Oracle 2020:
A Glimpse Into the Future of Database Management

The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the Oracle DBA job as top 10 job for growth

To fully understand the benefits of computer hardware in the year 2020, we must begin by seeing how the constant changes in CPU, RAM, and disk technology have effected database management over the past six decades.

Once we see the history in its correct perspective, we can understand the evolution of Oracle database systems into their current state.

A Brief History Lesson

The economics of server technology has changed radically over the past 60 years. In the 1960s, IBM dominated the server market with giant mainframe servers that cost millions of dollars. These behemoth mainframes were water-cooled and required huge operations centers and a large staff to support their operations.

• 1960s - Only the largest of corporations could afford their own data processing center, and all small- to mid-sized companies had to rent CPU cycles from a data center in order to automate their business processes.

• 1970s - Small UNIX-based servers existed, such as the PDP-11. However, they were considered far too unreliable to be used for a commercial application.

• 1980s - In 1981, the first commercial personal computer (PC) was unveiled, and practically overnight, computing power was in the hands of the masses. Software vendors rushed to develop useful products that would run on a PC, and the introduction of VisiCalc heralded the first business application outside the mainframe domain.

• 1990s - Oracle appears, and relational databases dominate the IT market. Large shops have hundreds of small UNIX-based computers for their Oracle databases.

• 2000s - Monolithic servers reappear, and Oracle shops undertake a massive server consolidation. By 2008, servers with 256 processors run hundreds of Oracle instances.

• 2010s - Disk becomes obsolete, and all Oracle database are solid-state. Hardware costs fall so much that 70 percent of the IT budget is spent on programmers and DBAs.

Largely the result of the advances of hardware technology, the Oracle professionals of the year 2020 have far different challenges than their ancestors way back in 2005.

• Very Large mainframe servers (Exadata) start to replace the minicomputers of the early 21st century

• The cloud processing paradigm shows that much proprietary software is accessed over the Internet (Word processing, spreadsheet, DBMS)

• PCs are replaced by IAs (Internet Appliances), and laptops and just screens and keyboards with a Java-enabled web browser.

• High-speed network bandwidth allows instant content delivery and server-to-server communications

• The Internet becomes non-anonymous (thanks to Oracle?s Larry Ellison)

• All database systems are solid-state

• Databases become three dimensional, allowing for temporal data presentation

It?s really important to note that all of these changes were the direct reaction to advances in hardware technology. Let?s quickly review the major advances in hardware over the past 15 years:

• 2018 - The first database server with more than 1,000 CPUs is introduced, enabling massive IT server consolidation. Dubbed ?Special K? servers because they have more than 1,000 processors, these boxes allow even the largest corporation to place all of their Oracle instances on a single server.

• 2019 - The first 128-bit processors are introduced.

• 2020 ? Hardware prices fall so much that they become negligible, and the bulk of the IT budget shifts to human costs.

• 2025 - Gallium Arsenide replaces silicon for RAM chips, increasing access speed into picoseconds.

• 2030 - Worldwide high-speed satellite becomes the backbone of the Internet.

• 2040 - Optical eye readers can identify your retina signature, and a quick glance is all that is required for positive identification.

These hardware changes also precipitated important social changes, and the increasing availability of computing resources led to worldwide infrastructure regulations:

• 2005 - Microsoft Office 2005 uses XML standards for MS Word documents and spreadsheets. Business documents are now sharable among all software.

• 2019 - The United Nations passes the Worldwide Internet Certification Act (WICA), requiring positive identification for Internet access.

• 2021 - The SQL-09 committee simplifies data query syntax, allowing natural language database communication.

• 2021 - W3C introduces the Verifiable Internet Protocol (VIP), requiring verifiable identity to access the Web.

• 2024 - Internic implements WICA and VIP, reducing spam and cybercrime by 95 percent worldwide.

• 2028 - Luddites protest the new lack of Internet privacy. The U.S. Congress passes the Data Privacy Act (DPA), requiring all custodians of confidential data to meet rigorous security and privacy requirements.

• 2028 - Internet bandwidth increase to allow high-speed communications between any server.

• 2028 - Internet Appliances (IA) replace personal computers, and all proprietary software is accessible only through the Internet.

