination. 
07:06
Lois: Thanks for that, Rohit. To learn more about OCI, please visit mylearn.oracle.com, create a profile if you don’t already have one, and get started learning on our free OCI Foundations training. 
Nikita: You can also practice what you learn in a safe environment with our hands-on labs, without the anxiety of working in a live environment.
07:27
Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham...
Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off!
07:37
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.

Data breaches occur more often than we’d like them to. As businesses embrace remote work practices, IT resources are more at risk than ever before. Oracle Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an essential tool for protecting enterprise resources against cybersecurity threats. Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Rohit Rahi, as they examine IAM and the key aspects of this service, and discuss how you can control who has access to your resources.

 

Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/

Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community

X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/

 

Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Kiran BR, Rashmi Panda, David Wright, the OU Podcast Team, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.

 

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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 Innovation Programs.
Lois: Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us for this Best of 2023 series, where we’re playing you six of our most popular episodes of the year.  
00:47
Nikita: Today’s episode is #3 of 6 and is a throwback to a conversation with Rohit Rahi, Vice President of CSS OU Cloud Delivery, on Identity and Access Management, which is one of OCI’s top security features. So, let’s get straight into it.
01:03
Rohit: IAM stands for Identity and Access Management service. It's also sometimes referred to as fine-grained access control or role-based access control service. 
There are two key aspects to this service. The first one is called authentication, or also referred to as AuthN. And the second aspect is referred to as authorization or also referred to as AuthZ. Authentication has to deal with identity or who someone is, while authorization has to deal with permission or what someone is allowed to do. 
01:37
Rohit: So basically what the service ensures is making sure that a person is who they claim to be. And as far as authorization is concerned, what the service does is it allows a user to be assigned one or more pre-determined roles, and each roles comes with a set of permissions. Now, there are various concepts which are part of this service or various features which are part of this service, starting with identity domains, principles, groups, dynamic groups, compartments, et cetera. Now identity domains is basically a container for your users and groups. So think about this as a construct which represents a user population in OCI and the associated configurations and security settings. 
02:30
Lois: So, how does this work in practice? 
Rohit: Well, what we do first is we create an identity domain, and then we create users and groups within that identity domain. And then we write policies against those groups, and policies are scoped to a tenancy, an account, or a compartment. And of course, the resources are available within a compartment. And again, compartment is kind of a logical isolation for resources. So this is how the whole service works.
03:03
Rohit: And users and the groups, authentication is done by common mechanisms like username and password, and policies is basically where you provide this role-based access control. So you put these groups in one of the pre-determined roles, and then you assign some permissions against those roles. So this is how the service works in a nutshell. 
Now anything you create in the cloud, all these objects, whether it's a block storage, it's a compute instance, it's a file storage, it's a database, these are all resources. And if these things are resources, there has to be a unique identifier for these resources, else how are you going to operate on these resources? So what OCI does is it provides its own assigned identifier, which is called Oracle Cloud ID, OCID. You don't have to provide this. We do this automatically for all the resources.
04:02
Nikita: Thanks for that rundown, Rohit. Another feature of OCI is compartments, right? Can you tell us a bit about compartments?
Rohit: When you open an account in OCI, you get a tenancy. That's another fancy name for an account. And we also give you a Root Compartment. So think of Root Compartment as this logical construct where you can keep all of your cloud resources. And then what you could do is, you could create your own individual compartments. And the idea is, you create these for isolation and controlling access. And you could keep a collection of related resources in specific compartments. So the network resource has-- a network compartment has network resources, and storage compartment has storage resources. 
04:46
Rohit: Now, keep in mind, Root Compartment, as I said earlier, can hold all of the cloud resources. So it can be sort of a kitchen sink. You could put everything in there. But the best practice is to create dedicated compartments to isolate resources. You will see why. Let me just explain.
So first thing is, each resource you create belongs to a single compartment. So you create a virtual machine, for example. It goes to Compartment A. It cannot go to Compartment B again. You have to move it from Compartment A, or delete, and re-create in Compartment B. Keep in mind, each resource belongs to a single compartment. 
05:21
Rohit: Why you use compartments in the first place is for controlling access and isolation. So the way you do that is, you have the resources, let's say in this case a block storage, kept in Compartment A. You don't want those to be used by everyone. You want those to be used only by the compute admins and storage admins. 
So you create those admins as users and groups, write these policies, and they can access these resources in this compartment. So it's very important. Do not put all of your resources in the Root Compartment. Create resource-specific compartments, or whichever way you want to divide your tenancies, and put resources accordingly. 
06:00
Lois: Now, how do resources interact if they are in different compartments? Do they all have to be in the same compartment? 
Rohit: Absolutely not! Resources in one compartment can interact with the resource in another compartment. Here, the Virtual Cloud Network is-- the compute instance uses the Virtual Cloud Network, but these are in two different compartments. So this is absolutely supported. And it keeps your design much cleaner. 
Keep in mind that resources can also be moved from one compartment to another. So in this example, Compartment A had a virtual machine. We can move that from Compartment A to Compartment B. Another concept, which is very important to grasp is the compartments are global constructs, like everything in identity. So resources from multiple regions can be in the same compartment. So when you go to Phoenix, you see this compartment existing. You go to Ashburn, you see the same compartment. 
06:55
Rohit: Now, you can write policies to prevent users from accessing resources in a specific region. You could do that. But keep in mind, all the compartments you create are global, and they are available in every region you have access to. Compartments can also be nested. So you have up to six levels nesting provided by compartments. You would do this again because this can mimic your current design, whether it's your organizational design or whether it's your ID hierarchy. You could create nested compartments. It just helps keep your design cleaner. 
07:32
Rohit: And then, finally, you could set quotas and budgets on compartments. So you could say that, my particular compartment, you cannot create a bare metal machine. Or you cannot create an Exadata resource. So you could control it like that. And then you could also create budgets on compartments. So you could say that, if the usage in a particular compartment goes beyond $1,000, you'd get flagged, and you get notified. So you could do that.
So that's compartments for you. It's a very unique feature within OCI. We believe it helps keep your tenancies much better organized. And it really supports your current ID hierarchy and design. 
08:12
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08:53
Nikita: Welcome back! So Rohit, can you tell us a little bit about principals?
Rohit: A principal is an IAM entity that is allowed to interact with OCI resources. There are two kinds of principals primarily in OCI. One is your users. Think about people who are logging on to your console or using your CLI or SDKs, users… human beings actually using your cloud resources. And then the resources themselves can be principals. So a good example of a resource principal is an instance principal which is actually an instance which becomes a principal, which means that it can make API calls against other OCI services like storage. 
09:34
Rohit: Also, when we talk about principles we have groups. And groups are basically collection of users who have the same type of access requirements to resources. So you can have a storage admin group where you could group all the human beings who are storage administrators and so on and so forth.
So let's look at some of the details, starting with authentication. Authentication is sometimes also referred to as AuthN. Authentication is basically figuring out are you who you say you are. And the easiest way to understand this is all of us deal with this on everyday basis. When you go to our website and you provide your username and password to access some of the content, you are being authenticated. 
10:15
Rohit: There are other ways to do authentication. The one common for cloud is API Signing Keys. So when you are making API calls, whether you're using the SDK or the CLI, you would use the API Signing Keys which use a public private key pair to sign these APIs calls and authenticate these APIs calls. It uses an RSA key pair, with both a public key and a private key.
There is also a third way to do authentication, and that's based on authentication tokens. And these are Oracle-generated token strings. And the idea here is you can authenticate third-party APIs which don't support OCI authentication model. 
10:56
Lois: So, then, what are authorizations? 
Rohit: So authorization deals with permissions and figuring out what permissions do you have. In OCI, authorization is done through what we call as IAM policies. And policies, think about these as human readable statements to define granular permissions.
Remember, policies can be attached to a compartment or they could be attached to a tenancy. If they're attached to a tenancy, it applies to everything within that tenancy. If it's applied to a compartment, it applies to only the resources within that compartment. 
11:33
Rohit: The syntax is always you have to start with an allow. Everything is denied by default, so you don't really have to write a deny statement. So you say allow group_name. A group is basically a collection of users. So you cannot write a policy on individual users, you always operate at a group level. To do something, there's a verb. On some resources, there's a resource-type and there's a location. 
Location can be a tenancy. Location can be a compartment. And you can make these policies really complex with adding conditions.
So just to give you an idea of what the verbs might look like. There are four levels of verb. There is a manage, there's a use, there's a read, and there's a inspect. And as you go down, these become additive. 
12:17
Rohit: So manage basically means you can manage your resources, use basically means you can read but you could not do things like update and delete and so on and so forth. And you can read more on the documentation. Resource type basically can be all resources, meaning everything in your account, or it could be compute resources, database resources, whatnot, all the resources you have. 
Now, you could operate at a family level, which is meaning all the entities within that resource family, or you could even go very granular. So you could say that in compute, I just want somebody to operate on the instances, but not work on the instance images. So you could actually do that. 
So this is how you would write a policy. 
12:58
Nikita: For more on OCI, please visit mylearn.oracle.com, create a profile if you don’t already have one, and get started on our free training on OCI Foundations. Taking this training will help you advance and future-proof your career and prepare you for our OCI Foundations Associate exam.
Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham...
Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off!
13:27
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.

