Oracle Academy Tech Chat

In this episode, we'll talk about Security and Control with Exadata We'll explore how organizations can benefit from cloud innovation while keeping full control over their data — a critical challenge in today's digital world. ---------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript:

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:44:19 Unknown Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy prepares next generation workforce. I'm your host, Alba Joven, and today I am joined by Sylvia Adrdilo an Exadata Cloud customer Service Specialist at Oracle.

00:00:44:21 - 00:01:11:21 Unknown In this episode we will talk about bringing the cloud to you. Security and control with Exadata. We will explore how organizations can benefit from cloud innovation while keeping full control over the data. A critical challenge is to date digital work. So let's get started. To start off, Sylvia, I would love you to share a bit about your background and your current role at Oracle.

00:01:11:22 - 00:01:47:10 Unknown Absolutely. And first of all, thank you so much for having me here. It's, it's absolutely a pleasure. So my journey started with my graduated as a telecommunications engineer from the University of Malaga in Spain in 2014, and after I finish my studies, I jumped straight into the IT world. And it's been over ten years now. So early on I worked on several companies like IBM and U next and Indra, and during those years I mainly worked as a backend developer in several technologies.

00:01:47:12 - 00:02:16:08 Unknown And I have to say that it was a great foundation because you really get to understand how systems talk to each other behind the scenes, which later became super valuable. And after that, I moved into a more operational role. I was a support lead for UCS as Smart Metering Implementation Program, or MIP in Accenture, and as me was at the time, and still is actually a massive national project to modernize how energy usage is tracked across the country.

00:02:16:10 - 00:02:45:03 Unknown And in that role, I supported everything from from manufacturing the smart meters to getting them delivered to warehouses, activating their SIM cards, installing them in homes, and even managing the returns under the activation processes. It was it was a lot about ensuring that that such a massive operation run smoothly, run securely. I was solving incidents quickly, but but also you had to make sure that they were solved correctly.

00:02:45:05 - 00:03:08:21 Unknown So that millions of people were affected. And that really taught me how critical operation, security and resilience are when you're dealing with important data, national infrastructure. And then in in 2021, I joined Oracle as a cloud systems solution engineer. And in that role I started working much closer with customers. I was involved in the pre-sales side of the deals.

00:03:08:23 - 00:03:36:19 Unknown I was doing technical presentations, workshops. I was learning about all kinds of different Oracle technologies. Oracle's hardware portfolio, and also about data center setups and and the needs from different industries. And then last year, in 2024, I moved to my current role as an Excel Data Cloud customer specialist. And in this role I continue supporting our sales team from from a technical standpoint, during the pre-sales process.

00:03:36:22 - 00:04:06:21 Unknown But now I'm more focused or solely focused on Exadata Cloud customer. So basically I help customers and I help internal teams understand what Exadata Cloud Customer is, how it fits into their IT strategy, and especially how it can meet their security and operational needs. So I deliver workshops, I answer technical questions, I join customer meetings, create documentation, and also help train our internal teams so that everyone stays sharp on the technology.

00:04:06:23 - 00:04:32:18 Unknown So to summarize, my my whole career has been about understanding technology deeply and then helping people use it safely and effectively. So now let's talk about a crucial topic that is data security. Can you explain what data security is and why it's so important in today's world? Think of data security like the lock and the alarm system of your home.

00:04:32:20 - 00:05:10:17 Unknown So you keep your doors locked. Maybe you have cameras, sensors, alarms, whatever. All because what's inside your house is valuable and personal. Now, in the digital world, your data, whether it's research papers, personal information or medical records, business transactions and so on is just as valuable, if not more. So data security is the set of practices and technologies that we use to protect that digital home from unauthorized access from theft, corruption or misuse.

00:05:10:19 - 00:05:43:05 Unknown Now, why is it important? Well, because we live in a world where data is currency. So companies, governments and even criminals, they know the power of having information, right? So if someone steals your research, they could profit off your hard work. If they get access to personal data, they can commit identity theft or fraud. If they access login details from a company, they can sell them to malicious actors who impersonate you to steal your information, and so on.

00:05:43:07 - 00:06:12:08 Unknown So on a larger scale, data breaches can cause massive reputational damage to companies. People lose trust in institutions that that can't protect their information. So we have discussed why that is important. But what would you say that are the biggest challenges organizations face trying to protect their data? In that context, what are the best practices you would recommend to follow?

00:06:12:10 - 00:06:42:20 Unknown This is where it gets really interesting, actually and honestly, it's a little bit daunting. So the first challenge is the speed of change. Technology evolves super fast. And unfortunately hackers do also. and another challenge is complexity. So organizations today have data spread across servers, across personal devices, a cloud services, applications or whatever. And every one of those extra connection points is a potential risk, right?

00:06:42:22 - 00:07:14:13 Unknown But actually, one of the biggest risks isn't actually the technology, but the human error. So what does it mean? Well, clicking a bad link, using weak passwords, not updating software, sending confidential information or messaging apps not authorized by the organization. A small mistake like this can have really huge consequences. And even the most advanced security systems cannot really protect against someone accidentally opening the wrong email attachment.

00:07:14:15 - 00:07:39:02 Unknown As for best practices, I think I will summarize. I will summarize them in five areas. So the first one will be to encrypt everything. Encryption is like writing data in a made up language. So even if someone intercepts it, they can't understand. They can understand what's written in it. Nor do anything with it. The second will be the least privilege.

00:07:39:04 - 00:08:05:19 Unknown So only give people access to what they truly need. It's like giving someone a key to just one room instead of the whole building. The third one will be batching and updating systems. So software updates are how we fix security issues or bugs before bad actors can exploit them, right before they can use them in their favor to access their systems.

00:08:05:20 - 00:08:34:07 Unknown Fourth one would be continuous monitoring. So basically do not assume that everything is fine. Use tools to keep an eye on activity. To spot suspicious behavior early and to alert the right people. And fifth. Well, it's, security awareness training, right? This tries to address what I mentioned before on the human error factor. So teach everyone, teach your employees, students, your family members the basics.

00:08:34:09 - 00:09:02:02 Unknown Because awareness is often the first down the best line of of defense. Let's dive a little bit into xCloud consumer. For those who might not be familiar. Can you explain what it is and how it helps address the data security challenge that you just have discussed? Yes, absolutely. And I love this question for obvious reasons. So Exadata Cloud Customer is is a smart solution to a big modern problem.

00:09:02:04 - 00:09:30:15 Unknown Okay. So first of all think of what organizations want today. They want the power and the flexibility of the cloud. That means being able to scale resources up and down. They want to use the latest technology. Automate a lot of tasks, but they also want to keep that control and security. This applies in places like universities, like hospitals, financial public institutions where the sensitive information is everywhere.

00:09:30:17 - 00:09:59:05 Unknown And normally, public cloud services mean that your data lives in a shared data center somewhere out there. But what happens if you can't risk that? Or what happens if regulations dictate that you must keep data in your own facility? That's where Exadata Cloud Customer provides an answer. So first of all, Exadata is Oracle's best database system. And it is a solution on its own.

00:09:59:07 - 00:10:27:23 Unknown It's a rack with database servers. The storage sells and switches for interconnection. But what makes it unique is that it provides ultra high performance. It provides optimized hardware and software and unique features that accelerate the Oracle database and the cloud. A customer or part of the name? It means that it is installed inside your data center, but it's managed like a cloud service.

00:10:28:01 - 00:11:00:11 Unknown Now for security. The setup is actually fantastic because you control the physical access since it's installed in your data center, so there's no need to trust an external data center. You control the network, access all the data is encrypted. And since it's a cloud service, it provides a way, a wide set of automation tools for managing, for example, the lifecycle of databases, the lifecycle of virtual machines, which help reduce that human error.

00:11:00:13 - 00:11:27:06 Unknown And Oracle handles the platform management, the infrastructure, things like patching, updating security in the underlying systems. But only you have the keys to your actual data. So basically actually the cloud customer solves that core tension. It gives you what would be cloud like ease and innovation without really sacrificing security and control. Well, all the information that you are giving us is super interesting and useful.

00:11:27:08 - 00:11:52:22 Unknown I think a common question people have is about data ownership. So with that, that is a cloud consumer who actually owns data and how is it managed? But actually this question has a really short answer. With Exadata Cloud, customer is the customer that owns the data 100% no ambiguity. So Oracle operates the platform. One would be the infrastructure.

00:11:53:00 - 00:12:14:10 Unknown Meaning that we make sure that the infrastructure works well, that it stays secure. It gets the latest patches, gets the faulty parts replaced and so on. But we cannot see or touch or use your data unless you explicitly grant permission. There is, there is a very strict rule separation between what Oracle manages and what the customer manages.

00:12:14:12 - 00:12:44:13 Unknown So Oracle manages what we call the Dom zero or domain zero, which consists of the hardware. So the database servers, the storage cells, the switches, the control plane servers, the firmware, the PDAs, the hypervisor and so on. And the customer manages the Dom, you the domain user, which consists of the virtual machine guests, the databases they create, the infrastructure, the operating system of the virtual machines, encryption keys and the data itself.

00:12:44:15 - 00:13:13:01 Unknown So basically everything that sits on top of the hypervisor is what the customer manages. And the management of the infrastructure from Oracle side happens through secure tunnels and through Rest APIs. And the customer gets dashboards, it gets controls, automation tools to help them manage that database and virtual machine lifecycle tasks. And when I say lifecycle, I mean like creation, deletion, backup, restore, replication, patching and so on.

00:13:13:03 - 00:13:38:15 Unknown And as a customer, you can also control the access permissions, the performance tuning and so on. And even when Oracle needs to do maintenance, we make sure to do it in a way that follows a strict security rules. So Sylvia, we are getting to the end of the podcast. So to wrap up things, what a piece of we had a bit I'm going to repeat.

