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The IT manager's guide to the business strengths of Oracle

By Scott Robinson, TechRepublic on May 2, 2003

Summary

Oracle is not your average RDBMS. It is a technology that can penetrate just about every aspect of your business. So, having some familiarity with Oracle is a necessary requirement for any IT manager, even if your company doesn't use it internally.

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Oracle is an expanding universe, and if it hasn’t penetrated your environment yet, you may soon see it heading your direction via the system of some partner company. Oracle is more than a platform—it is a bona fide technology—and the prudent IT professional should have some familiarity with it, even if it isn’t your house platform.

The business strengths of Oracle, like most ERP/database environments, include some fundamentals that no company should be without. But Oracle also has many unique qualities that merit special notice. It’s wise to be aware of these, whether you’re considering an Oracle conversion or planning to integrate with an existing Oracle system.

Unparalleled transaction management
Oracle passed through infancy and to its early stages of maturity as a technology in the days before enterprise resource planning (ERP) became the driving force of large-scale information systems. It entrenched itself in high-end LAN and WAN environments by tooling for high efficiency in high-volume processing. The idea was to create a large-scale processing platform that permitted large numbers of users to interact with multiple databases. A few issues Oracle had to contend with are:
  • Concurrency: You run into lots of problems when creating a system with such traditional relational database technology. Why? Well, if you permitted many users at once to access a wide spectrum of data, you must somehow allow for concurrent use. That is, an open-ended number of users may need to be reading certain common data, and an open-ended number of users will need to be maintaining that data in real time. In a traditional relational database management system (RDBMS), this is a major headache. Oracle was cured of that headache before anyone ever thought up the acronym ERP. Concurrency with Oracle is all that you could want it to be.
  • Transactional continuity: The marvelous thing about Oracle is that it is robust against a high update volume, and this volume does not impact extended queries. If you are doing an extended read of an exceptionally large data set, it will be uninterrupted, even if other users are hitting it hard with updates in the process.
  • Recovery: If there is a more recoverable high-volume platform than Oracle, I’m unaware of it. There is almost no way to lose data. What is astonishing about the robustness of Oracle technology in this area is that the RDBMS allows for complexity yet provides individual tables to be recoverable even in cascade updates. You can roll back to the original data at the most local level, no matter how integrated your application.

Rolling with the changes
When Oracle is asked to apply updates to a batch of records, it puts the originals in a rollback area and stores the necessary steps for restoring them if necessary. The capacity of this feature is configurable by your DBA, depending on the degree to which your organization values the capability. It’s important for you as an IT manager to be fully aware of this feature and how it works and to allow for this high degree of recoverability in designing applications.

This powerful capability enables you to write tremendously robust applications. You are given two phases of data management with which to work, and Oracle handles the overhead. There’s an update phase, which puts Oracle to work on the rollback process with whatever data your application is crunching, and a commit phase, which makes changes permanent.

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