• 2029 - Advertising becomes active, and retinal imaging allows for instant identification and customizing of marketing messages. Walk down the street and billboards target their content to the needs of those viewing it at that moment.

Oracle Corporation has played an integral role in the movement, offering low-cost database management and capturing over 90 percent of the database market in 2020. During the past 15 years, we see Oracle playing a major role in facilitating the new technology:

• 2018 - Oracle 14m provides inter-instance sharing of RAM resources. All Oracle instances become self-managing.

• 2020 - Oracle 16ss introduces solid-state, non-disk database management.

• 2011 - Oracle?s Larry Elision finances the Worldwide Internet Identification Database, requiring non-anonymous access and reducing cybercrime. Ellison receives the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian efforts.

• 2016 - Oracle 17-3d introduces the time dimension to database management, allowing three-dimensional data representation.

• 2018 - Oracle starts manufacturing IAs for $50 each, replacing PCs and making the Internet available everywhere in the world. Elision becomes the world?s first trillionaire.

As we see, there have been a huge number of changes over the past 15 years, but what caused them? Let?s take a closer look at how the advances in computer hardware precipitated these life-changing technologies.

Hardware Advances Between 2005 and 2020

Gordon Moore, Director of the Research and Development Laboratories at Fairchild Semiconductor, published a research paper titled ?Cramming More Components into Integrated Circuits? in 1965. Moore performed a linear regression on the rate of change in server processing speed and costs, and noted an exponential growth in processing power and an exponential reduction of processing costs. This discovery led to ?Moore?s Law,? which postulated that CPU power gets four-times faster every three years (refer to figure 1).

Figure 1: Moore?s Law.

However, the ?real? Moore?s Law cannot be boiled down into a one-size-fits-all statement to the effect that everything always gets faster and cheaper.

Prices are always falling, but there are important exceptions to Moore?s Law, especially with regard to disk and RAM technology (refer to figure 2):

Figure 2:The ?real? Moore?s Law.

As we can see, these speed curves are not linear, and this trend has a profound impact on the performance of Oracle databases. Let?s take a closer look.

Disk Storage Changes

I?m old enough to remember when punched cards were the prominent data storage device. Every year, I would get my income tax refund check on a punched card, and we would make Christmas trees from punched cards in the ?Data Processing? department.

My college kids have no idea what the term ?Do not fold, spindle or mutilate? means, and they missed out on the fun of dropping their card deck on the floor and having to use the giant collating machines to re-sequence their deck.

In 1985, I remember buying a 1.2 gigabyte disk (the IBM-3380 disk) for more than $250,000. Today, you can buy 100 GB disks for $10, and 100 GB of RAM for $100. With these types of advances, Moore?s Law for storage costs indicates that:

• Disk storage costs fall 10x every year.

• Storage media is obsolesced every 25 years.

Note that the change to Moore?s Law for disks shows the limitations of the spinning platter technology (refer to figure 3).

Figure 3: Disk speed peaked in the 1990s.

Platters can only spin so fast without becoming aerodynamic, and the disk vendors were hard-pressed to keep their technology improving in speed. Their solution was to add a RAM front-end to their disk arrays and sophisticated, asynchronous read-write software to provide the illusion of faster hardware performance.

RAM Storage Changes

Today in 2020, you can buy 100 GB of RAM for only $100, with access times 600,000 greater than the ancient spinning disk platter of the 20th century. In 2020, a terabyte of RAM costs less than $200.

The introduction of Quantum-state Gallium Arsenide RAM in 2009 was the largest breakthrough in RAM in more then 40 years. Before 2009, RAM always became cheaper every year, but it did not get faster. This meant that CPU speed continued to outpace memory speed, and RAM subsystems had to be localized to keep the CPUs running at full capacity.

Figure 4: Silicon chips did not increase in speed.

Until 2009, RAM speed remained constant at about 20 microseconds (millionths of a second), and even the solid-state database had to deal with the continued increasing speed of CPU resources. Let?s examine the CPU changes over the past 15 years.

Processor Changes

The same trend also exists for processor costs and speed. In the 1970s, a 4-way SMP processor costs over $3,000,000. Today in 2020, the same CPU can be purchased for under $300. CPUs continue to increase speed by four times as much every three years and cut cost in half.