00:13:38:17 - 00:14:06:01 Unknown So Sylvia, we are going to we multimedia. So Sylvia, we are getting to the end of the podcast. So to wrap up things. What piece of advice would you give to students and faculty when it comes to handle data security in their daily lives? Well, my advice is simple just to start seeing yourself as a guardian of information, not just a new, user.

00:14:06:03 - 00:14:41:00 Unknown Because in today's world, everyone is connected to critical data. So you you have to trade the information that you handle like you will treat a secret that matters to the world. And some practical tips around it. Well, always use strong passwords, unique passwords. Do not click links or open attachments from sources that you don't completely trust. When you are working with sensitive material, make sure that you're using organization approved platforms, secure platforms, and not just whatever is easiest.

00:14:41:02 - 00:15:08:14 Unknown And I think the most important is just to stay curious about cyber security, because it's changing constantly. And being informed even a little bit makes you so much safer. Because data, good data security isn't about being paranoid, but it's about being prepared. And if you make these habits a part of your everyday thinking, you're setting yourself up there to be not just a safe user, but also a safe citizen in the digital world.

00:15:08:16 - 00:15:40:01 Unknown Well, that's some excellent advice. Sylvia Thank you for joining me in today's episode of the podcast. If you would like to learn more about Oracle Academy, be sure to check out our website and subscribe to the podcast to stay up to date with our latest episodes. Thanks for listening. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

In this podcast, Dusa Vukovic, Principal of the Grammar School for Computer Science, Oracle Academy Teacher and Oracle Academy Instructor speaks from her experience using Oracle Academy materials in the classroom, as well as an instructor for Oracle Academy. She speaks about practical things teachers will discover while using Oracle Academy curriculum in their classrooms.

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Episode Transcript:

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:37:04 Unknown Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare the next generation's workforce.

00:00:37:06 - 00:01:10:06 Unknown I'm your host, Ljiljana Krkić. Oracle Academy program manager. In this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Dawsonville College principal of the Grammar School for Computer Science. Oracle Academy teacher and Oracle Academy instructor. She will speak about her experience using Oracle Academy materials in her classroom with her students, as well as an instructor for Oracle Academy. She will speak about practical things teachers will discover while using Oracle Academy curriculum in their classrooms.

00:01:10:08 - 00:01:37:02 Unknown Hi, Dusa. Welcome. Could you please tell us a little bit about your background and your current role? Hello. And also coach, I'm the principal of the grammar school for computer science. It's a school with a especially demanding curriculum designed for students talented in computer science. I have more than 20 years of experience in teaching programing in database topics.

00:01:37:04 - 00:02:06:17 Unknown I'm also author of the several textbook, on computer science since 2010. I have been an instructor for teacher courses within the Oracle Academy program, leading training sessions in Serbia, Montenegro, Turkey, Austria and the Czech Republic. This is really impressive. And could you please describe in more details your early experience with Oracle Academy, and what led you to become an Oracle Academy member as a teacher?

00:02:06:17 - 00:02:36:23 Unknown I'm aware that, especially in the past, but even today, education often provides a lot of theoretical knowledge without giving students a clear sense of how it's applied in the real world. When I first heard about the Oracle Academy program, I immediately thought, this must be different. Oracle is known for its excellent software solutions. So I assumed that their courses would be packed with real world examples and content that could be applied immediately.

00:02:37:01 - 00:03:04:22 Unknown Online courses and training are now a standard part of daily life. Back in 2007, when I took my first Oracle Academy course, very few people had ever experienced online training. Many couldn't imagine what it's like. The online portion of the training back then was nothing like we have today. It involved live chat sessions with only occasional image, and the internet connection was dial up.

00:03:05:00 - 00:03:30:01 Unknown I still remember the sound of the modern screechy as it connected to the landline. It's so funny to think now about the landline. Most people don't even use today. For me, it was an incredibly experience that back in 2007, I was able to follow from my home and online course with instructor Pat Hays was teaching from her office in the United States.

00:03:30:03 - 00:03:56:11 Unknown It really showed me how Oracle was not just keeping up with technological advancements, but actively applying them. That experience inspired me to be a part of that kind of innovation. I wanted to offer my students the opportunity to stay on the cutting edge of technology, learning skills that could be immediately applied in real world scenarios. Yeah, these were really very specific times.

00:03:56:17 - 00:04:23:22 Unknown And tell us, what were some of the key challenges you experienced and how did you overcome them? This is an excellent question. One of the biggest challenges when working with students is capturing their interest and keeping their attention. Many people myself included, agree that this issue is even more pronounced today, largely because kids are surrounded by technology and endless distractions on the internet.

00:04:24:00 - 00:04:52:21 Unknown However, the question of attention and engagement is an essential part of the teaching and learning process. When students are engaged, then focus. The results are always better. They don't just learn a single lesson. It's not about that. It's about developing a desire to keep learning and discovering new things throughout their lives. The Oracle Academy materials play a significant role in sparking students interest and keeping them engaged.

00:04:52:22 - 00:05:23:11 Unknown Students quickly realize that these aren't just abstract concepts, but practical skills that can help them secure good jobs. The lessons give them an opportunity to acquire valuable knowledge and skills that are highly relevant to the real world. In my classes when I teach, I organize activities in a way that maximizes student involvement. I don't just stand in front of students delivering delivering lectures.

00:05:23:13 - 00:05:54:01 Unknown Let me give you some examples. When we are starting a new lesson, I give the students a list of questions that they need to answer by exploring the new materials they read, the lessons they go through, the content and search for answers. In that case, the reading is far from boring. The reading is engaging and interactive. All students are given the same amount of time and the same set of questions, and they are required to write down their answers.

00:05:54:03 - 00:06:22:06 Unknown Later, we compare the results as a group with the goal of helping each student see where they stand and what they can improve. For example, if one student answers 27 questions, another only 15, we analyze what happened. What challenges they face. What could have they done differently? It encourages peer learning as they teach each other through their mistakes and success.

00:06:22:08 - 00:06:57:08 Unknown I also use Oracle Academy Solve it with SQL workshop to encourage students to explore new tools. I provide them with lessons and instructions and they work through the materials practically using a new IT tool, something they haven't used before. At the end, we assess the results together, discussing what went well and what could be improved. This hands on approach not only builds technical skills, but also develop critical thinking and problem problem solving abilities.

00:06:57:13 - 00:07:25:14 Unknown Thank you. And I agree. Focus is a challenge for all of us nowadays. And thank you for all of the advices regarding the groups and organization. And now this leads me to, another question. Tell me, how do you start your school year with new students? How do you introduce Oracle Academy to them? Oh, well, at the beginning of the school year I create Oracle Academy accounts for all students.

00:07:25:16 - 00:07:54:22 Unknown So that gives them access to complete learning materials throughout the year. We go through the curriculum gradually, and I always make sure to point out which lesson we've reached or which specific task we're working on. In that way, they can track their progress for hands on work. Their plenty of examples and exercises within the course itself. I make sure to go through those tasks in class.

00:07:55:00 - 00:08:28:11 Unknown Sometimes we work together. For example, I'm at teacher's computer demonstrating things we have to do, and all students follow on their own computers at other times. I assign tasks for them to complete independently while I circulate around the classroom. Occasionally we practice quiz questions during class, which helps them prepare for the certification exam. When we go over quiz questions, we always discuss them.

00:08:28:13 - 00:08:56:22 Unknown If I notice from their answers that they haven't fully grasped something, we revisit the lesson afterwards. Do I make more example to make things clearer for my students? Wonderful. And now from your teacher's, perspective, you have been Oracle Academy instructor for teacher courses for many years. Could you please tell us more about that experience? Well, this is very important for me.

00:08:57:00 - 00:09:33:07 Unknown The experience I have as an Oracle Academy instructor for teachers working with teachers is especially valuable. Each teacher brings their own experience from the classroom. Those experiences are always visible during training sessions. The process of knowledge exchange in teacher training is never one sided. While I train teachers on how to use Oracle Academy materials in their lessons, I also absorb knowledge from them about their teaching methods and how they work with their students.

00:09:33:09 - 00:10:02:03 Unknown When you're a teacher, your focus isn't just on the subject matter. The main focus is on how to help students acquire knowledge and skills. The way a teacher learns sometimes might not be the same way a student needs to learn. We don't all alone in the same way. Some people prefer to read a lot. They best learn by carefully going through the lesson, only moving to the task.

00:10:02:06 - 00:10:38:16 Unknown After reviewing everything thoroughly. Others skip the long texts. They don't like to read. They go straight to the tasks and they then return to the lesson text only when they need help solving a problem. Some students enjoy learning through competition. Others dread it. These are just a few examples in direct work with students in the classroom. The process of teaching and learning reveals how many different ways there are to learn, and what patterns can lead to knowledge acquisition.

00:10:38:18 - 00:11:03:18 Unknown The training sessions I've led as an Oracle Academy instructor gave me the chance to meet many teachers, not only from my own country, but from other countries as well. This has allowed me to peek into other classrooms and get to know the diverse teaching methods used by teachers with their students. Thank you so much for those valuable advices.

00:11:03:20 - 00:11:27:05 Unknown And now, one final question. If you could give one piece of advice to faculty or students, what would it be? Thank you for this opportunity to share my thoughts. I think that the most important thing is to take care of yourself and each other. And that includes using the knowledge you gain in a way that benefits people in the world.

00:11:27:07 - 00:11:58:10 Unknown Always think about how you can apply your knowledge to make life better for all of us. In the past, teachers used to teach the same lessons and assigned the same task. Year after year, from the time they started working until they retired. That's just not the case anymore. Technology is constantly changing and advancing. Those changes don't only affect subjects related to information and computer communication technologies.

00:11:58:12 - 00:12:28:00 Unknown They also impact how other school subjects are taught. Oracle Academy is always introducing new materials and new courses. Teachers shouldn't be afraid of the new. Teachers don't have to master every detail of the course before introducing it to the students. It's perfectly fine for teachers to learn alongside students and explore new concepts together as they come up in the class.

