Migrating to the Cloud: Oracle Client/Server Modernization [Paperback]

Tom Laszewski (Author), Prakash Nauduri (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 2011 | ISBN-10: 1597496472 | ISBN-13: 978-1597496476 | Edition: 1

Whether your company is planning on database migration, desktop application migration, or has IT infrastructure consolidation projects, this book gives you all the resources you'll need. It gives you recommendations on tools, strategy and best practices and serves as a guide as you plan, determine effort and budget, design, execute and roll your modern Oracle system out to production. Focusing on Oracle grid relational database technology and Oracle Fusion Middleware as the target cloud-based architecture, your company can gain organizational efficiency, agility, increase innovation and reduce IT Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by moving to service-oriented, Web-based cloud architectures.

• Focuses on Oracle architecture, Middleware and COTS business applications
• Explains the tools and technologies necessary for your legacy migration
• Gives useful information about various strategies, migration methodologies and efficient plans for executing migration projects

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Exclusive: A Letter from Tom Laszewski, author of Migrating to the Cloud

Author Tom Laszewski

Dear Amazon Readers,

From contractors in coffee shops to Fortune 500 boardrooms, people are all talking about using cloud computing and how it can save them time and money. Companies that have no IT solutions in use today, which are very rare, can immediately adopt cloud computing. However, most companies have major investments in client/server IT systems. These companies are running a variety of databases, application languages, COTS applications, storage solutions, hardware platforms, and software and database management products. This book helps any business, small or large, move from a distributed, multi-vendor client/server IT infrastructure to a centralized, cloud-based solution.

Data migration and database vendor consolidation is the first place most companies choose to address. Without access to complete, quality data a company cannot function. Companies are also spending a lot of money keeping disparate data sources in sync and managing the exploding growth of data—“big data.”

Without applications, the data has no value. All your data could be moved to the cloud tomorrow, but what does this do for you? Applications running on desktop PCs and laptops need to be migrated to run in the cloud. Whether this involves placing the applications in a virtualized environment, migrating to a cloud-ready language like Java EE, or using a hosted application like Oracle Application Express is all based upon your IT strategy.

Holding all the data and applications together are infrastructure hardware and software. Some IT organizations believe virtualization is synonymous with cloud computing. Even if everything is virtualized you still need integration, management, provisioning, chargeback and other infrastructure software that will run in a cloud environment.

From your database to your applications and infrastructure, Migrating to the Cloud will help you or your organization have a successful migration for your current IT environment to cloud computing.

--Tom Laszewski

From the Back Cover

Whether your company is planning on database migration, desktop application migration, or has IT infrastructure consolidation projects, this book gives you all the resources you'll need. It gives you recommendations on tools, strategy and best practices and serves as a guide as you plan, determine effort and budget, design, execute and roll your modern Oracle system out to production. Focusing on Oracle grid relational database technology and Oracle Fusion Middleware as the target cloud-based architecture, your company can gain organizational efficiency, agility, increase innovation and reduce IT Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by moving to service-oriented, Web-based cloud architectures.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Syngress; 1 edition (October 17, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1597496472
• ISBN-13: 978-1597496476
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #796,462 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars The Cloud According to Oracle (an early view) June 25, 2012

By Mark Colan TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

PROS
A partial view of Cloud Computing from Oracle's perspective
Extensive discussion of migration for data and applications
Useful migration planning if you're going Oracle, maybe even if you're not

CONS
Biased, essentially an Oracle marketing publication
A little dated/incomplete, due to rapidly changing notions of cloud, even Oracle's view
Very little on virtualization, monitoring, management, security
Missing information on tools for deploying to the cloud (e.g. OVAB)

The sub-title is truth in advertising: it says "Oracle Client/Server Modernization". If your company has already made the decision to go with Oracle, look no farther. Aside from the unavoidable fact that books cannot keep up with rapidly changing technologies (and cloud is developing rapidly), and this book describes capabilities from one of the potential market leaders who is rapidly advancing their strategies, it is a reasonable way to get the big picture of what Oracle thinks cloud should be circa October 2011 (the book's publication date, according to Amazon).

The book's publication date is significant, as it was apparently timed to coincide with Oracle Open World 2011, allowing discussion of some of the new products, but some are missing, too. A key tool for deploying applications is Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, and it is not discussed in this book, despite being presented at Open World.

Oracle has more recently presented their support for both private and public clouds. While the book discusses the terms, only the capabilities for private clouds are presented. They do not talk about Oracle's public cloud strategy or cloud support for Oracle applications, again more recent announcements than the book....

Because the authors work for Oracle, it is unsurprising that the authors make no attempt to provide objective information about Oracle's competition. They make lots of generally negative, not always justifiable comparisons and avoid naming competitors to avoid trouble for it.

The bulk of the chapters - which deal with aspects of migrating data and applications, including estimating the work, and the approach to going about it - are reasonably useful whether you are going with Oracle or not. In an industry of open standards, technologies tend to have a lot in common, so a similar approach would work with another vendor or even open source, though open source brings other considerations as well.

A lot is missing from this presentation of cloud computing. The value of the cloud concept is in sharing system resources. At the center of that are efficient virtualization, and system management to ensure that applications get the resources they need to meet their service level requirements. Sharing resources naturally leads to an increased importance of security. And to be sure all of this is working properly, you need good monitoring. These topics are key to cloud, and they deserve a chapter each (or more) in a book on planning a cloud migration, but most get barely a paragraph each.