• I/O bandwidth capacity doubles every ten years:
  • 8 bit 1970s
  • 16 bit 1980s
  • 32 bit 1990s
  • 64 bit 2000s
  • 128 bit 2015s
  • 256 bit 2020s

These super-cheap, super-fast processors sounded the death-knell for the age of small computers, and server blades (and Oracle10g Grid computing) were replaced by large, monolithic servers.

Between 2005 and 2009, RAM had to be physically localized near the CPU to keep the processors running at full capacity.

After 2009, the speed of RAM increased to picoseconds (billionths of a second); this development changed server architectures. The largest source of latency was not the wires between the CPU and RAM, and fiber optic cables were required to keep up with the processing speeds. During this period, computer servers first began to take on the familiar tower configuration that we know today. (As we all know, the tower configuration is required to minimize the fiber optical length between the CPU and RAM, and this is required to keep the CPUs operating at full capacity.)

As RAM speed broke the picosecond threshold and approached the speed of light, even the fastest 20th century networks could not keep up with the processing demands. Quantum mechanics and atom-state technology were combined with fiber optics to improve line speeds to keep pace with the hardware.

These advances in hardware made mini-computers instantly obsolete, and management recognized that multiple servers were far too labor intensive. Starting in 2005, we began to see the first wave of the massive server consolidation movement. The large, 64-bit servers with 16, 32, and 64 CPUs became so affordable that companies abandoned their server farms in favor of a single-server source.

Conclusion

This article has shown the major changes to Oracle database technology between 2005 and 2020, and demonstrated how hardware advances preceded and facilitated the changes to Oracle.

The main points of this article include:

• RAM speed remained significantly unchanged until 32-state Gallium Arsenide technology broke the picosecond barrier.

• Solid-state RAM disks made platter disks obsolete and heralded the creation of the first solid-state Oracle architecture.

• Improvements in Internet bandwidth made it possible to have on-demand software delivery from Oracle.

In our next installment, we will consider how the Oracle DBA?s job role is far different in 2020 than it was in 2005. We will also examine the changes to Oracle software over the past 15 years and see how the changing database technology has drastically changed the duties of the Oracle DBA.

Inside Oracle 2020

The year is 2020 and we are taking a historical look at how Oracle database management has advanced over the past 15 years. As we noted in our first installment on Oracle 2020, the hardware advances preceded the changes to 21st century technology. It was only after vendors introduced the new hardware that Oracle databases responded to leverage the new hardware.

One of the greatest hardware-induced technology changes was the second age of mainframe computing which began in 2005 and continues today. Let?s take a look at the second age of mainframes and see how this architecture has changed our lives.

The Second Age of Mainframe computing

At the dawn of the 21st century, a push toward Grid computing began with Oracle10g, as well as a new trend called server consolidation. In both Grid computing and server consolidation, CPU and RAM resources were delivered on-demand as required by your application. In other words, the computing world went straight back to 1965 and re-entered the land of the large, single computer!

The new mainframe-like servers were fully redundant, providing complete hardware reliability for all server components including RAM, CPU and busses. It was clear that server consolidation was a trend that had many benefits and many companies dismantled their ancient distributed UNIX server farms and consolidated into a large single server with huge savings in both management and hardware costs:

• CPU speed continued to outpace memory speed. RAM speed had not improved since the 1970s. This meant that RAM sub-systems had to be localized to keep the CPUs running at full capacity.

• Platter Disks were being replaced by solid-state RAM disk.

• Oracle databases were shifting from being I/O-bound to CPU-bound as a result of improved data caching.

From a historical perspective, we must remember that the initial departure from the ?glass house? mainframe was not motivated by any compelling technology. Rather, it was a pure matter of economics. The new mini-computers of the 1990s were far cheaper than mainframes and provided computing power with a lower hardware cost, but a higher human cost. This required more expensive system administrators and DBAs to manage the multiple servers. This low TCP led IT management to begin dismantling their mainframes, replacing them with hundreds of small UNIX-based minicomputers (refer to figure 1).

Figure 1: The multi-server architecture of the late 20th century

In shops with multiple Oracle instances, consolidating onto a single large Windows server saved thousands of dollars in resource costs and provided better resource allocation. In many cases, the payback period for server consolidation was very fast, especially when the existing system had reached the limitations of the 32-bit architecture.