Oracle’s next-gen cloud platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, has been helping thousands of companies and millions of users run their entire application portfolio in the cloud. Today, the demand for OCI expertise is growing rapidly. Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Rohit Rahi, as they peel back the layers of OCI to discover why it is one of the world's fastest-growing cloud platforms.

 

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Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Kiran BR, Rashmi Panda, David Wright, the OU Podcast Team, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.

 

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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 Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me today is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor.
Nikita: Hi there! You’re listening to our Best of 2023 series, where over the next few weeks, we’ll be revisiting six of our most popular episodes of the year.
00:47
Lois: Today is episode 2 of 6, and we’re throwing it back to our very first episode of the Oracle University Podcast. It was a conversation that Niki and I had with Rohit Rahi, Vice President, CSS OU Cloud Delivery. During this episode, we discussed Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s core coverage on different tiers.
Nikita: But we began by asking Rohit to explain what OCI is and tell us about its key components. So, let’s jump right in.
01:14
Rohit: Some of the world's largest enterprises are running their mission-critical workloads on Oracle's next generation cloud platform called Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. To keep things simple, let us break them down into seven major categories: Core Infrastructure, Database Services, Data and AI, Analytics, Governance and Administration, Developer Services, and Application Services. 
But first, the foundation of any cloud platform is the global footprint of regions. We have many generally available regions in the world, along with multi-cloud support with Microsoft Azure and a differentiated hybrid offering called Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer. 
01:57
Rohit: We have building blocks on top of this global footprint, the seven categories we just mentioned. At the very bottom, we have the core primitives: compute, storage, and networking. Compute services cover virtual machines, bare metal servers, containers, a managed Kubernetes service, and a managed VMWare service. 
These services are primarily for performing calculations, executing logic, and running applications. Cloud storage includes disks attached to virtual machines, file storage, object storage, archive storage, and data migration services.
02:35
Lois: That’s quite a wide range of storage services. So Rohit, we all know that networking plays an important role in connecting different services. These days, data is growing in size and complexity, and there is a huge demand for a scalable and secure approach to store data. In this context, can you tell us more about the services available in OCI that are related to networking, database, governance, and administration?
03:01
Rohit: Networking features let you set up software defined private networks in Oracle Cloud. OCI provides the broadest and deepest set of networking services with the highest reliability, most security features, and highest performance. 
Then we have database services, we have multiple flavors of database services, both Oracle and open source. We are the only cloud that runs Autonomous Databases and multiple flavors of it, including OLTP, OLAP, and JSON. 
And then you can run databases and virtual machines, bare metal servers, or even Exadata in the cloud. You can also run open source databases, such as MySQL and NoSQL in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. 
03:45
Rohit: Data and AI Services, we have a managed Apache Spark service called Dataflow, a managed service for tracking data artifacts across OCI called Data Catalog, and a managed service for data ingestion and ETL called Data Integration. 
We also have a managed data science platform for machine learning models and training. We also have a managed Apache Kafka service for event streaming use cases. 
Then we have Governance and Administration services. These services include security, identity, and observability and management. We have unique features like compartments that make it operationally easier to manage large and complex environments. Security is integrated into every aspect of OCI, whether it's automatic detection or remediation, what we typically refer as Cloud Security Posture Management, robust network protection or encryption by default. 
We have an integrated observability and management platform with features like logging, logging analytics, and Application Performance Management and much more. 
04:55
Nikita: That’s so fascinating, Rohit. And is there a service that OCI provides to ease the software development process?
Rohit: We have a managed low code service called APEX, several other developer services, and a managed Terraform service called Resource Manager. 
For analytics, we have a managed analytics service called Oracle Analytics Cloud that integrates with various third-party solutions. 
Under Application services, we have a managed serverless offering, call functions, and API gateway and an Events Service to help you create microservices and event driven architectures. 
05:35
Rohit: We have a comprehensive connected SaaS suite across your entire business, finance, human resources, supply chain, manufacturing, advertising, sales, customer service, and marketing all running on OCI. 
That's a long list. And these seven categories and the services mentioned represent just a small fraction of more than 80 services currently available in OCI. 
Fortunately, it is quick and easy to try out a new service using our industry-leading Free Tier account. We are the first cloud to offer a server for just a penny per core hour. 
Whether you're starting with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or migrating your entire data set into it, we can support you in your journey to the cloud.  
06:28
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Join the conversation today!
07:04
Nikita: Welcome back! Now let’s listen to Rohit explain the core constructs of OCI’s physical architecture, starting with regions.
Rohit: Region is a localized geographic area comprising of one or more availability domains. 
Availability domains are one or more fault tolerant data centers located within a region, but connected to each other by a low latency, high bandwidth network. Fault domains is a grouping of hardware and infrastructure within an availability domain to provide anti-affinity. So think about these as logical data centers. 
Today OCI has a massive geographic footprint around the world with multiple regions across the world. And we also have a multi-cloud partnership with Microsoft Azure. And we have a differentiated hybrid cloud offering called Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer. 
08:02
Lois: But before we dive into the physical architecture, can you tell us…how does one actually choose a region? 
Rohit: Choosing a region, you choose a region closest to your users for lowest latency and highest performance. So that's a key criteria.
The second key criteria is data residency and compliance requirements. Many countries have strict data residency requirements, and you have to comply to them. And so you choose a region based on these compliance requirements. 
08:31
Rohit: The third key criteria is service availability. New cloud services are made available based on regional demand at times, regulatory compliance reasons, and resource availability, and several other factors. Keep these three criteria in mind when choosing a region. 
So let's look at each of these in a little bit more detail. Availability domain. Availability domains are isolated from each other, fault tolerant, and very unlikely to fail simultaneously. Because availability domains do not share physical infrastructure, such as power or cooling or the internal network, a failure that impacts one availability domain is unlikely to impact the availability of others. 
A particular region has three availability domains. One availability domain has some kind of an outage, is not available. But the other two availability domains are still up and running. 
09:26
Rohit: We talked about fault domains a little bit earlier. What are fault domains? Think about each availability domain has three fault domains. So think about fault domains as logical data centers within availability domain. 
We have three availability domains, and each of them has three fault domains. So the idea is you put the resources in different fault domains, and they don't share a single point of hardware failure, like physical servers, physical rack, top of rack switches, a power distribution unit. You can get high availability by leveraging fault domains. 
We also leverage fault domains for our own services. So in any region, resources in at most one fault domain are being actively changed at any point in time. This means that availability problems caused by change procedures are isolated at the fault domain level. And moreover, you can control the placement of your compute or database instances to fault domain at instance launch time. So you can specify which fault domain you want to use. 
10:29
Nikita: So then, what’s the general guidance for OCI users? 
Rohit: The general guidance is we have these constructs, like fault domains and availability domains to help you avoid single points of failure. We do that on our own. So we make sure that the servers, the top of rack switch, all are redundant. So you don't have hardware failures or we try to minimize those hardware failures as much as possible. You need to do the same when you are designing your own architecture. 
So let's look at an example. You have a region. You have an availability domain. And as we said, one AD has three fault domains, so you see those fault domains here. 
11:08
Rohit: So first thing you do is when you create an application you create this software-defined virtual network. And then let's say it's a very simple application. You have an application tier. You have a database tier. 
So first thing you could do is you could run multiple copies of your application. So you have an application tier which is replicated across fault domains. And then you have a database, which is also replicated across fault domains. 
11:34
Lois: What’s the benefit of this replication, Rohit? 
Rohit: Well, it gives you that extra layer of redundancy. So something happens to a fault domain, your application is still up and running. 
Now, to take it to the next step, you could replicate the same design in another availability domain. So you could have two copies of your application running. And you can have two copies of your database running. 
11:57
Now, one thing which will come up is how do you make sure your data is synchronized between these copies? And so you could use various technologies like Oracle Data Guard to make sure that your primary and standby-- the data is kept in sync here. And so that-- you can design your application-- your architectures like these to avoid single points of failure. Even for regions where we have a single availability domain, you could still leverage fault domain construct to achieve high availability and avoid single points of failure. 
12:31
Nikita: Thank you, Rohit, for taking us through OCI at a high level. 
Lois: For a more detailed explanation of OCI, please visit mylearn.oracle.com, create a profile if you don’t already have one, and get started on our free training on OCI Foundations. 
Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham...
Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off!
12:57
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.

