Just days before his trip to Oracle Open World 2019, we sat down with Martin D’Souza, Director of Innovation at Insum. D’Souza will present two sessions at OOW19, geared towards helping developers Simplify and speed up their work, by applying simple technologies in an unconventional manner. In this interview, we covered his first presentation during the event, “Oracle Database Build Process”.
Q: Your First presentation at Oracle Open World, entitled “Oracle Database Build Process” is aimed at helping developers with doing releases for Oracle Database Development. Is this something that developers struggle with a lot?
A: Yes. It can often be a scattered, even dysfunctional process. And this it has nothing to do with developers’ ability to code. It’s related to their deployment methodology. Often it seems that during the deployment phase, things are slapped together. And by slapping things together I mean like emails going around saying hey run this bit run that bit, or, here, use this or that code. People tend to forget things, and problems are created. This doesn’t happen everywhere, but I have seen it often enough.
Q: What do you think are the reasons behind this?
A: Perhaps one of the reasons is because, in general, Oracle developers haven’t put enough emphasis on deployment over the years. I’ve seen some that have nailed this problem but the majority fall into the other category.
Another problem is that (again, in general) Oracle developers don’t use Version Control properly. Some don’t use it at all.
Yet another problem is who actually runs and is responsible for deployment. Often, the DBA doesn’t actively work on the project gets saddled with this responsibility. They get brought in near the end, during deployment. Traditionally, they are the ones running the release. But that isn’t fair. It isn’t their responsibility. That responsibility should be on the developer. So, the poor DBA has to struggle through it. Has to find a way to get from Dev into Test or Prod. As a result, many DBAs resort to templates and change requests and things are further complicated. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Q: But Don’t tools already exist to better organize code deployment?
A: Yes, there are what are called Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CICD) type tools that help support deployment, but in an Oracle Environment they can take a while to set up and they are not easy to work with so, under pressure to complete the work, people end up favoring an Ad Hoc approach.
Q: And in “Oracle Database Build Process” you’ll be presenting a viable alternative to this?
A: What I’m proposing in this presentation is a structure for people to run their releases in. It’s a very simple structure to do things and by following it you can take this scattered, problematic process and make it simple, cheap and easy to integrate. It’s something we’ve developed over time with our customers, and they love it. Compared with other tools available, it gets you 80% to 90% there, at a fraction of the cost and time. Developers love it because it is simple to work with, managers love it because it instills confidence, and business users like it because they are getting the results they need.
Q: We look forward to your audience’s reaction to your presentation. Thank you, Martin.
A: So do I (laughs). Thank you.
Martin D’Souza’s presentation will be on the first day of Oracle Open World 2019, Monday, September 16th at 12:30 in the Moscone South – Room 313 – All are welcome!
(Editor’s Note: If you are interested in version control, Insum has recently launched a developer tool aimed at easing the version control process when using Oracle Application Express (APEX), Oracle’s Rapid Application Development (RAD) platform) To learn more about this tool, see the APEXcl website
