Migrating to Oracle Database 11gR2

Oracle11gR2 is easier

• Oracle11gR2 is easier to install & manage
  • Lots of tools around the database: Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle VM, SQL Developer, Data Modeler…
  • New intelligent installer: fewer steps, automated fixes…
  • Simplified management: Performance, Fault, Change…
  • ASM Cluster Filesystem
  • New assistants: ASMCA
  • New automated tasks: Automatic SQL tuning…

Defining the Business Value proposition of Oracle11gR2 in just a few slides is a little bit challenging! I will simply recall a few facts that explain why so many Independent Software Vendors (or ISVs) are interested in porting their solutions to Oracle.

Oracle11g is the leading and reference relational database
It is able to store any data on any platform. It is also language independent.

Any data is important because, in the near future, a huge growth area for databases will come from the new needs to store unstructured content.
Think that in the US and soon in the EU, electronic docs like images of invoices are as legal as their paper originals. But it will become mandatory to archive them, to be able to index and retrieve them etc.
Also think of the new needs to store medical images, or to comply with new regulations such as those making mandatory to archive emails…
One of my recent projects has been to scope the migration of a MySQL + Filesystem application storing medical images to Oracle with DICOM support.

And Oracle11gR2 provides all this in a Grid Computing environment, that is to say:
A cost effective platform promoting commodity hardware
In an open environment
Which is highly available
But can still be easily and centrally managed

I remember a time, a couple of years ago, when the database was said to have become “commodity software”.
Sybase, Informix, SQL Server, Oracle … they were thought to have become completely equivalent and interchangeable. And it was somewhat true.

But today, there are a couple of key features that make the Oracle database unique again!

I do not know of any other databases able to directly manage disks, directly doing striping and mirroring. We’re also the only one supporting this rich data model and high availability model that will result is reducing the total cost of ownership by better sharing resources.

And of particular interest is Application Express which provides a free development environment. As you may know, Apex in 11g is much more interesting to partners, as there is no need for any AS to deploy it. No Apache, no nothing, everything is in the db, whereas Apache is needed in 10g.

So many partners are interested in making their solutions available on Oracle.
And many partner recruitments start by a migration project.

A database migration deals with porting existing software to make it compatible with the Oracle database. In general, it is not a complete rewriting of the application, which is kept as unchanged as possible. An example is when a SQL Server application should also become compatible with Oracle.

Oracle provides a set of free tools to facilitate migrations.
Thanks to those tools, migration is easier and can be done without assistance. However, if some technical assistance is required by partners who may be new to our technology, it can be delivered in several ways.

PTS is focused on driving the adoption of Oracle technology and our assistance has often greatly helped to start partnering on a good basis.

By the way, a migration does not necessarily mean that the application stops supporting other databases.

There are other migration projects, for instance to port the application server from IBM Websphere to Oracle Weblogic. PTS can also assist in these projects but to day we will focus on database centric migrations.

Well the good news is that we can always help, whatever the legacy environment may be.
One good thing about PTS is that we are flexible and have gathered a lot of experience over time.

However, there are some common environments for which migration tools exist and in this case, PTS would teach partners how to use them to ease their migrations.

Oracle’s main tool for migration today is SQL Developer, which is free.

Here is more detailed information about the databases actually supported by Oracle migration tools.

Migration workbench is our old tool, that we still can use for Informix.

But once again, if you identify a migration project from Ingres or Progress, we still can help the partner.

Note that for the current release of SQL Developer v2, the following Teradata objects will not be migrated to Oracle: procedures, functions, triggers, views, macros, and BTEQ scripts.

As I already said, we at PTS are flexible.

There are multiple ways to provide migration assistance.

And an important part of the help is to assist the partner to get started on our platform: basic things such as setting up a good development environment, identifying the right tools and a few well chosen examples are very helpful to new partners.

If you have many migration projects and want to address them in a cost effective manner, scheduling a migration workshop is perhaps the best option.

However, in some cases, nothing can replace direct on site assistance.
It is often easier to provide remote assistance after having met a partner in their labs.

Alternatively to direct PTS engagement, it is also possible to send our partners to one of the ISV Migrations Centers aka IMC.

Fujitsu and Oracle have opened three ISV Migration Centers. The ISV Migration Centers are located at Oracle Headquarters in Munich, Germany in Istanbul, Turkey and Moscow, Russia.
The centers are equipped with state-of-the-art Fujitsu technology and offer experts onsite as well as a range of free workshops to help migrate or upgrade your existing solution offerings.

PTS is a team of expert consultants reporting to Oracle development.
We are at the same time the technical arm of our partnering program and in charge to drive the adoption of our technology by the partner community.

We started out as the database migration group (hence the extensive experience is this area). Today, we also offer our assistance to all partners in the world on every product in out technology stack like database, Fusion Middleware, Grid Control etc.

We have a range of Seminars, Workshops, Do-It-Live workshops and one-on-one assistance either on-site or remote. To highlight the Do-It-Live workshops specifically; this is a very successful kind of workshop because instead of using a generic environment, we ask the partner to bring his/her application and database. At the end of the workshop, the new technology (like RAC, Data Guard, Upgrades etc) has been applied and tested on their own environment and they immediately know the pro’s and con’s of using the new technology.

Just to be sure, PTS is not consulting nor support, we try to fill the gap in between. If there is a real support issue with bugs to be fixed, we will hand it over to Support. If the partner cannot be bothered with the new knowledge, he just wants to have the job done, we call Consulting.

PTS transfers skills so that the partner can do it on its own. We do not charge for our workshops or our assistance.

The slide explains itself.

It is important that you provide a business justification so that we are sure to focus our efforts where there is a return on investment that makes sense for the company.

Once the request is accepted, the assigned consultant calls the partner to further qualify the project and
The Account Manager is copied of the exchanges

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