00:12:28:01 - 00:12:56:11 Unknown Students shouldn't believe that there is a person who knows everything. That's not the teacher's role. The teacher's role is to spark a passion for learning in students. It's not embarrassingly scary not to know something. What matters the most is the desire to explore and learn. Thank you so much for sharing highlights from your huge experience with us and with Oracle Academy that TEDx audience.

00:12:56:13 - 00:13:15:08 Unknown It is a pleasure to work with you. Thank you Ljiljana. I'm so happy to be part of the Oracle Academy program. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

In this Episode Orlaith Lawton speaks with Oracle ACE Roberto Capancioni about the importance of APEX and why it is the world's most popular low-code application platform.

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Episode Transcript:

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:35:14 Unknown Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to Oracle Academy Texas, where we discuss how Oracle Academy prepares the next generation's workforce.

00:00:35:15 - 00:01:03:22 Unknown I'm your host Orlaith Lawton. In this episode, we dive into the transformative power of the low code software development and explore how it's reshaping industries, streamlining workflows, and enabling faster innovation. Our guest today is Oracle Ace Roberto Journey, and he shares his expertise on Oracle Apex, the world's most popular low code application platform. You're very welcome, Roberto.

00:01:04:02 - 00:01:34:01 Unknown Lovely to talk to you. And thank you so much for being our guest today on our podcast. Start off, Roberto, can you please give me a little bit about your background and your current job role? Thank you all for inviting me. If I'm open for me to be here with you and to share my knowledge in Oracle Apex and the Oracle technology in general, because I'm very, enthusiast of these environments.

00:01:34:01 - 00:02:37:17 Unknown And I try to explain why. My name is Roberto. I'm, I'm an engineer, and, I've been working in, in I.T for about 30 years. I started, focusing in databases or relational databases and, application development that many years ago for multi utility companies, also in, service sectors company. At the moment I work with mainly exclusively in apex project because they're a when I found the apex about 15 years ago, I thought that it was the, the only take for developing application in, in my career and the, in the the following of this podcast, I try to explain, explain why I also collaborators,

00:02:37:19 - 00:03:14:13 Unknown as a trainer and the also a consultant with companies and also education institution. So, I'm, I'd like to explain to student mainly to student and school because I think that at the moment the there is the need of this kind of, example of code of, the middle word technology, because, Oracle technology is suitable for company and also for educational institutions.

00:03:14:15 - 00:03:48:01 Unknown Thank you, Roberto, for that. And what is apex and what are the benefits of using Apex? Okay. In the apex is the, so-called low code development platform. Why low code look on? Because it the code at the moment is, mainly. And the hype word because the when you say low code, do you want to say that everybody can develop, quick and dirty applications.

00:03:48:03 - 00:04:30:01 Unknown And if you want, the apex can also do that. You can, develop in about an hour a very simple application. But the, the secret is that is also low code application. So it's suitable for business user, for student, for junior developers and also for enterprise applications or grades of housing because the technology that is below apex, that is the Oracle database is an enterprise platform.

00:04:30:01 - 00:05:16:07 Unknown So every company can leverage of database and the, the, low code, the environment, the to develop to develop application. So the secret is that, if you know, languages, if, you know, business problem, apex can without writing, single frontend code, the frontend means all the code that you have to write to create the web application that that usually it's not simple for also, for all the, old style, developers, apex do it for you.

00:05:16:07 - 00:05:51:11 Unknown So you can have to write frontend code. Also business code that you know that also or developers can do in they career and they don't know, web application because they are doing another job with apex. You can develop it quickly. Business application. So why is this the world's most popular low code application platform? I think for, for several reasons.

00:05:51:11 - 00:06:24:12 Unknown First of all, apex is included inside the, he tried the the Oracle database license, if you haven't to pay for apex because, apex is the database. Oracle is an extension of the database Oracle. So if you have a database, you data but you have to pay nothing to have Apex. You have a really apex in your environment.

00:06:24:12 - 00:07:23:01 Unknown You have even the two, provide the, application server or other, tech inside your component. Because if you have Oracle database, you have a really also apex. So, it's, it's very simple to start, but also, if you haven't developed with it and the it is, a mature technology because, even if, only this year we hear about, apex because when, Oracle became, cloud company about two, five years ago mainly, you know, also before, but, it's, the last five years that that there was an explosion in the cloud of Oracle apex became strategic because is inside the the cloud technology

00:07:23:01 - 00:08:02:03 Unknown of of Oracle. Sure. Oracle has auto language database. Autonomous database is a platform as a service that Oracle asks for. For the companies, you with a simple, subscription you and access, instantaneously to the database in the cloud. And also, apex also updated the maintain need that fine tuning the from Oracle you UI to be, online subscription and all is, provided for you.

00:08:02:03 - 00:08:37:13 Unknown So it's very easy to have an environment that is secure, is maintaining with the GDPR, at the moment. But, watchdog every DPO has to concern about the, the security, the, the explosion, exploitation and the all the problems that you have to maintain updated your environment with the autonomous database, the Oracle do it for you and apex is it inside the autonomous database.

00:08:37:15 - 00:09:20:18 Unknown So with a minimal effort, you have a mature, enterprise ready. GDPR really needs to read the environment. And, inside the your organization. So, I think that the company appreciate that because determinative there are several out there native. But only tools, only development tools. So Oracle is a complete the stack from the infrastructure from the Sabara database middleware, application server from them.

00:09:20:18 - 00:09:49:15 Unknown But, it it is the only product in the world, that can do that at the moment. That's a very detailed account of this. Thank you so much for that. Roberto, may I ask you can apex help with generators, AI or AI? Apex makes it easy to integrate AI model and external services inside the, inside is environment.

00:09:49:17 - 00:10:26:11 Unknown Mainly because, apex is the DB oracle. So as you know, the last, version of the, Oracle database is a 23 I why I mainly because you use that and marketing subject all today. All all products are AI but Oracle provide the SAP environment agent in the EAS autonomous cloud that can integrate with apex.

00:10:26:13 - 00:11:02:15 Unknown Apex has the, enterprise ready Add-On to, integrate with, a Lem agent that so you can do in ad declarative way without to, hassle, experience program because there are several weeds. And the several. Yeah. It really application inside the, the the gallery and the, demo product that, installed in provided in the apex environment.

00:11:02:17 - 00:11:48:17 Unknown So, always the AI is, increasing every way. The model, the MCP server, today we can have also tool that the provide the ASR, in interface to interact with the, agent that in, in the industry from which are GP3, cloud, IEEE, all the, the agent that we ever in at the moment and apic is the, enterprise ready to do that for the novice and the for the experience developer?

00:11:48:19 - 00:12:49:08 Unknown How do you see apex being used in the future? I believe that the apex will, becoming increasingly strategic for the organization. And the speed to, to see many extension also because of AI, IoT analytics. Don't forget that Oracle as wide ecosystem side that is cloud. The from the diffusion application that the software as a service application that Oracle provide to the companies and the analytics application we have in Oracle analytic servers in the apex again, can be the, the Swiss knife that the can integrate with the tailor made this process, all the orchestration, all the workflow that we can have between all

00:12:49:08 - 00:13:23:09 Unknown the Oracle ecosystem product but not also Oracle because the in the mean the Odeon world or the, enterprise application as a software as a service application and the, the rice there is that there are the, the standard interfaces to, interact with, the other products. Is convenience also focused on development, of integration.

00:13:23:09 - 00:13:57:19 Unknown So apex can do, invite development environment for software application, software as a service application, but also also integration application. And at the moment this is the most important things for the companies because all the companies, has ERP, cloud Europe very valued and the expensive environment and that are migrating in cloud.

00:13:57:21 - 00:14:42:22 Unknown So we are losing the but ability to connect directly with the database, because at the moment that they have on premise, product, when they, on cloud is more difficult to interact directly with the database. So they have an API, they have Rest services. They and, need other, tools to interact with the application to get, to fetch all their data for business intelligence, application front orchestration, AI application and data analysis.

00:14:43:00 - 00:15:21:09 Unknown Oracle apex can help a lot. And this is one of the my main, a job at the moment to integrate, into prize, application like ERP with custom software in the company with the Oracle Apex autonomous database to provide business intelligence, application reporting application, orchestration workflow application. Because the don't forget, apex is the, a very powerful environment also to create workflow application.

00:15:21:11 - 00:16:02:17 Unknown And the, is the mobile first, the, environment. So every, application that I create, the is provided first on the mobile mobile phone tablet, with also progressive web application that is and and I look and feel of native application but is more cheaper and more quickly to develop and the is robust and enterprise in the use of finally as a native application of the mobile.

00:16:02:18 - 00:16:39:02 Unknown So apex has all the instrument on the characteristic to be the first environment for, consumer enterprise applications and also integration application between software as a service, enterprise software. That is really interesting to hear. You know, I didn't realize just how valuable that is. Because when you look at apex, sometimes it seems so simple. You know, it is a low code, but it just shows you how instrumental it is.

00:16:39:02 - 00:17:00:01 Unknown And I love the description you give. It's a Swiss Army knife. That's a very good description of it being the Swiss knife, being able to, knit and everything together and fix everything together. And it sounds like it's, it's it can be used in very complicated manners as well, which is fantastic. So it's great for, our students and faculty to hear that.

00:17:00:03 - 00:17:38:06 Unknown And finally, Roberto, if you could give one piece of advice to faculty or students, what would that advice be? And my advice is, to start experimenting as soon as possible. Apex offers free and via romance. You can have, a workspace. A is the the first environment that you can have a workspace, asking for Oracle in, five minutes, account subscription.

00:17:38:08 - 00:18:12:20 Unknown Or you can ask for, free environment, a free tier and Oracle specify always free the always free because it is not not a thought. The these the environment the more. And then you have to be always free means that you can be inside always. And that this is the same enterprise environment is not limited. You have the same function ability.