Sergio Castro joins Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham to explore multicloud, some of its use cases, and the reasons why many businesses are embracing this strategy.

 

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/

 

Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, the OU Podcast Team, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.

 

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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: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs.
Lois: Hi there! If you’ve been following along with us, you’ll know we just completed our first three seasons of the Oracle University Podcast. We’ve had such a great time exploring OCI, Data Management, and Cloud Applications business processes. And we’ve had some pretty awesome special guests, too.
00:56
Nikita: Yeah, it’s been so great having them on and so educational so do check out those episodes if you missed any of them. 
Lois: As we close out the year, we thought this would be a good time to revisit some of our most popular episodes with you. Over the next few weeks, you’ll be able to listen to six of our most popular episodes from this year. 
Nikita: Right, this is the best of the best–according to you–our listeners.  
01:20
Lois: Today’s episode is #1 of 6 and is a throwback to a discussion with our Principal OCI Instructor Sergio Castro on multi-cloud. Keep in mind that this chat took place before the release of Oracle University’s course and certification on multi-cloud. It’s available now on mylearn.oracle.com so if it interests you, you should go check it out.
Nikita: We began by asking Sergio to help us with the basics and explain what multi-cloud is. So, let’s dive right in. Here we go!
01:51
Sergio: Good question. So multi-cloud is leveraging the best offering of two or more cloud service providers. This as a strategy for an IT solution. And Oracle embraces multi-cloud. This strategy was clearly communicated during Open World in Las Vegas last year. We even had demos where OCI presenters opened the cloud Graphic User Interface of other providers during our live sessions. So the concise answer to the question is multi-cloud is two or more cloud vendors providing a consolidated solution to a customer. 
02:29
Nikita: So, would an example of this be when a customer uses OCI and Azure?
Sergio: Absolutely. Yes, exactly. That's what it is. We can say that our official multi-cloud approach started with the interconnect agreement with Azure. But customers, they have already been leveraging our FastConnect partners for interconnecting with other cloud providers. The interconnect agreement with Azure just made it easier. Oracle tools such as Oracle Integration and Golden Gate have been multi-cloud ready even prior to our official announcement.
And if you look at the Oracle's document... the documents from Oracle, you can find VPN access to other cloud providers, but we can talk about that shortly.
03:16
Nikita: OK. So, why would organizations use a multi-cloud strategy? What do they gain by doing that?
Sergio: Oh, there are many reasons why organizations might want to use a multi-cloud strategy. For example, a customer might want to have vendor redundancy. Having the application running with one vendor and having the other vendor just stand by in case something goes wrong with that cloud provider. So it is best practices not to rely on just one cloud service provider. Another customer might want to have the application with one tier or the application tier with one cloud provider and their database tier with another cloud provider.
03:53
Sergio: So this is a solution leveraging the best to cloud providers. Another company or another reason might be a company acquired another one, you know purchasing a second company, and they have different cloud providers and they just want to integrate their cloud resources. So every single cloud provider offer unique solutions and customers want to leverage these strong points. For example, we all know that AWS was the first infrastructure access service provider, and the industry adopted them.
Then other players came along like OCI and customers realized that there are better and less expensive options that now they can take advantage of. So cloud migration is another reason why multi-cloud interconnectivity is needed.
04:42
Lois: Wow! There really are a lot of different use cases for multi-cloud.
Sergio: Yeah, absolutely. There is, Lois. So Golden Gate, for example, this is an Oracle product. Oracle Golden Gate allows replication from two different databases. So if a customer wants to replicate the Oracle Database in OCI, in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, to a SQL server in Azure, this is possible. And now there's an OCI to Azure interconnect (live) and it can facilitate this, this database replication. And if a start-up needs to communicate OCI to Google Cloud Platform, for example, but a digital circuit is not economically viable, then we have published step-by-step configuration instructions for site-to-site VPN, and this includes all the steps on the Google Cloud Platform as well. So these are some of the different use cases.
05:37
Lois: So, what should you keep in mind when you're designing a multi-cloud solution?
Sergio: The first thing that comes to mind is business continuity. It is very important to have High Availability and Disaster Recovery strategies. This to keep the lights on and focus on the organization's current technology, the organization's current needs, the company's vision, and the offering from the cloud service providers out there. The current offerings that each cloud service provider brings to this company.
For example, if an organization's on-premises, current deployment consists of Microsoft applications and Oracle Databases, and they want to use as much as they can of their current knowledge base that their staff has acquired through the years, it only makes sense to take the apps to Azure and the database to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and either leverage ODSA, Oracle Database Solution for Azure, or our OCI-Azure interconnect regions. We have 12 of those.
06:39
Sergio: So ODSA was designed with Azure cloud architects in mind. The Oracle Database solution for Azure. For each database provision using ODSA, the service delivers OCI database metrics, OCI events, and OCI logs to tools such as Azure Application Insights, Azure Event Grid, and Azure Log Analytics.
But the concise key points to keep in mind are latency, security, data movement, orchestration, and operation management.
07:10
Nikita: So, latency... security... Can you tell us a little bit more about these?
Sergio: Yes, latency is crucial. If an application needs, let's say X milliseconds, 3 milliseconds response time, the multi-cloud solution better meet these needs. We recently published a blog post where we released the millisecond response of our 12 interconnect sites to Azure and OCI. We have 12 interconnect sites of Azure regions to 12 regions from OCI. Now, regarding security, in Oracle, we pride ourselves for being a security company. Security is at our core of who we are and we have taken this approach to multi-cloud. This for encryption of data at rest, encryption of data in transit, masking the data in the database, security key management, patching service, Identity and Access Management, Web Application Firewall. All of these solutions from Oracle are very well suited for multi-cloud approach.
08:17
Lois: OK, what about data movement, orchestration and operation management? You mentioned those.
Sergio: I mentioned Golden Gate earlier. So you can use this awesome tool for replication. You can also use this for migration. But data movement is much more than replication, like real live transactions taking place and backup strategies. We have options for all of this. Our object storage, our bulky regions backup strategies. Now for orchestration, the Oracle API Gateway avoids vendor lock-in and enables you to publish APIs with private endpoints that are accessible from within your network and which you can expose with a public IP address. This in case you want to accept traffic from the internet.
09:07
Nikita: Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining those, Sergio. Now, what multi-cloud services does OCI have?
Sergio: So I already mentioned a few like ODSA, the Oracle Database Solution for Azure. So, this is where Azure customers can easily provision, access, and operate an Oracle Database enterprise-grade and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with a familiar Azure-like experience. ODSA was jointly announced back in July 2022 by our CTO Larry Ellison and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. He's the CEO. This was last year.
And we also announced the MySQL Heatwave, which is available on AWS. This solution offers online transactional processing analytics, machine learning, and automation with a single, MySQL database. So OCI multi-cloud approach started when the OCI regions interconnected via FastConnect to Azure regions Express Route. This was back in June of 2019. 
10:12
Sergio: Other products for multi-cloud include OCI integration services, OCI Golden Gate, the Oracle API Gateway, Observability and Management, and Oracle Data Sync to name a few.
Nikita: So we've been working in multi-cloud services since 2019. Interesting. 
Lois: It really is. Sergio, can you tell us a little bit about the type of organizations that can benefit from multi-cloud?
10:36
Sergio: Absolutely. My pleasure. So organizations of all sizes and of all industries can benefit from multi-cloud, from start-ups to companies in the top 100 of the Forbes list and from every corner of the world, you name it, every corner of the world. So it's available worldwide for customers, the Oracle customers. There are also customers, and we know this of other providers.
So in terms of cloud, it's to the customers' benefit that cloud service providers have a multi-cloud strategy. In OCI , OCI has been a pioneer in multi-cloud. It was in 2019 when the FastConnect to Express Route partnership was announced. And Site-to-Site VPN is also available to all three of our major cloud competitors. So the beauty of the last word, cloud competitors, is that indeed they are our competitors and we try to win businesses away from them.
11:29
Sergio: But at the same time, our customers demand the ability for cloud providers to work with each other and our customers are right. And for this reason, we embrace multi-cloud. Recently, the federal government announced that they selected four cloud providers: OCI, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. And also, Uber announced a major deal with OCI and Google Cloud Platform. So these customers, they want us to work together.
So multi-cloud is a way to go, strategy and we want to make our customers happy. So we will operate and work with these cloud providers, service providers.
12:09
Nikita: That's really great. So a customer can take advantage of the benefits of OCI, even if they have other services running on another cloud provider. Now if I wanted to become a multi-cloud developer or a cloud architect, how would I go about getting started? Is there a certification I can get?
Sergio: Absolutely. Excellent question. I love this question. So this depends on where you are in your cloud journey. If you are already a cloud knowledgeable engineer with either AWS or Azure, you can start with our OCI for Azure Architect and OCI for AWS Architect. We have courses for both. And if you are just getting started with cloud and you want to learn OCI, you can start with our OCI Foundations as the path to OCI and as you progress along, we have OCI Architect Associate, we have OCI Architect Professional. So there's a clear path, but if you have a specialty like a developer's or operations or multi-cloud certification, so we have all of this for you. And regarding the OCI Architect Professional certification, it contains in the learning path a lesson and a demo on how to interconnect OCI and Azure from the ground up.
13:23
Lois: And all of this training is available for free on mylearn.oracle.com, right?
Sergio: Yes, that is correct, Lois. Just visit the site, mylearn.oracle.com, and create an account. The site keeps track of your learning progress and you can always come back and continue from where you left off, at your own speed.
13:42
Lois: That's great. And what if I don't want to get certified right now?
Sergio: Of course, you do not have to be pursuing a certification to gain access to the training in MyLearn. If you are only interested in the OCI to Azure interconnection lesson, for example, you can go right to that course in MyLearn, bypassing all the other material. Just watch that lesson. If you're interested, follow along with the demo on your own environments.
14:09
Nikita: So you can take as much or as little training as you want. That's wonderful.
Sergio: Absolutely it is. And with regards to other OCI products that are great for multi-cloud, our API Gateway is greatly covered in our OCI Developer Professional certification. The awesome news that I'm bringing to you right now is that soon Oracle University will release a new OCI multi-cloud certification. This is going to be accompanied by with the learning path and the multi-cloud certification, this is what I'm currently at this moment working on. We are designing the material. We are having fun right now doing the labs, and shortly, we will write the test questions. 
14:51
Lois: That's great news. You know I love to share a sneak peek at new training we're working on. Thank you so much, Sergio, for giving us your time today. This was really insightful.
Sergio: On the contrary, thank you. And thanks to everyone who's listening. I encourage you to go ahead and link your multiple cloud accounts and if you have questions, feel free to reach out. You can find me in the Oracle University Learning Community.
15:15
Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. And like we were saying before, the multi-cloud course has been released and has quickly become one of our most sought-after certifications. So, if you want to access the multi-cloud course, visit mylearn.oracle.com.
Lois: Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Lois Houston…
Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off!
15:39
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.