If you read the book, take it with a grain of salt. Read about other vendors, look carefully at cost studies that show price-performance comparisons for application systems similar to your core systems before you make your decision. Even with open standards, there are big differences in capabilities, and more importantly in pricing models between vendors to take into consideration.

BOTTOM LINE
This is an unabashedly biased and uneven book written by deep experts for some areas but, of course, not all. It would have benefited from having more authors to cover the missing topics, and being written a bit later when Oracle's own plans were more complete. But if the goal was to promote products early on, it had to go out when it did. Parts are good; essential parts are missing.

Three stars: it's ok for what it is. Read more ›

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Better than thought it would be September 28, 2012

By sanoe.net VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Because I work in an IT Department, I selected this book to read more as learning experience than actual application.

For myself, I was surprised at how readable it was for someone at my level (intermediate at best) yet informative for someone at a higher level. Usually books of this type can be either too light on material to make it easy reading for beginners to intermediate or so advanced that even those who are the intended audience give it up.

But authors Laszewski and Nauduri really balance accessible writing even when the topic starts to go into the higher level process. They also make clear what they do and do not go into such as IT training or documentation on process, etc.

But the book is laid out nicely and broken up in small bites. Since I am in the middle of a data migration project from the validation side, there were certain chapters that popped more for me than others while for a co-worker who I gave the book to for his opinion found that other chapters were of more interest.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Step by Step Guide for Oracle Migrating August 27, 2012

By David Bradshaw VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

This book is specific to Oracle. Do not expect this book to be useful for moving to a Cloud system that is not Oracle. This book offers a semi step by step example of how to migrate to the cloud using Oracle tools. This book offers some neat tools to help you plan for your migration and then helps you get everything ready and then finally take the step to migrating to the cloud. The book does not hide that it is for Oracle, since it is in the title. However, you would still think that it would be useful as an example for other tools, but this was not the case (at least I thought), it is very specific to Oracle and does not offer a lot of backend to help you apply to other tools. I also found that a lot of the beginning of the book was not needed since it was just telling you why Oracle is so great and why you should use it. I did not think that was necessary since if you are reading this book you probably have already decided to go with Oracle (I would think).

In the end this is a nice step by step guide to migrating to the cloud using Oracle. I found that some of the book was not very useful since it seemed like just a push for people to use Oracle. I did like the planning phase and Design phase of the book. It was very interesting and offered some neat advice. This book is a good choice if you are Migrating to the Cloud using Oracle. If you are not using Oracle I would look elsewhere (either for a book on the specific tool you plan to use or a more general book), or if you want to learn why to use Oracle you could read this book as well...

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid Advice, but reads like an advertisement for Oracle July 17, 2012

By D. Baer VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Okay, so I'm not a DBA. I don't work with Oracle software every day; I'm an infrastructure guy. I build the stack (servers, storage, operating systems) that Oracle software uses to run. I've got quite a bit of experience in the industry with cloud, virtualization, and various hardware components in addition to dealing a bit with the applications that run on top of them.

The heavy Oracle sales pitch aside, I found the advice contained within this book valuable for anyone looking to migrate to a Private Cloud. The Public cloud technical details are a little light in my opinion -- the infrastructure is dismissed as simply requiring a magic Oracle Exadata/Exalogic stack or a subscription to Amazon, Savvis, or other cloud provider. From an infrastructure perspective, there is quite a bit more involved than just swiping a credit card to obtain space and compute.

Rather than choosing to write a simple how-to guide for performing migrations, the authors have chosen to create a reference that discusses approaches and strategies in addition to the tools and processes used to perform various migrations to Oracle platforms. Beyond just migrating the data, you've got to consider stored procedures, triggers, views, application front-ends, and a whole slew of other aspects.

Taking a step back and looking at the whole process as a project -- a software development project -- makes a lot of sense and allows consultants and internal IT staff to estimate duration and effort in advance of jumping into something that may take years to complete. I like that the main authors gave three of the later chapters to integrators who have specific experience and were able to provide expert advice, guidance and case studies regarding specific areas of migration.... The topics in these chapters were Sybase-to-Oracle database migration, Oracle Forms to J2EE and SOA-based apps, and PowerBuilder to APEX. It was nice to have that "from the trenches" information and perspective.

Although I found the salesy nature distracting, it did not take away from the overall credibility and value of the guidance provided. For an infrastructure guy, it was a bit distracting that their answer for infrastructure is to simply put everything on Exadata or Exalogic -- the reasoning being that these platforms effectively let the software people ignore the hardware configuration. As long as those solutions meet and don't insanely exceed a customer's needs, I'm good with simplification. Chapter 10 does mention the infrastructure in more depth, but it is still somewhat high level. I guess we infrastructure folk tend to downplay the complexity of migrating databases, too.

Overall, I learned quite a bit about the complexity and considerations involved with migrating databases -- to 'the cloud' or not. This is a huge topic and I think the authors did a fine job making it accessible. I appreciate the comprehensive index that allows me to find what I need quickly, and the endnotes that provide references for additional reading. Read more ›