00:18:12:20 - 00:18:43:08 Unknown And, all the environments that are major, apex, and not, machine learning, machine learning for Python at the moment with the students that we, providing an initiative where you start from the database with Apex, then extend with the Python library, machine learning Python, then back to the database, make to apex. So there is an integration and you can do that.

00:18:43:12 - 00:19:24:21 Unknown But in the free environment you have no limit. Also resource limit that for an education environment is not a problem. And neither for elite or enterprise leader. Business environment is not a problem because, you, you have a natural resource for how to, leader. Leader environment sure is suitable for a school for students that want to try because, if Oracle has the in several tutorials, several, initiative documentation, lab activity.

00:19:24:23 - 00:19:55:15 Unknown So you can also yourself as a student or, or as a teacher that want to provide to a class, a demo environment to, to start learning, experiment is the first one because you can do that. But with, a general in the I value deductive environment because, don't forget that the, the, sequel Oracle database is, is your stand up 23.

00:19:55:15 - 00:20:38:14 Unknown So, I'm afraid I need the teacher that say to me, but you, you are teaching, appropriate theory technology. Oracle is not that. Yes. Oracle is not open source. That sequel is just standard visual queen. If you learn Oracle database, you learn all the relational database. And the Oracle is more than that. If you learn apex is a web application and the user experience pattern that you can learn, genera, you can do that from, recreate from scratch, free within other environment.

00:20:38:14 - 00:21:17:02 Unknown But in apex you can learn faster. You can learn faster. Database, relational database. Web application paper. You pattern on application, master detail, application workflow, application automation, all the things that you find in apex. Standard, web standard tool that in another environment you have to create impact with the server. Yeah. Or but experience that or studying for more more time that with apex apex in weeks.

00:21:17:04 - 00:21:54:03 Unknown At the moment I it tomorrow I would finish at 20. Yeah I was course in apex where where and experience had people business user in 20 hours can create but I keep the business ready environment that can be used in production. And also you can do that with another tool at the moment. So is important in this code because, the theory is in the theory is important school as, as to lead to teach.

00:21:54:05 - 00:22:33:10 Unknown Start knowledge of AI. The first and the first. The to say that the you can, reinforce the abstract knowledge with practice and if you have demo, industrial ready and business ready tools, you can understand better. And the at the end is not the, the main important thing for a school, but it helps. You are ready for, company, because if you go to a company and they, you can provide the, the demonstration that you can develop an application as you do in apex.

00:22:33:12 - 00:23:04:07 Unknown Many Sara applications inside the company. Not so well developed as a, develop it also in, in education. And then when battlement so it's too easy also to find a job if you have portfolio a done in epic. Absolutely. And that's great information for our students and faculty. Thank you so much, Roberto, for giving us your time today.

00:23:04:09 - 00:23:35:12 Unknown For sharing your expertise. On apex, I know you're an oracle case. You're a true believer in apex. And you've been fantastic for all of our students and faculty in SC in particular. And I really want to thank you and my colleague Robert Bertelli for being part of this podcast. Thank you so much. And for those of you who are listening who may not be familiar with Oracle Academy, please take a look at our website and see if there's any resources that you think will be useful to you and your students.

00:23:35:18 - 00:23:55:04 Unknown Once again, many thanks to Roberto. And thank you so much. And thank you again soon. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

In this Episode Tyra Peirce speaks with speaks with Oracle ACE Satwik Reddy about how businesses leverage Oracle APEX to build powerful applications without the need for extensive coding.

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Episode Transcript:

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:35:04 Unknown Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy prepares the next generation's workforce.

00:00:35:05 - 00:01:11:14 Unknown I'm your host, Tyra Peirce. In this episode, we dive into the transformative power of low code software development and explore how it's reshaping industries, streamlining workflows, and enabling faster innovation. Our guest, Oracle ace Satwik Reddy, shares his expertise on how businesses leverage Oracle Apex to build powerful applications without the need for extensive coding. Welcome Chadwick or Hyder. To start off, can you give me a bit about your background and your current job role?

00:01:11:16 - 00:01:40:09 Unknown Hey there. Developer tech enthusiast standing around an accidental quarter turn full time epics. Advocate. I have been working with Oracle Apex for over 13 years now. Here, like it's more than a decade deep in the loop code. It all began, back in my grad school. Like, me and my couple of friends, like, we are doing a hackathon and we were dabbling in different programing languages, trying to build a website.

00:01:40:11 - 00:02:11:02 Unknown And that's when, we stumbled across Oracle Apex. And honestly, it just clicked and we loved it. Since then, apex has been my jam and butter. Like, let's say right now I work as an apex technical lead. That means I do a lot of hats, like gathering requirements from stakeholders, designing scalable applications like a team of developers like, and make sure that when built, actually solves the real world problems.

00:02:11:04 - 00:02:37:17 Unknown And think of me as an orchestra conductor, like making sure every piece of the development puzzle fits licensing and hits the right notes in terms of performance, scalability, and reliability. And I also handle the production support and mentor the junior dev developers. Docker reviews write production design documents, and make sure every project stays aligned with the big picture goals of the organization.

00:02:37:17 - 00:03:07:19 Unknown So yeah, like yeah, a lot of moving parts, but with epics things move fast, faster, smoother than we would think. I love that you're so involved in the apex development from the beginning to the end. You're mentoring the junior staff and new apex developers, so you are quite the apex expert. So for my next question, what is low code application and what is low code application development and why should students learn it?

00:03:07:21 - 00:03:39:04 Unknown Great question. Let's start with low code and why it's not just a buzzword but a game changer, especially for students. In the morning the of building software. Right. Like low code. Development doesn't really, rely heavily on manual coding. Instead of writing thousands of lines of code, you visualize tools and like drag and drop interfaces, templates, reusable components, which can help you build apps quickly and efficiently.

00:03:39:06 - 00:04:01:00 Unknown And think of it like this. Like, instead of starting from scratch, low code gives you a toolbox full of ready made pads. You just snap them together, kind of like digital Lego and build what you need. And now, like here, here's where it gets even cooler. A lot of these platforms like Oracle Apex are adding more AI powered features.

00:04:01:02 - 00:04:39:23 Unknown That means you can build apps that analyze data and make predictions, create smart forms that adjust in real time to what the user types are. Even automate workflows like using AI driven decision making. So what used to take weeks or months to code? You can just create in days? Sometimes maybe has help now, like why students? Why should students care like live in break down this and like local development right is in high demand across industries making it a valuable skill that boosts employability for people from all backgrounds.

00:04:40:01 - 00:05:10:11 Unknown Like, you don't need to be a computer science major like any business students or educators, even art students, anyone who can learn low code and use it to solve real world problems. And it also helps in quick prototyping because let's say you want an idea for an app, you can go from concept to working name in a way you can already, or even an idea that's huge for class projects like hackathons or even the startup pitches.

00:05:10:13 - 00:05:43:06 Unknown Or if you're building any, demo or doing something. And it's also budget friendly. I can is doing a great job by giving it for free with Oracle database, which means you don't need to spend a dime to get started. And it also helps when prepping for the future. Like as AI becomes part of our daily digital tool and local platforms, helps build smarter apps without needing to be data cities like.

00:05:43:08 - 00:06:18:21 Unknown And it's like having AI as the coding copilot. And when it comes to choosing the platform, Oracle Apex stands out. In that case, it's tightly integrated with the Oracle database. It scales easily from story projects to full enterprise systems. It supports cloud and on premise deployment, and many of the big organizations uses like QR and finance, health, manufacturing or retail and also pharmaceutical and stuff.

00:06:19:00 - 00:06:49:11 Unknown Here, students aren't just learning theory, they're gaining real world resume really skills. So if I sum it up or the bottom line is low code is leveling the playing field locally, it's like leveling the playing field with tools like Oracle, apex, and a bit of creativity. Students go from I have an idea to I built an app faster than I had, and with AI in the mix, they're winning smarter, faster, and with more impact.

00:06:49:12 - 00:07:10:01 Unknown I love that answer because it shows that students don't have to be a computer science major. They can get, they can get ramped up pretty easy. And through Oracle Academy and through Oracle, they can get access to apex for free. So I think that that's a, a really great way to kind of get involved. Which leads to my next question.

00:07:10:03 - 00:07:32:16 Unknown What role does apex play in the broader landscape of cloud computing and enterprise applications? Since Oracle Apex isn't just a developmental, it plays strategic role in the world of cloud computing and in your business. To break it down, in today's digital world, like every company from startups to global chains is moving to the cloud and AI.

00:07:32:18 - 00:08:03:06 Unknown And they're not just storing the data up there. They're building apps, training operations, and making real time decisions all in the cloud. But here's the catch building cloud apps from scratch can be so expensive and complicated. Especially you are dealing with legacy systems or any complex business need. That's where the picks up just as it's a low cloud, low code platform that acts like an accelerator for digital transformation.

00:08:03:08 - 00:08:35:01 Unknown It helps organizations like build secure, scalable, and data driven apps without the heavy lifting. So instead of like spending six months coding a custom dashboard you can build in a week, or you can reuse, market apps or Apex apps, which were inbuilt, given like when we installed Oracle Apex inside the database or connected. And also the apps are directly connected to Oracle Database and they're also hosted in the Oracle Cloud and ready to go live.

00:08:35:03 - 00:09:03:03 Unknown That's huge for enterprise teams who need to move fast and stay secure. And here's a strategy. Like epics, epics plays three big roles in the cloud and enterprise landscape, which acts as a bridge builder. Epics connects users with I.T, helping them build apps together. Hey, you don't want to wait for a development team to free up with low code.