In the final episode of this season, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Sr. Principal ERP Learning Strategist David Barnacle, dive into the Accounting Transformation process flow, which covers how financial transactions are converted into journal entries and how subledger journal entries are processed through subledger accounting.

 

They also explore the Budget to Report process flow, which focuses on planning, accounting for transactions, and reporting financial information to the appropriate stakeholder. Budget reporting goes a long way in helping businesses take corrective actions and improve their financial performance.

 

Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/

Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/

X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu

 

Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, Parvathy Narayan, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.

 

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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 Innovation Programs.
Lois: Hi there! Last week, we had David “Barney” Barnacle, Sr. Principal ERP Learning Strategist, with us, who spoke about Procure to Pay and Asset Acquisition to Retirement, which are two major business processes within the Oracle Financials Business Process Model. Barney is here with us for one last time this season to take us through the last two business processes, Accounting Transformation and Budget to Report. 
01:02
Nikita: Welcome back, Barney! 
Barney: Hi Niki! Hi Lois!
Nikita: So Barney, what can you tell us about Accounting Transformation?

Barney: Accounting Transformation is one of the most important business processes in the Oracle Cloud Financials Business Process Model. All our enterprises are required to record their financial transactions, and the Oracle Fusion Cloud: ERP application supports businesses in recording these transactions with the help of best practice life cycles like Invoice to Cash, Procure to Pay, and Asset Acquisition to Retirement.
01:32
Nikita: Everything we’ve discussed in our previous episodes.
Barney: Right. Now, Accounting Transformation refers to the process of converting business transactions from Oracle subledgers, or transactions from external source systems, into detailed, auditable journal entries. 
Source systems are typically industry-specific applications that are either purchased from third parties or built internally within the customer organization. Examples of such systems include core banking applications, insurance policy administration applications, billing applications, and point of sales applications.
And to do this transformation, we have a very powerful tool called the Accounting Engine. If the accounting engine is only used in Oracle Cloud Subledgers (for example, Assets, Payables, etc.), then this engine is referred to as the Subledger Accounting Engine.

02:24
Lois: And what does this Subledger Accounting Engine do?
Barney: The Subledger Accounting Engine, also known as SLA, is loaded with predefined event models and accounting methods, i.e. the accounting rules. And within this engine, users can also create user-defined accounting methods, i.e. new rules, to achieve multiple financial reporting requirements. The accounting engine’s job is to convert business transactions into auditable and balanced accounting journal entries.
02:55
Lois: Is SLA a separate product?

Barney: SLA is not a separate product itself but is Oracle’s common engine, which caters to the accounting needs of all the Oracle subledgers. Subledger Accounting is a rules-based accounting engine that is centralized for use by all the Oracle Cloud subledgers.
03:13
Nikita: So how does Subledger Accounting work?
Barney: When using Oracle Cloud Financials, financial transactions such as invoices or payments are recorded in the Oracle Cloud subledger products, whereas transactions from legacy systems are recorded in Oracle Fusion Cloud Accounting Hub.
Each financial transaction has some accounting event type associated with it. For example, creating a customer invoice, adjusting a payment, validating a supplier invoice, and so on.
As I was saying earlier, Subledger Accounting has predefined accounting rule sets, also known as accounting methods. And these accounting methods follow industry practices (for example, Standard accruals).