The proliferation of server farms had caused a huge surge in demand for Oracle DBA professionals. Multiple database servers may have represented job security for the DBA and system administration staff that maintained the servers, but they presented a serious and expensive challenge to IT management because they were far less effective than a monolithic mainframe solution:

• High expense - In large enterprise data centers, hardware resources were deliberately over-allocated in order to accommodate processing-load peaks.

• High waste - Because each Oracle instance resided on a single server, there was significant duplication of administration and maintenance, and a suboptimal utilization of RAM and CPU resources.

• Labor intensive - In many large Oracle shops, a shuffle occurred when a database outgrew its server. A new server was purchased, and the database was moved to the new server. Another database was migrated onto the old server. This shuffling of databases between servers was a huge headache for the Oracle DBAs who were kept busy, after hours, moving databases to new server platforms.

When the new 16, 32, and 64-CPU servers were introduced in the early 21st century, it became clear to IT management that the savings in manpower would easily outweigh the costs of the monolithic hardware.

Oracle professionals realized that within a consolidated server you could easily add CPU and RAM resources to the server as your processing demands increase. This offered a fast, easy, and seamless growth path for the new mainframe computers of the early 21st century (refer to figure 2).

Figure 2: The Intel-CPU mainframe architecture of the early 21st century (Courtesy UNISYS)

Server consolidation technology not only greatly reduced the number of servers. It also reduced the amount of IT staff that was required to maintain the server software.

A single server meant a single copy of the Oracle software. Plus, the operating system controlled resource allocation and the server automatically balanced the demands of many Oracle instances for processing cycles and RAM resources. Of course, the Oracle DBA still maintained control of the RAM and CPU within the server, and they could dedicate Oracle instances to a fixed set of CPUs (using processor affinity) or adjust the CPU dispatching priority (the UNIX ?nice? command) of important Oracle tasks.

If any CPU failed, the monolithic server would re-assign the processing without interruption. This offered a more affordable and simpler solution than Real Applications Clusters or Oracle Grid computing.

By consolidating server resources, the DBA had fewer servers to manage and they no longer needed to be concerned about outgrowing their server. But the server consolidation movement also meant that less Oracle DBAs were needed because there was no longer a need to repeat DBA tasks, over-and-over, on multiple servers. Let?s take a closer look at how the job of the Oracle DBA has changed.

Changing Role of the Oracle DBA in 2020

In the late 20th century, shops had dozens of Oracle DBA staff and important tasks were still overlooked because DBAs said ?It?s not my job,? or ?I don?t have time.? Changing technology mandated that the 21st century DBA would have more overall responsibility for the whole operation of their Oracle database.

Winner of the ?It?s Not My Job? award

So, what did this mean to the Oracle DBA of the early 21st century? Clearly, less time was spent installing and maintaining multiple copies of Oracle, and this freed-up time for the DBA to pursue more advanced tasks such as SQL tuning and database performance optimization.

But the sad reality of server consolidation was that thousands of mediocre Oracle DBAs lost their jobs to this trend. The best DBAs continued to find work, but DBAs who were used for the repetitive tasks of installing upgrades on hundreds of small servers were displaced (refer to figure 3).

Figure 3: The changing dynamics of human and hardware costs

The surviving Oracle DBAs found that they were relieved of the tedium of applying patches to multiple servers, constantly re-allocating server resources with Oracle Grid control, and constantly monitoring and tuning multiple systems. The DBA job role became far more demanding, and many companies started to view the DBA as a technical management position, encompassing far more responsibility than the traditional DBA.

Consequently, many computer professionals and Oracle DBAs were faced with a new requirement to have degrees in both computer science and business administration. The business administration allowed them to understand the working of internal systems and helped them to design the corporate database.

By 2015, the automation of many of the Oracle DBA functions led to the Oracle professional accepting responsibility for a whole new set of duties:

• Data modeling and Oracle database design
• Data interface protocols
• Managing data security
• Managing development projects
• Predicting future Oracle trends for hardware usage and user load

Now that we understand how the DBA job duties expanded in scope, let?s take a look at the evolution of the Oracle database over the past 15 years.

Inside Oracle 2020

The world of Oracle management is totally different today than it was back in 2004. We no longer have to worry about applying patches to Oracle software, all tuning is fully automated and hundreds of Oracle instances all reside within a single company-wide server.