00:09:03:08 - 00:09:36:04 Unknown Business analysts and even power users can start prototyping apps themselves, and it's also a cloud catalyst like for organizations like for moving to the cloud. Epics need some things, so it's already integrated with our cloud infrastructure. Teams can deploy apps without worry about setting up servers, managing databases, or securing the backend. It's all everything is. Building. And then next is a major and it's a cost cutter and enterprise world.

00:09:36:05 - 00:10:11:21 Unknown Like building app apps often means big budgets and a long time that change is that you can get faster development, fewer bugs, and easier maintenance all at a fraction of the cost. And because it's part of the Oracle ecosystem, apex fits seamlessly into the existing enterprise environment. So companies that already rely on Oracle for database or ERP systems or analytics or any other aim, they don't have to reinvent the wheel epics just Plex right in.

00:10:11:23 - 00:10:38:18 Unknown It's like having a custom app factory sitting on top of one of the world's most powerful cloud platforms, and for storing. This is good because landing epics doesn't just teach you to build apps, it teaches how you could first look how cloud first companies think and operate, and innovate. That I love how apex is fully integrated into everything Oracle related.

00:10:38:18 - 00:11:11:10 Unknown And so that leads to my next question. Can you share some examples of how different industries utilize Low-code development? Looker isn't just like for one industry or one kind of app. It's a versatile tool that's being used across the board. And, axes are right at the center of that movement. And let's start with the big picture here has a low code platform that empowers organizations to build scalable web and mobile apps faster and smarter and often like, without needing a full army of data.

00:11:11:10 - 00:11:42:22 Unknown But right now, what makes our epic special is how seaming seamlessly fits into cloud computing and enterprise systems. Yes, in cloud computing, apex is tightly integrated with, our cloud infrastructure, which means it gives gives you a fully managed low code environment right out of the box with supports all the cloud native features like example auto scaling or backup to patching so it doesn't have to babysit the infrastructure.

00:11:43:00 - 00:12:21:02 Unknown And with other auto deployments across a global regions, it also it's also able to support companies with a wider presence in enterprise applications. Epics connects easily to system like all the e-business suite or even third party tools using RESTful API and orchestrate services like Rich data services. And it can be used to build mission critical apps, things like real time dashboards, complex form workflows, and apps that handle thousands of transactions with zero data lag.

00:12:21:04 - 00:13:17:04 Unknown And it's perfect for extending SaaS platforms or creating custom business tools tailored to company specific needs. And the key here that the key cloud and the end of enterprise features are scalability, which means you can grow with your user base. No need to manually, no need for manual scaling. And the security it's got, it's got built in encryption and many authentication features like up to and it's compliant with standards like PCR and Hepa and integration epics is epics already in the I, and it started to include ad driven tools like auto generating queries or enhancing data visualization, creating apps like this by assistant, like the by the user prompt, and making

00:13:17:04 - 00:13:47:20 Unknown apps even more smarter. And it's also mobile friendly. Design like apps are responsible and mobile ready by default and in the real world. Like example, in case of financial systems or financial services, like one of the global firms where they have a massive program with like comprehensive reporting, it was like manual, slow and using Excel, like with the old, all the way, all the days and no security.

00:13:47:20 - 00:14:17:18 Unknown And there was no audit on there, errors and manual errors, everything. And when they started using Oracle Apex, they built a customer that automated the entire process from pulling data, validating it, generating reports to visualization, security, auditing everything. On a real time. And the result? Reporting time drop from months to days. And the accuracy improved top notch security.

00:14:17:19 - 00:15:00:11 Unknown And they have built the deadline. They have hit the deadlines, like without adding any stress. Like, their industry examples, like building real time inventory tracking systems to avoid the overstock or shortages in the retail or manufacturing in the manufacturing like monitoring production lines, using IoT or Internet of Things and real time data in manufacturing and creating platforms for storing records or grading, academic scheduling or creating question papers, in the education sector or students office portals, or everything from license renewals to tax forms which were made, which can be made accessible online in the government sector, too.

00:15:00:12 - 00:15:37:19 Unknown And why it matters for students like here's what students really get when they learn low code to epics. Is one is the automation scale is like where you can learn how to streamline business processes and cut out the busywork. And, it's also where data like data integration. Right. You get hands on experience connecting APIs and working with real world data sets and scalability thinking like you understand how to design systems that can grow a critical enterprise skill or a rapid prototyping.

00:15:37:19 - 00:16:04:05 Unknown Like you can turn ideas into functional apps quickly. Great for hackathons, cool projects, or even launching your own startups. So yeah, low code with epics isn't just a shortcut, it's a stepping stone into real world enterprise development, and it's a skill that's highly sought after in every major industry. I think you explained that very cleanly and very clearly.

00:16:04:07 - 00:16:44:13 Unknown So here is my last question. If you could give one piece of advice to faculty or students, what would it be? Embrace the power of practical learning for students especially like don't just learn the theory. Get your hands dirty. Build something. Used tools like AR clip X to create real world applications. Whether it's a project idea or a class, or a personal idea or even something for your community, build it because that's how you gain confidence chopping your problem solving and create a portfolio that employs actually notice and for faculty, encourage that kind of learning.

00:16:44:15 - 00:17:09:15 Unknown Integrate real world tools into your teaching. Give students the chance to solve actual problems, not just case studies from the textbook. That's how like we help them bridge the gap between the classroom and the career. In short, learn by doing. Teach by empowering. That's the more rewarding and effective path to the growth. I think that is the perfect answer.

00:17:09:15 - 00:17:37:18 Unknown I really do think, like you said, getting your hands dirty, solving real world problems is the best way to learn something. And I really want to thank you for for this really insightful podcast today. So thank you to Southwick for providing us some additional information about Apex and why it's important to learn it. Visit academy.oracle.com for more information about Oracle Academy and subscribe to our podcast.

00:17:37:21 - 00:17:53:22 Unknown Thanks to Saric once again and thanks for listening. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening. And stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

Unlocking the Role of an Account Cloud Engineer at Oracle What does it take to bridge technical expertise with real-world customer impact? In this episode, we dive deep into the role of the Account Cloud Engineer (ACE) at Oracle—a unique position that sits at the intersection of technology and customer engagement. Often misunderstood as solely technical, ACEs play a vital role in presales, partnering with sales teams to guide customers through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) solutions. From shaping architectural designs to providing ongoing support, ACEs are key to delivering value-driven cloud transformations. Listeners will discover: How ACEs collaborate with sales to co-design custom cloud solutions for clients The importance of soft skills—like communication, collaboration, and curiosity—alongside technical acumen What a typical day looks like for an ACE, including demos, workshops, customer calls, and problem-solving How cloud certifications, mini-courses, and real-world experience can jump-start your cloud career Why asking the right questions helps uncover and solve customers' real challenges We also spotlight the Generation Oracle (GenO) program—a global initiative dedicated to launching tech careers for people from all backgrounds. Whether you're a student, educator, or career switcher, GenO offers structured training and direct pathways into dynamic roles such as ACE, sales, consulting, and more. Ready to jumpstart your cloud journey? Explore Oracle Academy's free cloud curriculum and certifications, and check out Academy Bytes for bite-sized learning. Whether you're pursuing a career in cloud or curious about the world of presales, this episode is the perfect place to begin. Resources Mentioned: Oracle Academy : Free cloud curriculum and resources for educators and students Oracle University : Training and certification Generation Oracle Careers : Entry paths into Oracle -------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript:

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:35:10 Unknown Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy prepares the next generation workforce.

00:00:35:11 - 00:01:04:04 Unknown I'm your host, Rick Blake, our being the Oracle Academy program manager for the Benelux and the region. So what we're going to discuss today, in this episode, we're exploring what it is really like to work in cloud tech, especially in the AI's role at Oracle. Lily will share her journey into tech, what the job involves day to day, and some honest advice for students and educators thinking about careers in this space.

00:01:04:06 - 00:01:26:20 Unknown Lily Griffin works in Oracle for three years, currently program manager for Oracle Academy for the UK and the Nordics. Previous to this, Lily worked as an account Cloud engineer for Oracle in the UK. Today we will discuss what an Account Cloud Engineer is and Lily's experience in the role. Lily, are you ready? I'm ready. Very good. Let's start.

00:01:26:20 - 00:01:53:15 Unknown Lily, a warm welcome to this podcast. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to learn from you. From your knowledge and your experiences. So to kick it off, Lily, if I look at the top 50 global technical roles, I can see that data and cloud are strongly represented in the top ten jobs. Even in various roles. Can you please explain what an account cloud engineer and as we call it, is?

00:01:53:16 - 00:02:25:09 Unknown Yeah, of course they as mentioned, Ace stands for Account Cloud engineer. And at Oracle it's a pre-sales role. So that means that you're involved before a sale happens. You're working with customers to help them understand Oracle's cloud offering, guiding them through, solutions, architecture and product features. I guess what's great is that you're involved, that your involvement doesn't end once the deal is signed.

00:02:25:11 - 00:02:51:01 Unknown You're sort of. You continued to be the customer's technical point of contact for Oracle Cloud infrastructure, and it becomes very consistent relationship so they know who to reach out to if they have any questions. Need guidance or want to explore any other capabilities. I think that ongoing support helps build trust and makes the role feel really rewarding.

00:02:51:03 - 00:03:15:14 Unknown It's a technical role, but it's also very people focused. So you might be talking about networking in one call and chat bots in the next. So you need to really comfortable switching gears and sort of having a wide range of conversations. I'd also say you don't work alone either. So as an ace, you're paired with one or more one or more sales reps.

00:03:15:16 - 00:03:41:03 Unknown And the ones sort of driving the sales process of building relationships and creating opportunities. You're their technical counterpart, so you're helping shape the solution and making sure it fits into the customer's needs. When it works well, it's a real partnership. And while it's definitely a technical role, it's important to mention soft skills as they are just as important.