03:53
Nikita: And how do accounting rules work?
Barney: The accounting rules pick the accounting event type associated with the business transaction. It uses relevant transaction attributes like Amounts, Currencies, Dates, Customers, or Suppliers. Then, it converts the transactional attributes into balanced and auditable Subledger and ultimately General Ledger journal entries, which may also require the copying or complete creation of account code combinations.
04:19
Lois: Can all the accounting requirements of a business be met with the help of standard accounting methods?

Barney: No, Lois. Sometimes, standard accrual accounting methods don’t meet all the accounting or business requirements. But then subledger accounting can support user-defined accounting methods to generate different accounting entries to support these different regulatory or business requirements. For example, by using a local GAAP.
04:44
Nikita: Barney, can you tell us in more detail the various steps involved in the accounting transformation process?

Barney: So, the first step is to record business transactions using modern business life cycles.
As the user processes these transactions, with such actions as create, validate, adjust, delete etc., these actions are recorded as event types. The accounting engine uses these types and the accounting method rules to create detailed subledger journals. It is the accounting rules that take the transaction source attributes, such as amount, date, customer supplier, etc., and converts them into a balanced detailed subledger journal that can be audited. If there are insufficient or incorrect account or no account values within the source transactions, then the account rules, mapping sets, and user-defined formula that can be configured to create the correct account combinations.
05:39
Barney: To create these journals, the create accounting process can be automated to run on a regular basis, typically at least once a day. The Create Accounting process first generates detailed subledger journals in draft or final mode within the SLA data repository. If these SLA journals are in final mode, then they can also be transferred to create summarized or detailed general ledger journals. Once posted, these GL journals update the account balances of all dimensions stored within the GL Essbase cubes.
From these account balances, you can create flexible financial reports to meet the requirements of all stakeholders. And the best part is any role that’s assigned SLA privileges can carry out these tasks.

06:30
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If you’re already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn 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. 
06:59
Nikita: Welcome back. So, transactions are created, accounting is generated using the powerful SLA engine, and then when that’s done, organizations can publish their financial reports and submit them to government authorities and their stakeholders, right? So, how do they administer control over their financial planning and spending? And how do organizations create these different reports?
07:23
Barney: Financial reports/statements are key to assessing the financial efficiency and determining the key performance indicators of any organization or enterprise. In Oracle Fusion Cloud, we talk of producing reports across three key axes, the legal, the management, and the functional axis, to match the varying requirements of stakeholders.
Some organizations, to drive good financial control, plan and generate budgets and/or forecasts. This is so that they can estimate their revenue and expenses for a specific future period. In fact, some enterprises go much further and use budgetary control and encumbrance accounting to ensure expenditure remains within budgeted control levels per period and they can block further expenditure on items that have spent over planned budgeted amounts.
08:15
Barney: Other enterprises may have a rolling 12-month budget that can be updated at the end of each financial period.
Simple to complex budgets or forecasts can be loaded into the GL Essbase cubes and the planned budgeted account balances over a period can easily be compared with actual performance using a variety of financial reporting tools provided by Oracle Cloud. Any budget variance can be used to drive financial control and analysis, while contributing to effective, strategic decision-making.
The Oracle Fusion Cloud Budget to Report process focuses on planning, accounting for transactions, and reporting financial information to the appropriate stakeholder.
08:59
Lois: Why is this process so important for organizations? What are the benefits of budget reporting?

Barney: It is a great way to drive financial control by efficiently tracking the company's performance versus the budget or forecast plan. Budget reporting allows an organization to perform frequent comparisons of forecasted and actual results with the purpose of fixing the key deviations. It allows organizations to allocate cash to assets worth the investment, make acquisitions, or create disposals or disinvestment strategies. 
09:32
Lois: Barney, what are the key processes within Budget to Report?
Barney: Within the Budget to Report processes life cycle, there are three key subprocesses: managing budgets and forecasts, capturing transactions (i.e. account balances), and period close to financial reporting. Accountants will cycle through these three processes on a regular basis, which is typically monthly.
Let’s start with the Manage Budgets and Forecasts process. This process refers to the entire cycle of events that start with planning and formulating and ultimately ends with creating budgets and forecasts in the application. Oracle General Ledger simplifies budget and forecast uploads into the system by the use of Excel spreadsheets.
10:15
Barney: Next is the Capture Transactions and Journal Entry process. Financial transactions captured in the subledgers are accounted for via the SLA accounting engine and are converted into detailed subledger and summarized general ledger journals (i.e. the accounting process we have just discussed under SLA). Manual journals can also be created with the use of the user interface or via spreadsheet uploads. The account combinations on these journal lines, once posted, that record the actual account balances, which detail organization revenue, expenditure, taxation, and so on over a period.
10:52
Barney: The Period Close to Financial Reporting process starts with the period closure for each subledger application, ensuring all financial transactions are captured and reported in the correct period. It includes the reconciliation of all key suspense accounts or key accounts (for example, cash balances, tax debtors, liabilities, etc.), special period-end processing, such as foreign currency requirements for revaluation and translations or allocation journals to spread the account distribution of central costs or revenue pools, and the use of consolidation ledgers, with requirements to move currency account balances between ledgers. Finally, from these consolidated, reconciled account balances, a variety of reporting tools can be used to generate the required financial reports/statements for both internal and external stakeholders. 
11:42
Barney: Some of these reports will include the comparison of actual versus budgeted values, and any key variances will be used to revise or amend the budgets/forecast plans. We return to where we started with a review or modification of our strategic financial plans.
11:59
Nikita: Barney, what are the key job roles associated with the Budget to Report process?
Barney: There are three job roles associated with this process that are predefined as standard by Oracle: General Accountant, Financial Analyst, and General Accounting Manager.
The General Accountant manages all financial transactions and revenue, expenses, assets, liability, and equity accounts, and is responsible for recording accounting adjustments, such as accruals, allocations, currency revaluations, and translations.
The Financial Analyst analyzes the financial performance of an enterprise or an organization.
The General Accounting Manager manages the general accounting functions of an enterprise, including general ledger, subsidiary ledgers. They also manage period close activities.
12:49
Lois: Any final words, Barney, as we conclude this series on ERP Financials business processes? 
Barney: So, in these last couple of episodes, we discussed the five financial business process life cycles. These processes are collectively known as Record to Report.
The Record to Report process includes data extraction, collection, and processing to deliver accurate and timely financial information and enhance decision-making within the organization or enterprise.
Using embedded analytics to drive an error-free financial close process, Oracle Fusion Cloud can not only automate and transform the R2R process, but also enable timely, real-time financial performance reporting.
13:37
Nikita: Thank you so much, Barney, for being our guide and taking us through the Oracle Financials Business Process Model. 
Barney: Thank you. It’s been great being here with both of you.
Lois: If you missed any of our earlier episodes with Barney, you should go back and check them out. And if you’re interested in learning more about Oracle’s business process training and getting certified, visit mylearn.oracle.com. Until next time, this is Lois Houston…
Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off!
14:03

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.

Time to unlock your finance team’s digital potential! Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Sr. Principal ERP Learning Strategist David Barnacle, as they discuss the Procure to Pay process flow, an integral financial process that integrates purchasing with accounts payable activities.

 

They also talk about the Asset Acquisition to Retirement process flow, which includes all the main activities that occur during the life of an asset, right from acquiring it all the way to disposing it at the end of its life.

 

Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/

Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/

X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu

 

Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, Parvathy Narayan, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.

