Oracle Magazine - November/December 2011

Oracle Exadata’s
Organizational Impact
With Oracle Exadata, consolidation isn’t just
for information and applications.

By now you have all heard many pro- nouncements about why Oracle Exadata provides a technical and business advantage: data warehousing, big data, consolidation, private clouds, and so on. What I want to discuss in this column, however, is the impact Oracle Exadata has on the team that supports it.

In most organizations, there are three distinct roles to administer your database, server, and storage environments. Often these three roles belong to separate teams with different line management. In rare cases (I’ll let you define how frequent “rare” is), this leads to organizational politics and finger-pointing, particularly when you are experiencing issues with one or more of your database servers.

Enter Oracle Exadata. When you have a new server that integrates, consolidates, and streamlines the administration of your data servers, how do you allocate resources? Which team—DBA, systems administration, or storage—takes on the primary responsibility for the Oracle Exadata Database Machine? Further still, have you introduced a new role to your organization? These are interesting questions that may not yet have definitive answers.

At the Independent Oracle Users Group
(IOUG), we have a fairly DBA-centric view
of things. DBAs make up a significant
part of our history and the roots of our
organization. So when first presented
with the Oracle Exadata challenge, we
looked at it through the DBA prism. We’ve
since discovered that we needed to—and
here I’ll paraphrase Tom Kyte from the
membership lunch at the IOUG Forum at
COLLABORATE—“unlearn what we know
as DBAs.”
Managing a database on Oracle Exadata
truly changes what a DBA needs to manage
for performance and storage optimization.
And if the responsibility for Oracle Exadata
changes how a DBA needs to work, is which
team should have primary responsibility for
Oracle Exadata still the best question? Or do
we in fact need a new kind of administrator:
an Oracle Exadata administrator?