00:03:41:05 - 00:04:09:05 Unknown So communication, problem solving, collaboration. And those are kind of the key ones. And you're not just exploiting tech, you're helping helping people make decisions on standing value and feeling confident in the solution that you're offering. Good at Lily. Interesting. That sounds indeed like balancing both technical and soft skills. How do you find this job as an ace and what is it?

00:04:09:05 - 00:04:33:03 Unknown Was it a rule you saw yourself doing? Well, if you'd asked me ten years ago what I'd be doing now, I definitely wouldn't have said cloud engineer or program manager for Oracle Academy. For that matter. But, I didn't originally plan to go to university. And at the last minute, I signed up for a business management undergraduate course at my local college.

00:04:33:05 - 00:04:59:01 Unknown So in the UK, that's typically for students aged 16 to 18 straight after secondary school. However, my particular college did, did degree level, courses, and I lived at home and I spent three years learning the ins and outs of business. And when I graduated, I'll be honest, I still didn't know what I wanted to do.

00:04:59:03 - 00:05:20:22 Unknown And I was really lucky to go traveling after university. And I came back a lot earlier than I expected due to Covid. So when I got back, I still had no idea what direction I want to take. And honestly, I don't think we talk about that enough. I feel like the pressure to have it all figured out.

00:05:21:00 - 00:05:43:10 Unknown And there's often that expectation that you should know exactly what you want to do. And I felt that's, like, rarely the case. Oh, maybe that was just for me, I don't know. But eventually, my business spring kicked in and I started doing some research about what industries were growing and what careers were in demand at that time.

00:05:43:12 - 00:06:06:05 Unknown And the answer felt quite clear to me. It was technology. So I felt like you could see that it was booming for a while, but I didn't have the soft skills to break in. During lockdown, I started sort of teaching myself Python. A little bit of all, doing some online courses, reading textbooks and eventually deciding to take a on a conversion.

00:06:06:05 - 00:06:30:05 Unknown Masters in Data Science. That one year completely changed my career path and led me to my first job as a data analyst. So straight out of university. And then a year later, I joined Oracle through the Generation Oracle program, which led me to the Ace role. Thank you, Lily, for sharing your experiences in an open and transparent way.

00:06:30:07 - 00:06:54:14 Unknown I think this is really relevant for students, young adults on their way to their first entry level job. S on paper, starting a career looks like it's a straight line. In practice, it could look like a road full of twists and turns, isn't it? So, Lily, I understand this Generation Oracle program was relevant for you. Could you brief explain what Generation Oracle is?

00:06:54:16 - 00:07:22:06 Unknown Yes. So generation Oracle or Gen two, as we often call it, is a global career program run ins of many countries. So it offers roles, across a wide range of disciplines, including sales, customer success, cloud engineering and consulting. And what's great is that it open. It's open to anyone looking to start or switch a career in tech.

00:07:22:10 - 00:07:53:17 Unknown So for God, less of your age or background, the program gives you structured training over a couple of years, and by the end you sort of move into that role or something similar within Oracle. For me, it was an incredible opportunity and it really gave me the foundation I needed to become a fully fledged ace. I will say as well, if you're curious to hear any more about the Jono experience, then do keep an eye out because I've heard there's a dedicated Jedi podcast coming soon.

00:07:53:19 - 00:08:16:01 Unknown But you'll be able to hear from others who have gone through the same program. That sounds good. Lily will stay tuned for the general podcast a bit from another angle. Now, if I may. The Daisy, which is the Digital Economy and Society Index published by the European Commission, presents on entry level IT jobs and the digital skills gap.

00:08:16:05 - 00:08:48:15 Unknown A couple of interesting things, like around 40% of adults in the European Union lack basic digital skills. Many entry level IT roles now require more than just basic skills, as candidates need to know coding, cloud and analytics tools. This means also a lot of self-study being important to enter the IT job market. Lily, what advice would you give to someone aspiring to become an account Cloud Engineer?

00:08:48:19 - 00:09:18:06 Unknown Other particular attributes, qualification or experience that you think can really help someone succeed on this path? I'll start by saying this is just based on my own experience. It's not the only path for the only right answer, but from what I've learned in the role, having well-rounded soft skills is absolutely key. Being a strong communicator and a great collaborator makes sort of a huge difference.

00:09:18:08 - 00:09:43:20 Unknown You'll be working with a lot of different people every day. That's customers, sales reps, your wider team. And if communication isn't as your strong suit, it can be tricky. If you need to expand your skills, why not try sharing or asking for feedback from friends or work colleagues and try to be like an active listener, or find a mentor who can help you grow in that space.

00:09:43:22 - 00:10:21:05 Unknown I would say one skill I find especially useful is being an expert questioner, for which I think I'm still still building on. But when you speak to customers, you might not always know exactly like where their pain points are or how to articulate those challenges. So asking the right questions helps you sort of uncover what's really going on, and can sort of let you offer the best possible solution for them in terms of qualifications, I'd say that they can definitely help, but they're not always essential.

00:10:21:10 - 00:10:51:14 Unknown Depending on your pathway into the role, a relevant degree or apprenticeship can give you a solid foundation. For example, in cloud infrastructure. But cloud is a huge space, and you might actually find yourself drawn into a specific area like network, compute, storage or disaster recovery. So doing maybe mini courses would be maybe a good recommendation and can sort of be a great way to explore those areas further.

00:10:51:16 - 00:11:16:03 Unknown Something else I think is important to mention is, like most large vendors also offer professional certifications, so that will help you focus on that specific cloud platforms. For example, Oracle University has professional certifications that you can take. And as you might already know, Oracle Academy is a brilliant way to kickstart your learning, especially with the cloud curriculum.

00:11:16:05 - 00:11:39:18 Unknown And the Academy bites. Lastly, I will say, it helps to have a basic understanding of sales because you're not you may not be the sales person, but you are in the pre-sales world. So knowing how sales reps build opportunities and manage pipeline gives you an edge really, and can help you support them better. Understand the bigger picture.

00:11:39:20 - 00:12:04:09 Unknown There's always this difference between theory and practice, as in books give the framework, but reality fills in the details. For most students, it is difficult to envision a day in a life. As an IT consultant, you have been a student and an ace. Can you please describe how does a day in the life of an ace look like?

00:12:04:11 - 00:12:31:00 Unknown Yeah. So a day in a life of an ace could be pretty varied, as I've mentioned. And that's both exciting and at times a bit overwhelming. You're speaking to customers regularly, whether that's a zoom email or phone, and not everyone you talk to is super technical. So one of those key skills is being able to explain complex ideas in a way that makes sense to different people, or day to day basis.

00:12:31:00 - 00:12:58:06 Unknown You're going to be working closely with your sales reps and then the ones driving the deals. So you need to be there to help support each other and you're going to come in from a technical side. You bounce ideas around, solve problems together, and actually help customers figure out what cloud solution works best for them. Some days you might be giving a demo, walking someone through Oracle Analytics or running a workshop on cloud security.

00:12:58:08 - 00:13:31:17 Unknown Other days you might be prepping for meetings, catching up with your manager, or researching something new because a customer's ask the question and you didn't know the answer to it. And, that's totally normal too. For me, the best part was the people. I love building relationships with customers and seeing how I'll work makes a difference. I also got to go to conferences, help out on the stands, and do like live demos, which was nerve wracking at first, but such a confidence based, I will say on a day to day.

00:13:31:18 - 00:13:53:03 Unknown The trickiest part was for me, the variety. OCI offers a lot and you're not expected to know everything, but you do need to be flexible. I sometimes have multiple customer calls in a day, each on completely different topics. And it was. It was quite a challenge, really. But it kept things interesting and helped me grow really quickly.

00:13:53:05 - 00:14:19:16 Unknown This is a relevant, dynamic and also fun job. That is clear. What did you learn as an account cloud engineer? When I first started out as an ace. I'll be honest, I was lacking confidence. And I think the idea of presenting to customers did feel quite intimidating. I was worried. They theorized for me, that I'd come across as inexperienced or that my.

00:14:19:16 - 00:14:48:14 Unknown No, to sort of get the better of me. But I was was lucky. I had a brilliant manager and a supportive team who sort of encouraged me, to push myself. I never really will forget that moment when I was assigned to my first consuming customer. And that's someone that's already using Oracle Cloud and I had to prepare a demo, in apex, walking through some new features.

00:14:48:16 - 00:15:12:21 Unknown And I've been practicing it for weeks. And I knew the content inside out, but the nerves were still there. And on the day of the meeting, we started with some, like, conversation. Asked about the weekend, eased into things, and then it was my turn and I had to get a demo. And you know what? It went really well.

00:15:12:23 - 00:15:41:02 Unknown The internet didn't crash. I didn't figure out my lines. No one died, which at the time felt like a very real possibility. And over time, I sort of built a great relationship with that customer. What I learned from experience was customers are human, too, and they're just like you. They have lives, personalities, and they really appreciate authenticity.

00:15:41:04 - 00:16:10:08 Unknown The more I spoke with different customers, the less scary it became. So this is just one story of many, but it really captures how much confidence I gained in the ace role. Learning to trust myself, even when I felt unsure. And it also reminded me of how important it is to have people around you that support you, who you can ask for help and who can help you grow not just professionally, but personally too.

00:16:10:10 - 00:16:35:16 Unknown Thank you, Lily, for your again, open, honest and transparent response. Again, very relevant, I think, for students and young adults moving to the labor markets. Lily, we're heading towards the finish line of this podcast. I would like to close with this very last relevant question. If you could give one advice to faculty or students, what would it be?

00:16:35:18 - 00:17:05:05 Unknown Okay, big question to end, but, I'd say take on as many opportunities as you can, whether they're in technology like Oracle Academy, or something completely unrelated, you never know where they'll lead. Some of the biggest turning points in my career came from saying yes to things that I wasn't sure I was ready for. I wouldn't be where I am now without taking a few risks and trying something new.