 

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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 Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor.
Nikita: Hi everyone. In our last episode, we looked at Invoice to Cash, which is the first business process within the Oracle Cloud Financials Business Process Model. Invoice to Cash refers to everything from the moment a receivable invoice is created until the customer's receipt is settled and reconciled with the bank statement. If you missed that episode, do go back and give it a listen.
01:01
Lois: Today,  David “Barney” Barnacle, our Sr. Principal ERP Learning Strategist is back on the podcast to tell us about the next two business processes, Procure to Pay and Asset Acquisition to Retirement.
Nikita: Hi Barney! Thanks for being back with us. So, what is the Procure to Pay process?
01:20
Barney: Hi Niki. Hi Lois. Good to be here. Let’s focus on Procure to Pay or P2P for short, which is an integral financial process within any organization. It integrates purchasing with accounts payables activities and involves a series of tasks. These could include placing a purchase requisition or a purchase order, receiving and inspecting the delivered goods or services, capturing the supplier invoices, which is the company’s liability to the supplier, matching the unit quantity and price to the original PO, calculating the relevant taxes or withholding taxes, approving the charges for final payment by the company, and finally, recording the bank statement lines with all payments made to suppliers or employees.
02:04
Barney: Oracle Fusion Cloud: ERP's capacity to use cutting-edge technologies for effective operations is what distinguishes it from the competition. The true value is in the automation, which helps enterprises improve processes, increase efficiency, and get the latest insights and alerts. 
Let me give you some examples within P2P. We have something called Intelligent Document Recognition or IDR for short, which is a fully integrated invoice recognition solution. As you know, many suppliers send payables invoices electronically via email. With Oracle’s cloud solution, IDR extracts invoice information from the emailed documents to create invoices and then imports them directly into Payables.
Another interesting feature is the ability to calculate the trip distance in mileage expense entry by using the Oracle Maps Cloud service. For mileage expense types, on the Oracle Maps page, you can enter the start location, subsequent stops, and the end location. It’s that easy.
03:09
Lois: Oh wow, that’s pretty cool. I remember having to track my miles manually many years ago. What a nice feature. So, is creating an invoice the beginning of the P2P process? 
Barney: No, Lois. Invoicing is not the beginning but just one part of the larger parent P2P process. The P2P process can be broken into three key phases. These phases are set in a repeating loop and fine-tuned and improved with every cycle. The three phases are the Purchasing process, the Receiving process, and finally, the Payment process.
03:46
Barney: During the Purchasing process, purchase requisitions for goods and services are created and approved. Suppliers are evaluated and selected. And then, purchase orders are issued for the required goods and/or services.
Next is the Receiving process, where goods and services are received. Receiving documents are then reviewed and logged for the goods.
In the final Payment process, which includes the Invoice, Payment, and Reconciliation sub-processes, invoices are received and invoice processing is completed, recording the supplier’s liability. Invoices are reconciled and cross-checked with the original purchase orders and goods receipts or receiving documents. This is called purchase order or receipt matching, and it ensures that the enterprises only pay for goods and services it has ordered and received. Errors are recorded and corrected, and approved invoices are paid, reducing the supplier’s liability. Payments are then reconciled with bank statement lines.
04:47
Nikita: OK. So, there are multiple activities, like purchasing, receiving, and invoicing, which are part of the P2P process. But how do these activities flow with regard to the Oracle Fusion Cloud: ERP application? 
Barney: The Procure to Pay process spans multiple departments within an organization. And in the Oracle application, it covers different modules like purchasing, payables, cash management, and general ledger.
Demand generation for goods or services can originate in the Manufacturing departments based on planned or actual orders, or by internal employee orders for goods or services that the business requires. 
05:23
Barney: This demand gets converted into requisitions within the Purchasing department. Everything from the creation all the way to the authorization of these requisitions is performed within the Purchasing department. Once the requests have been authorized, the buyers or procurement agents consolidate the requests and convert them into a purchasing document, like a purchase order.
Next, the process of receiving goods or services against the purchasing document is typically carried out by the employees requesting those goods or services or by the staff at the receiving location.
05:54
Nikita: And a receiving location could be a warehouse, for example, right? So there is a purchasing department processing purchased orders and another receiving department recording the receipt of goods.
Barney: Exactly, Niki. And once the goods are received and recorded, the transaction flows into the Payables department within the finance business function. Supplier Invoice to Payment, which comes within the finance business function, touches internal as well as external parties involved with an organization. 
06:23
Barney: For example, when talking about the process of expense reimbursement, employees are considered internal parties. In this process, employees record and submit expenses incurred on behalf of the organization and are reimbursed for the authorized items.
For an external party, the process of recording invoices against goods or services used by the organization and the subsequent process of making payment to clear these invoices is also a key part of the Procure to Pay process. 
For example, organizations purchase assets like printers or furniture, which are recorded as part of the purchasing process. Oracle Assets is a fully integrated solution to track internal products and assets at internal or external sites, while providing the ability to capture financial transactions with back-office automation.
07:10
Barney: And then there is the Treasury department that some companies may call the Cash department, which, at periodic intervals, receives bank statements and reconciles the statement lines with payments made to suppliers. The key focus of the Treasury department is to determine the cash position and to assist in managing the cash forecasting process.
These are just some activities of the Procure to Pay process that touch multiple departments within the business.
07:35
Lois: You mentioned expense reimbursement and making payments to external suppliers for goods received. How does this fit into the Oracle Financials Business Process Model? 
Barney: As we discussed, P2P involves multiple processes spanning procurement to cash, specifically payables invoice to cash. Let me list out the processes that are aligned with Oracle Financials business processes as part of the P2P process. First, we have the Expense Report to Reimbursement process that deals with getting business expenses reimbursed for employees and contract workers, also known as contingency workers.
08:13
Barney: The Supplier Invoice to Payment process deals with recording liability for purchases made by the organization directly from external parties and paying for those purchases.
The Capture Tax process deals with applying transactional tax or withholding taxes based on the information entered in an invoice and invoice line level, and legislative requirements.
The Bank Transaction to Cash Position process deals with matching bank statement lines to payments made to suppliers. Accountants working in the Treasury department can prepare the expected cash position based on the expected receipts and payments within that specific period. 
08:51
Lois: Each of the Oracle business processes you mentioned seem to be aligned with the general flow of activities in a typical organization. What are the advantages of having such a streamlined P2P process?
Barney: A streamlined and automated Procure to Pay process helps organizations remain compliant with supplier-related contractual terms and legislative tax requirements. It also helps them reduce the risk of fraud with risk migration controls in place and automation within the process. 
09:18
Barney: It results in better supplier management in terms of sourcing and evaluating suppliers, and monitoring and controlling supplier invoice aging, resulting in timely payments being made to suppliers.
The ability to capture supplier invoices from multiple channels, including scanning and online submission by suppliers to enable batch processing of payments, results in cost reduction for an organization and saves hours that would have been spent manually processing invoices and payments. Most importantly, a streamlined Procure to Pay process provides the ability to capture data at each stage, which helps with future decision-making.
09:56
Nikita: What are the job roles associated with the Procure to Pay business process?
Barney: There are a few key job roles in the P2P business process.
There’s the employee job role, which identifies the person as an employee who can create a requisition and an expense report. The Procurement Agent job role is responsible for transactional aspects of procurement processing. The Expense Audit job role reviews and audits expense reports daily to ensure compliance with the company's reimbursement policy. The Accounts Payable Specialist job role enters invoices, ensuring accuracy, uniqueness, and completeness, and matches invoices to the correct purchase orders or receipts, all while making sure that the invoices comply with company policy. The Accounts Payables Supervisor job role oversees the activities of Accounts Payable Specialists, initiates and manages payment runs, and resolves non-data entry holds. And finally, the Cash Manager job role protects and develops the company's liquid assets, maximizing their use and return to the organization.
10:58
Lois: For an organization to have an optimized Procure to Pay process, I’m sure they need to track certain key performance indicators, right? 
Barney: Yes, and they do. Some of the KPIs that are tracked for the P2P process are Expenses vs. Budget, Invoice Payment Days, % Discount Taken, Time to Settlement, Time to Reconcile, and Payables Overdue Invoices.
11:20
Lois: Barney, earlier you spoke about how easy it is to raise expenses and use the Maps functionality. Are there other emerging technologies used by the ERP application in the Procure to Pay process?
Barney: Yes Lois, Oracle Fusion Cloud: ERP uses the latest emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, digital assistants, and image scanning in different areas of the Procure to Pay process. Adaptive Intelligence models are used in the Payables module to calculate and recommend discounts for single payments. Intelligent Document Recognition is used to scan and automate the invoice creation process in Payables, incorporating the required reviews and approvals. Within the Expenses module, Digital Assistants are used to punch in expenses and submit them automatically. You can also click photos of receipts and process them to input the required expenses. 
12:16
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If you’re already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn 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. 
12:47
Nikita: Welcome back. Barney, you mentioned that Payables is one of the starting points to capture or track assets in the application. Can you help us understand how this is built in to Oracle Fusion Cloud?
Barney: In the Oracle Financials Business Process Model, Asset Acquisition to Retirement is a key process that covers all the main activities that occur during the life of an asset, anything from acquiring it to disposing it at the end of its useful life. There are many things a business will need to do with assets. Capture asset acquisition, record financial transactions, track asset movement for reporting and regulatory purposes, and so on. We can manage these assets and simplify fixed asset accounting tasks with the help of Oracle Fusion Assets. It has the ability to record leased assets in line with the requirements of the two new accounting standards.
13:37
Barney: Oracle Assets integrates with other modules like Payables, Subledger Accounting, and Projects. You can add assets and cost adjustments directly into Assets from invoice information in Payables. The Create Mass Additions for Assets process sends valid invoice line distributions and associated discounts from Payables to the Mass Additions interface table in Assets. You can then review the mass addition lines in Assets and determine whether to create assets from them.
14:03
Nikita: So, what are the different stages in the Asset Acquisition to Retirement life cycle? I’m sure the first one has to be acquiring the asset.
Barney: You’re absolutely right there, Niki. The Asset Acquisition to Retirement life cycle starts with the Asset Acquisition stage. A business can acquire an asset through the Procure to Pay life cycle and record the asset in the asset register. An asset can be acquired by purchasing it, leasing it, constructing/developing it (i.e. by the use of Oracle Fusion Projects), or by mergers or acquisitions. And by acquiring assets, we mean capturing and recording the purchase of assets from all business locations.
14:42
Barney: The next stage is Monitoring and Tracking. Once an asset has been created and added to the asset register, you can perform various activities during the asset’s life cycle. These activities could be changing its category or financial details, transferring assets, i.e. from locations, or running or changing depreciation.
Any finally, we have Retirement. When you sell an asset, or an asset is lost, or the asset reaches the end of its useful life, you must remove it from the asset register.
15:14
Lois: And before we let you go for today, remind us – what job roles perform the functions related to this life cycle, Barney?
Barney: There are two main job roles involved in this process. One is the Asset Accountant, the basic user who performs all functions in the asset management module. Then there’s also the Asset Accounting Manager who has much of the same access as the asset accountant, along with extra access in terms of reporting and running accounting processes.
15:40
Nikita: I think we’ve discussed these two important Oracle business processes quite thoroughly. Thank you so much, Barney, for taking us through them. 
Barney: Thanks for having me!
Lois: Yes, thanks, Barney. This is a great introduction. Next week will be our final episode on the Oracle Financials Business Process Model, where we’ll cover the Accounting Transformation and Budget to Report business processes. And don’t forget to head over to mylearn.oracle.com to learn more about these processes and get certified. Until next time, this is Lois Houston…
Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off!
16:13