Looking remarkably like the access architectures of the 1970s, all Oracle access is done via disk-less Internet Appliances (IAs), very much like the 3270 dumb terminals from the mainframe days of the late 20th century. The worldwide high-speed network allows all software to be accessed from a single, master location, and everything including word processing, spreadsheets and databases are accessed in virtual space.

Software vendors save millions of dollars and they can instantly transmit patches and upgrades without service interruption. Best of all for the vendor, software piracy is completely eliminated.

The SQL-09 standard also simplified data access for relational databases. Forever removing the FROM and GROUP BY clauses, the SQL-09 standard made it easy to add artificial intelligent language pre-processors to natural language interfaces to Oracle data.

To see the difference, here is a typical SQL statement from the 20th century:

select

   customer_name,

   sum(purchases)

FROM

   customer

natural join

   ordor

WHERE

   customer_location = ?North Carolina?

GROUP BY

   customer_name

ORDER BY 

   customer_name;

SQL-09 SQL removes the need for the FROM and GROUP BY clauses, pulling the table names from the data dictionary.

select

   customer_name,

   sum(purchases)

WHERE

   customer_location = ?North Carolina?

ORDER BY 

   customer_name;

Oracle?s cost-based SQL optimizer is now 100% effective and dynamic sampling ensures that the execution plan is optimal for every query.

We also see that all Oracle software is dynamically accessed over the Web and a single copy of Oracle executables is accessed from the main Oracle software server in Redwood Shores. Several hundred master copies of Oracle exist on the worldwide server and applying patches is a simple matter of re-directing your Oracle instance to pull the executables from another master copy of Oracle.

Oracle first started on-demand computing way back in 2004 when the Oracle10g Enterprise Manager would go to MOSC and gather patch information for the DBA. This has been expanded to allow for all Oracle software to be instantly available by any Internet-enabled appliance.

Oracle?s Inter-Instance Database

If any of you are old enough to remember back to 2008, Oracle abandoned Grid computing in favor of inter-instance sharing of RAM resources. As corporations migrated onto the large monolithic servers, companies began to move hundreds of Oracle instances into a single box. These servers were excellent at sharing CPU resources between instances, but RAM memory could not be freed by one instance to be used by another (refer to figure 4).

Figure 4: Oracle Inter-instance RAM architecture

Oracle borrowed from their Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Automatic Memory Management (AMM) to create a new way for hundreds of Oracle instances to share RAM resources between instances. With RAM costs falling below $1,000 per Terabyte, multi-gigabyte data caches became commonplace.

All Oracle instances become self-managing during this time, and AMM ensured that every instance had on-demand RAM resources.

Solid-State Oracle Database

The first new generation of disk-less Oracle databases was introduced back in 2011 when Oracle 16ss was introduced. Appropriate for all but the largest data warehouses, this disk-less architecture heralded a whole new way of managing Oracle data.

With the solid-state architecture, the old-fashioned RAM region called the SGA disappeared forever and was replaced with a new scheme that managed serialization, locks and latches directly within the RAM data blocks. The idea of ?caching? was gone forever, and everything was available with nanosecond access speeds. With this greatly simplified architecture, Oracle was able to reduce the number of background processes required to manage Oracle and exploit the new solid-state disks. Oracle also improved the serialization mechanisms to make it easier to manage high volumes of simultaneous access. Oracle 16ss was the first commercial database to break the million transactions per second threshold.

Oracle3d Adds a New Dimension

With all Oracle database running in solid-state memory, the introduction of the new 32-state Gallium Arsenide chips with picosecond access speeds shifted the database bottleneck to the network. By now, all traditional wiring has been replaced by fiber optics and all system software is delivered over the web.

In 2016, Oracle 17-3d was introduced to add the temporal dimension to database management. Adding the third dimension of time, Oracle was able to exploit the ancient concept of their Flashback product to allow any Oracle database to be viewed as a dynamic object with the changes to the database available in real-time.

Where from Here?

We have seen Oracle technology come a long way in the first twenty years of the 21st century all as a direct response to advances in hardware. As computing hardware continues to make advancements, Oracle will respond and incorporate the new hardware technology into their data engine.