00:17:05:07 - 00:17:30:05 Unknown And even if it doesn't work out exactly how you imagined. You will learn something valuable along the way. Thank you, Lily, so much for giving the listeners the opportunity to learn more about the Asal and how to get into it. If I quickly wrap up and summarize the main points of this episode, I would say that the Account Cloud engineer at Oracle is a pre sales role.

00:17:30:07 - 00:17:56:13 Unknown You're working with customers to help them understand Oracle's cloud offerings, guiding them through solutions, architecture, and product features. The career path to it varies. In this episode, we learned that it could be straight and paper twisted in practice. So as a student, it's not needed to have your career spelled out up front. Develop yourself along the way with trainings and courses and an open mind.

00:17:56:15 - 00:18:29:09 Unknown This is also confirmed by the latest Future of Jobs Report 2025. In this world Economic Forum publication that specifically discusses entry level ID roles. It is mentioned that continuous re and upscaling to words, advanced digital and IEE driven competencies is relevant. Last but not least, wrapping up experience the fun of an ace job role being top notch, innovative and future driven.

00:18:29:11 - 00:18:57:22 Unknown Finalizing. To our listeners, I encourage you to visit our website, academy.oracle.com to learn more about Oracle Academy for educational institutes on all levels worldwide. I also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. Feel free to share this with your educational friends as well. Also, please follow Oracle Academy on Instagram and Facebook just to keep up with all our activities together with our new members.

00:18:58:00 - 00:19:11:11 Unknown Thank you so much. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

In this episode host Oracle Academy Program Manager Benelux & DACH Rik Bleeker speaks with Oracle expert Thomas Minne on the crucial intersection of Artificial Intelligence and data security, explaining why the Oracle Database is foundational to both. Drawing on his 15 years as a DBA and current role in Oracle's EMEA CTO office, Thomas shares practical strategies for implementing AI responsibly without compromising sensitive information. Listeners will learn how features like Real Application Security and Label Security safeguard data, why AI vectors require the same protection as raw data, and hear real-world stories from industries like finance and healthcare. Thomas also discusses how AI can both enhance and threaten security, and offers career advice to students keen on mastering IT fundamentals and safely experimenting with Oracle LiveLabs. Whether you're a student, educator, or just curious about AI security, this episode is packed with insights to help you innovate confidently and securely.

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Episode Transcript:

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:35:13 Unknown Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy prepares the next generation workforce.

00:00:35:13 - 00:01:08:08 Unknown I'm your host, Rick Bleeker, are being the Oracle Academy program manager for the Benelux and the region. In this episode, Oracle expert Thomas Minne explores how artificial intelligence and data security intersect. And why'd Oracle Database is at the center of this? All with 15 years of DBA experience and now part of Oracle's EMEA CTO office. Thomas shares real world insights on how organizations can use AI responsibly while protecting sensitive data.

00:01:08:10 - 00:01:35:18 Unknown From healthcare to finance, I offers huge opportunities, but only if security is in from the start. The topics we're going to cover today is why I makes data security more important than ever. How Oracle databases features like real application security and label security protects sensitive data. The risk of vectors in AI workflows. Why they need the same protection as raw data.

00:01:36:00 - 00:02:12:12 Unknown Real world stories of securing large financial systems. AI as a double edge sword basically strengthening the defenses but also usable by attackers. Career advice for students master it fundamentals. Explore AI workflows, and practice safely with Oracle Life Labs. So security also today isn't a barrier. It's an enabler. With the right governments, access controls, and hands on learning. Students and educators can explore AI confidentially and responsibly.

00:02:12:14 - 00:02:45:19 Unknown Today, we're joined by Thomas Minne, Oracle database Expert and Data Security Blackbelt. Thomas, welcome and an absolute pleasure to have you on this podcast. As a start, Thomas, could you tell us about your background and current role at Oracle? Thank you Rich. Hello everyone. Well, I work in the EMEA office of the CTO at Oracle. So focusing on data security, I have spent 15 years as an Oracle DBA, starting in infrastructure and gradually moving closer to application development, helping teams build performance and world design systems.

00:02:45:20 - 00:03:16:20 Unknown I'm also an Oracle Certified Master. In my current role, I advise customers on protecting their most valuable assets and their data. I specialize in Oracle database security features like encryption, auditing, identity and access management, data masking also, and other security goodies. So my work combines engineering, technical representation and also collaboration with project management, all with one goal keeping data safe while enabling innovation.

00:03:16:23 - 00:03:41:11 Unknown That sounds good Thomas. Thank you so much. So today's topic is AI and security and domains. If I look at the top 60 global technical roles, I and cloud roles are strongly represented in the top ten in various roles and jobs. Why is security so important in the context of AI and how does it connect to the Oracle database?

00:03:41:13 - 00:04:15:12 Unknown Great question. First, AI isn't magic. It's just a set of tools that process data. And whenever we talk about data, security becomes essential. AI system use techniques like larger language models, lens vectorization and retrieval, augmented generation, and drag. All of these interact with data and sometimes highly sensitive data. For example, in healthcare, Oracle Database Store patient records. You can't connect that kind of database directly to a public AI model.

00:04:15:12 - 00:04:54:06 Unknown You could accidentally expose private medical information. I can absolutely add doctors and researchers, but only if access is controlled, the right person at the right time, and the right context. Without those safeguards, the risks outweigh the benefits. And that's the challenge. Making sure that even if the data are highly sensitive, we manipulate those data safely to sarcomas. Listening to the security on its own in it is already a challenge to what is your opinion, a security, an extra challenge for companies when enabling with new AI capabilities?

00:04:54:08 - 00:05:19:14 Unknown Exactly. Companies are no longer asking should we use AI? They are now asking how can we use AI securely? That's where Oracle Security Features comes in, helping organizations build secure, compliant pipelines for AI solution while still benefiting from AI. Spoiler. And is that challenge is not taken seriously. It will prevent them to move on with their project.

00:05:19:16 - 00:05:55:00 Unknown Got it. Thomas. So, as we all know, security is crucial for organizations. Community security processes, however, are often seen as painful or complex, time consuming and even slowing down projects. How do you look at this? It's true. Unfortunately, and security can seem like extra work, but it is the reality. You can't escape it. The potential damage from the breach to both individuals and companies is huge, and companies must also be compliant with the different regulations.

00:05:55:02 - 00:06:19:03 Unknown I like to flip the perspective. Security can actually. Oh, to move you to move faster. If you can guarantee that only authorized holes in your application can see sensitive data. You unlock the ability to use that data in AI workflows with confidence. Without that, companies tend to lock their data in a bunker safe, but effectively use less.

00:06:19:05 - 00:06:45:08 Unknown So security becomes an enabler. It's the condition that allows you to use AI responsibly. The closer AI tools gets to the data, the more fine grained access control becomes non-negotiable. Think of it as an investment. If you understand your data, its sensitivity, and how to control access, you can safely leverage powerful AI capabilities. Okay, okay, it almost got it.

00:06:45:08 - 00:07:09:18 Unknown But even then, still, there are multiple options. So why the Oracle database? There's a lot of new open source tools that could help build AI pipelines, aren't there? Yeah. It's true that there are two key points. First, the sensitive data there are already in the Oracle database. And many of our customers are already running critical system on our infrastructure.

00:07:09:19 - 00:07:41:22 Unknown And they're happy with the performance but also the availability of our platforms. So moving data into another system like an open source vector database forced you to duplicate security measures across platforms, adding complexity and risk. In addition, you may lose the benefits of a highly available and performant platform. So, Gunns Oracle Converged Database strategy lets you store data, owns and run multiple workloads SQL, graph, vector search, analytics, spatial all in one place.

00:07:41:22 - 00:08:13:21 Unknown So security is built into the core, not bolting on later. With Oracle 23 AI database, these capabilities are unified, enabling innovation without compromising protection. Okay, clear. Understood. Thomas, thanks for elaborating. And but how do you look then at the relationship between data governance on one side and AI security evolving on the other? Data governance is absolutely critical. The team help us understand what data we have.

00:08:13:21 - 00:08:40:08 Unknown It's sensitivity and applicable regulations. They're the bridge between technical teams and compliance requirements. Simply put, you can't design an effective security strategy if you don't know which data is sensitive. For example, when I worked at a major bank in Luxembourg, I collaborated with colleagues from the data governance and business intelligence team to design security for a new data warehouse.

00:08:40:13 - 00:09:18:22 Unknown We classified the data and determine how to secure it. Access was controlled along multiple axis data domain, so over 50 domains with different sensitivity level inside each subsidiary user and access only to certain subsidiaries data on play data only HR could access it and also customer personal information, GDPR compliance and protection of personal information. All these control were unforced directly in the database, so each user only saw what they were authorized to access for their workflow.

00:09:18:22 - 00:09:56:14 Unknown The same principle apply AI solution should only access allowed data features like Rear Application security, virtual Private database or label security can enforce these rules and ensures AI tools operate safely and compliantly. LeClair did. That explains about the relationship and Thomas could AI itself help improve database security in the future? You think absolute. For example, SQL server lets you run queries and generate reports on an Oracle database using natural language.

00:09:56:16 - 00:10:25:17 Unknown You can even use it for security testing. Ask the AI to find sensitive data and it can quickly produce a detailed report. This is just one example. I'm convinced we will see many ways AI tools can proactively increase database security, identifying risk, monitoring access, and even suggesting improvement. Wow, that that is fascinating, Thomas. But doesn't that also mean attackers could use the same AI tools to find former abilities faster?

00:10:25:17 - 00:10:51:12 Unknown And how do we defend against that? Exactly. It's a double edged sword. But using AI internally helps us to find weakness before attackers do. Security isn't a simple on off switch. It's the combination of multiple tools, proper configuration, and best practices that elevate your overall security posture. I advise our student to check what is the Oracle Maximum Security Architect here.