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.

Want to know about the key financial business processes that make up Invoice to Cash? Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, as well as Sr. Principal ERP Learning Strategist David Barnacle, are here to simplify this critical process flow for you.

 

In this episode, they go over the entire Invoice to Cash process flow, which includes everything from the moment the invoice is created to the moment when the customer's debt (payment) is settled and reconciled with the bank statement.

 

Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/

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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 Innovation Programs.

Lois: Hello everyone! In our last episode, we spoke about Enterprise Resource Planning business processes, particularly those related to Oracle Fusion Cloud: Financials, with our Sr. Principal ERP Learning Strategist David “Barney” Barnacle. We discussed how there are five business processes within the Oracle Cloud Financials Business Process Model. Today, Barney joins us once again to take us through the first of those business processes, the Invoice to Cash process.

Nikita: Welcome back, Barney!

1:08

Barney: Hi Niki. Hi Lois.

Nikita: Barney, what does the Invoice to Cash business process cover?

Barney: Invoice to Cash is a child process of a parent life cycle commonly known as Order to Cash. Order to Cash includes all the steps involved in fulfilling customer orders, from order entry to delivery to the final customer payment.

01:31

Barney: Order processing can take many forms depending on the industry, product, and customer. It can range from delivering standard items that are directly shipped from stock to complex items, configurations (or structures), which can be fulfilled from multiple sources i.e. make, buy, or transfer. It can include processes such as drop shipments and internal orders. Certain businesses may process orders based on subscriptions only, which may or may not include fulfilment of items.

If you’re interested in learning more about these complex business subprocesses, I’d suggest visiting mylearn.oracle.com and looking for the business processes under Supply Chain Management (SCM), in particular Order Management Processing.

02:20

Barney: Here, in the business process for financials, we have simplified Order to Cash into two child subprocesses: Order to Shipment and Invoice to Cash. It is the second subprocess i.e. Invoice to Cash that uses financial products and covers customer billing (including the calculation of transaction tax), customer payments, also known as receipts, bank statements, reconciliation of receipts, and the ultimate creation of accounting entries for all transaction events in this billing process.

02:55

Lois: So, you’re saying Invoice to Cash is just one part of the Order to Cash process.

Barney: That’s right, Lois. While the origin or source of a customer transaction can be multiple feeder systems (for example, Order Management, Projects, Subscription Management, and third-party or legacy billing systems), Invoice to Cash refers to an end-to-end process covering everything from the moment an invoice is created until the customer's debt is finally settled and reconciled with the bank statement. The real value for businesses lies in automating the process and getting insights and alerts from the Oracle Cloud applications to improve their overall profitability and cost savings.

03:38

Lois: Help me understand the flow of events, Barney. Because surely there are processes that occur before an invoice is raised, right? What are the processes covered in the larger Order to Cash cycle?

Barney: You’re absolutely right, Lois. Let’s break it down further.

Order to Cash is the parent business process. It starts in Order Management (with order capture and pricing) and ends in Cash Management (with the reconciliation of customer receipts). If we take a simple view of Order to Cash, we can use, as our example, ordering standard product items delivered directly to the customer from existing stock. We have two subprocesses here: Order to Shipment and Invoice to Cash. These processes use many different SaaS products.

04:25

Barney: The Order to Shipment subprocess starts with order capture by the order entry clerk, the salesperson, or directly input by the customer. The order captures essential attributes, such as items and quantities, required delivery dates, and financial contract terms, like payment terms, and so on. The pricing engine is called to create a sales price and then the global order promising check verifies supply of the items. Once the order is validated, submitted, and optionally approved, the order line passes on to order orchestration or fulfillment.

05:04

Barney: The order orchestration process drives scheduling and reservations. Then, within warehouses, the items are picked, packed, and shipped to the customer. Once the shipment is confirmed, the customer is invoiced based on contractual terms.

Here, the second subprocess of Invoice to Cash takes over. The order orchestration process pushes the order attributes into the auto invoice interface tables. From there, the Billing Manager runs auto invoice to import customer invoices. This, in practice, will often be automated. The transactions will include the correct taxes as well as default accounts, and revenue will be recognized based on defined revenue recognition rules or events.

05:52

Nikita: Can I just interrupt, Barney? What do you mean by revenue recognition rules?

Barney: Revenue recognition is an accounting principle that asserts that revenue must be recognized as it is earned.

Let’s look at this simply.

The revenue recognition principle is a key component of an accrual-basis accounting. This accounting method recognizes revenue once it is considered earned, unlike the alternative cash-basis accounting, which recognizes revenue at the time cash is received or anytime cash changes hands. In the case of cash-based accounting, the revenue recognition principle is not applicable.

06:34

Barney: Revenue is generally recognized after a critical event occurs, like the product being delivered to the customer. Revenue recognition standards can vary based on a company’s accounting method, geographical location, whether they are a public or private entity, and other factors.

In essence, revenue recognition looks to answer when a business has earned its money. Typically, revenue is recognized after the performance obligations are considered fulfilled, and the currency amount is easily measurable to the company. A performance obligation is the promise to provide a distinct good or service to a customer. On the surface, it may seem simple, but a performance obligation being considered fulfilled can vary based on several factors.

07:19

Barney: Essentially, the revenue recognition principle means that companies’ revenues are recognized when the service or product is considered delivered to the customer — not when the cash is received. Determining what constitutes a transaction can require more time and analysis than one might expect. To accurately recognize revenue, companies must pay attention to the five steps outlined in the various accounting standards and ensure they are interpreting them correctly.

07:47

Barney: For revenue recognition within our simple process flow, we could use an account receivables invoice and accounting rule to defer revenue, or we could pass the information over to the Revenue Management product to follow the steps of the relevant accounting standards and only recognize earned revenue when a performance obligation has been satisfied.

Nikita: OK, I get it now. Thanks for that, Barney.

08:10

Barney: Great. So, getting back to our financial process, the invoice or invoices are either printed or electronically sent to the customer. The payment terms attached to each transaction will determine when full payment is due and may include early settlement discounts. Monthly statements sent to the customers will highlight account balances and any late or overdue transactions.

Customers will send their payments, manually or electronically, and the company may also create automatic receipts (commonly known as direct debits) to transfer funds from customer bank accounts to the company’s bank account on a regular monthly basis.

08:52

Barney: The receipt received will be applied to the open transactions (debit items such as invoices) and either clear or reduce the customer’s account balances. The cashier will then ensure these receipts have all been correctly accounted in the company’s bank account – a step called bank account reconciliation.

The subledger accounting rules engine will ensure that at each transaction event (e.g., create invoices, adjust invoices, create receipts), the correct accounting is created and ultimately transferred to the general ledger as receivables journals. That means a full account record is created for each order line processed within the Order to Cash flow.

09:37

Barney: Finally, the Collections team monitors customer account balances on a regular basis and with various collection strategies and actions (such as sending dunning letters) aims to reduce Days Sales Outstanding and improve the company’s cash inflow.

09:53

Lois: Let me make sure I get this. We have the larger life cycle, the Order to Cash process, which connects the various pillars of Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP, like Financials and Procurement. And within them, there are modules like Order Management, Receivables, Collections, Cash Management, and General Ledger.

Barney: Exactly, Lois.

Nikita: So, since the focus of this series is on Oracle Financials, we’d like to learn more about the processes under it.

10:19

Barney: OK, Niki. Oracle Cloud provides capabilities to streamline the Invoice to Cash business process, and Oracle Receivables Cloud is the cornerstone of the Invoice to Cash solution. This application helps you improve cash flow, increase efficiencies, and optimize customer relationships. It has user-friendly interfaces that you can leverage to efficiently manage the process. And you can proactively manage the entire customer billing cycle and process customer receipts.

10:51

Nikita: From what I understand, the Accounts Receivable Specialist seems to be an important role in the Order to Cash process. So, how does the Oracle application help Receivables Specialists work more efficiently?

11:02

Barney: Oracle Receivables has embedded business intelligence that offers summarized dashboards within the work areas, giving you or giving the receivables specialist an intuitive, simple, and modern user experience. Infolets highlight, in real-time, issues with the key processing steps, such as auto invoicing, receipt processing, etc., allowing receivables specialists to take effective action. Some of these errors can also be downloaded into a spreadsheet for efficient bulk correction of data.

11:40

Barney: Another interesting feature is social enterprise network, which can highlight issues within the receivables and collections team, leading to quicker adjustments or corrections of the customer account balances or transactions.

There’s also Oracle Bill Management, which provides a self-service approach to reduce customer inquiries. You can set up Bill Management to enable the customer to directly complete various receivables processes for themselves, such as reviewing outstanding transactions and credit memos, monitoring disputes, and more importantly, making online payments.

12:22

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13:01

Nikita: Welcome back. So Barney, you spoke about how Invoice to Cash has several tasks within it, like invoicing customers, collecting payments, and so on. How does all of this come together in terms of the Oracle Cloud Financials Business Model?

Barney: Invoice to Cash is an integral financial process within organizations and is broadly divided in our model into four subprocesses: Customer Invoice to Receipt, Capture Transactions, Customer Statement to Collection, and Bank Transaction to Position. Let’s have a look at each of these in turn.

13:36

Barney: The Customer Invoice to Receipt subprocess includes several tasks. Everything from recording the invoice to be sent to customers for goods sold or services provided and addressing billing-related issues, if there are any, to recording customer receipts, making adjustments to outstanding amounts, posting receivables activities so that the Receivables subledger can be seamlessly closed, and finally using analysis and reporting tools to get deeper insights and drive better decision-making.

14:04

Lois: That’s a lot of details that are being captured.

Barney: Yes, Lois. Every minute detail that affects the financial status of an organization can be captured, like the Capture Taxes subprocess. This is the process of applying required taxes based on legislative requirements. It’s based on the information entered within the invoice and invoice line level. This could be regarding customer ship to, bill to, product and tax classification codes, and so on. The system automatically applies the attributes and calculates the correct taxes at the invoice line level and then calculates the total taxes applicable to the whole invoice.

14:43

Barney: Then we have the Customer Statement to Collections subprocess, which includes sending statements to customers at periodic intervals, flagging delinquents, creating and assigning collection-related tasks to collection agents, recording and resolving disputes raised by customers, recording payments, and tracking and measuring KPIs to review the collection team’s performance.

And finally, the Bank Transaction to Cash Position subprocess deals with matching bank statement lines to payments received from customers. Accountants working in the Treasury Department can prepare the expected cash positions, based on the expected receipts and payments to be made within the specific time period.

15:26

Lois: OK, so we’ve established that the application captures a lot of details. But we also need to be able to extract this data to assess the financial health of the organization, right? So, when it comes to receivables activities, what are the key performance indicators for an organization?

Barney: Yes, you’re right there, Lois. KPIs are required to closely monitor and measure the performance of an organization. And to really optimize the Invoice to Cash process, the Receivables department in any organization will have certain KPIs they need to track.

16:01

Barney: Some critical ones we’ve already mentioned are Days Sales Outstanding or DSO, which measures the average number of days that a company takes to collect revenue after a sale has been made, Time to Settle, Percentage of Current Receivables, Average Invoice Age, % Disputed Invoices, Operational Cost Per Collection, Number of Delinquent Accounts, and Time to Reconcile. These are all important KPIs. All these KPIs are easily available in the Oracle application in a visual representation, like a graph or percentage, and can be viewed by management simply in a single dashboard. They can also be displayed in a user-designed format for greater efficiency.

16:49

Nikita: Thank you so much, Barney, for coming back to talk to us about the Invoice to Cash business process.

Barney: No worries. Happy to be here.

16:56

Lois: We’re really looking forward to having you back next week to tell us about the next two business processes, Procure to Pay and Asset Acquisition to Retirement. And if you want to learn more about these ERP business processes and get certified, visit mylearn.oracle.com. Until next time, this is Lois Houston…

Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off!

17:18

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