00:10:51:14 - 00:11:21:04 Unknown It will definitely help them to understand that it's the combination of many different building blocks that create a good security posture. Clear, clear. And is there an area of AI security that is often underestimated in European. Yes. Vectors. In AI, a vector is a numerical representation of data like text or image transform into a series of numbers used later for similarity search.

00:11:21:05 - 00:11:47:20 Unknown Think of it like a fingerprint of the data. Even without the original file, it can reveal information if not protected. Some assume vectors are harmless because there are just numbers, but sensitive data must be secured at the vector level. Two algorithms can reconstruct original information from vectors, which I accuracy, so securing them is as important as protecting the source data.

00:11:47:22 - 00:12:17:02 Unknown Got it, got it. But talking about security and challenges, what is the biggest mistake organizations make when connecting AI to their systems and their data? Not applying the least privilege principle. I walk flows and system should operate with the minimal privileges. This reduce the attack surface and prevents accidental access to sensitive data. Are there some industries more critical than others for AI security?

00:12:17:07 - 00:12:48:01 Unknown Well, all industries need security. But as cars, finance and government are particularly sensitive due to privacy regulations, even retail and logistic benefits from strong AI security practices. The risk level varies, but the principle remains you can't innovate safely without protecting your data. I agree, Thomas, but what if an AI system accidentally exposes sensitive data? Whose responsible and how should it be handled?

00:12:48:03 - 00:13:16:15 Unknown Zero risk doesn't exist. Security is always evolving. Auditing is key. Even in a breach, it tells you what happens from where and by whom. Combined with the access control, monitoring and training, auditing helps organization learn from incidents and adapt their defenses. Students don't need to have a learning environment to practice their skills. Oracle Academy provides such skilling opportunity.

00:13:16:15 - 00:13:49:22 Unknown Isn't it? What resource, course or lap do you recommend students to start experimenting safely? Definitely. I recommend visiting live labs. There are over 900 free workshops you can run in a sandbox on the Oracle Cloud. A safe way to get hands on experience with AI vectors and database security. So just search for AI vector or security reveals many interesting workshops to explore, and you may also get access to our environment through the Oracle Academy program.

00:13:49:22 - 00:14:10:16 Unknown But for this week, I think you will be able to guide them. Absolutely. I will do this with pleasure for you, us, and obviously also for the listener. I will provide some links at the end of this podcast. Thomas, what skills should students focus on if they want a career in AI security? Well, the core I.T skills are still essential.

00:14:10:16 - 00:14:39:14 Unknown AI is built on computers, network storage, data model and data types. All the fundamentals. Without these, you can't accurately judge what an AI system is producing until you understand the fundamentals. You can safely explore AI models, vectorization, and workflows without introducing security risk. And when it comes to security, missing the foundational concepts makes it impossible to build something solid.

00:14:39:16 - 00:15:13:06 Unknown Master the basics. There the foundation AI security stands on. So from there, student can expand their career and learning path in AI security. First, hands on experience use Sandbox on Brenneman like Oracle Live Labs to experiment safely. Build small AI workflow, vector search application or test access control practice experience. Teach more than theory alone. Second, certifications consider Oracle Database cybersecurity or AI ethics certification.

00:15:13:06 - 00:15:49:12 Unknown They demonstrate knowledge and open doors to specialized roles and also cross disciplinary learning. AI security sits at the intersection of database management, cybersecurity, and data science. So learn the basics in all three understanding vectors, embeddings, and database and its security layer domains. And we're not there yet. But thank you so much for sharing your expertise today. Interesting. It's been fascinating to see how AI and database security intersect, and your examples make these concepts very tangible domains.

00:15:49:14 - 00:16:16:15 Unknown Thank you. Rick. I really enjoyed the conversation. Security isn't just a constraint. It's an enabler for innovation. Designing systems with security in mind lets you safely leverage AI to unlock real value from data. Here are a few practical takeaways for our listeners. First, understand your data. Know what is sensitive, how it is classified, and what regulations apply.

00:16:16:15 - 00:16:49:02 Unknown Governance is the foundation of all security strategies. Second, master the fundamentals, networks, storage, data types and database principle form the essential basis for AI security. Then use security as a tool, not a barrier. Access controls, data driven security and auditing are enablers for confident innovation. Then experiment safely. Sandbox Live Labs anonymized data set lets student explore end zone without risk.

00:16:49:04 - 00:17:15:10 Unknown And last but not least, stay curious and proactive. AI insecurity evolve rapidly. Keep bringing in. Anticipate all new technologies can help or your systems. Absolutely. I would call that great advice, Thomas. And to our listeners, whether you are a student exploring AI or an educator or a professor instructor guiding the next generation. Security is definitely part of that.

00:17:15:10 - 00:17:46:11 Unknown Journey is not an obstacle. Exactly. Explore experiments safely and keep data protection at the center of your work. Secure data is usable data, so push the boundaries responsibly. And I can truly become a powerful tool in your toolkit. Absolutely. Thanks again Thomas. We hope to have you back soon for another discussion. So wrapping up today, we explored how AI is both a powerful opportunity and a security challenge.

00:17:46:11 - 00:18:13:06 Unknown Why the Oracle database is such a strong foundation for protecting sensitive data, and how features like access control, auditing, and vector security makes AI safer to use. We also touch on the role of governments, the risk of unrest, debating factors, and why mastering IT fundamentals is the best path into a career in AI security. So stay curious. Keep experimenting safely.

00:18:13:08 - 00:18:55:04 Unknown And remember, security isn't a barrier. It is what makes innovation possible. Curious and staying secure. A few links, like Thomas said on this topic please go to livelabs.oracle.com. And also for the maximum security architecture go to oracle.com/ To our listeners I encourage you to visit our website academy.oracle.com to learn more about Oracle Academy for educational institutes of all levels worldwide.

00:18:55:06 - 00:19:21:08 Unknown I also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. Feel free to share this with your educational friends as well. Also, please follow Oracle Academy on Instagram and Facebook just to keep up with all our activities and with our members. Dear listeners and thank you, Thomas. Again, thank you so much. This wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

00:19:21:10 - 00:19:33:12 Unknown That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

AI is driving a remarkable transformation throughout the industry, delivering unprecedented productivity gains and enabling rapid insights from vast amounts of data.

In this two-episode season premiere, Tirthankar Lahiri, SVP of Mission-Critical Data and AI Engines, discusses how Oracle AI Vector and embedded machine learning search are harnessing the power of AI to unlock value from enterprise data, and allow developers to build sophisticated RAG and Agentic frameworks that leverage the full power of the converged database architecture of Oracle Database — including its class-leading scalability, fault-tolerance, and enterprise-grade security. Furthermore, Oracle database provides several mechanisms to make data "AI-ready" by enabling declarative data intent for AI. In this session, we will describe these techniques, and more, to explain how to truly build an AI for data solution in this rapidly changing AI landscape! ------------------------------------ Episode Transcript:

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:34:07 Unknown Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy prepares the next generation's workforce.

00:00:34:09 - 00:01:03:23 Unknown I'm your host, Tara Pierce. This is the first of two episodes on AI for data when data meets intelligence. Our guest speaker is to thank Carly Harris, senior vice president for mission critical data and AI engines at Oracle. Here's responsible for the data engine for Oracle database, including areas like AI, vector search, indexing and data compression. He also manages the Oracle Times ten in memory and the Oracle NoSQL database product teams to thank her.

00:01:03:23 - 00:01:33:13 Unknown Has 30 years of experience in the database industry and has worked on a variety of areas such as performance, scalability, manageability, caching, in-memory architectures and developer focused functionality. He has 71 issued and several pending patents. A bachelor's in computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology and a master's in electrical engineering from Stanford University. In the first episode to thank our talks about how data makes AI intelligent and how enterprises are using AI to get greater value from their data.

00:01:33:15 - 00:01:59:19 Unknown Over to you to thank her. Hi. Hey, guys. Thank you very much for joining. It's a great pleasure to be presenting AI for data. This is an exciting time in technology. AI is ubiquitous. AI changes everything. And I actually makes data intelligent. Let's talk about that today. So you know Oracle is working on AI. As many of you know, at many levels in the enterprise stack.

00:01:59:21 - 00:02:31:22 Unknown We have AI initiatives for applications, AI initiatives for services. I for data. And we're building a lot of AI infrastructure, as you seen from the news. Now I'm going to focus on AI for data. That's the focus of my presentation today. How we bring AI, the power of AI and unleash it on enterprise data. So Oracle's goal is to make AI for data extremely simple for basically everything.

00:02:32:00 - 00:02:54:08 Unknown So no matter what kind of end user you are, whether you're an expert, an AI, or a developer, or a DBA random list, every single persona should be able to leverage AI for data. We want to make it possible for all applications to leverage AI for data and benefit all workloads with the AI for data. So this is the goal that we have for AI for data.

00:02:54:08 - 00:03:25:05 Unknown Now, there's again basically two classic kinds of AI in the classical sense. So let's quickly talk about one before I get to what's new. So the traditional AI, was basically called algorithmic AI. Algorithmic here is based on machine learning models, typically non neural net designed to do predictions classifications, forecasting etc. and for data science people, you know that there's many different machine learning algorithms.

00:03:25:07 - 00:03:44:06 Unknown And these are all now available in Oracle database. So if you want you can use one of these models. This is the ever evolving list. You can use one of these models to load to first of all to train, you know, a sorry, you could use one of these algorithms. Excuse me. I keep that in the trunk.

00:03:44:08 - 00:04:05:22 Unknown These are algorithms. You can use one of these to train models and then to run inferencing using these models. So you imagine you can take, you know, linear linear regression. The algorithm used that to train a model and then applied that to data in real time to basically do predictions. So that's what in database machine learning lets you do.

00:04:06:00 - 00:04:30:18 Unknown And we've had this, capability for a while now. So what is new is something called I vector search, which is the primary focus of a presentation today. And this is newer, you know, and if this is beyond classical machine learning. So basically yeah vector search the new technology that enables searching for data by semantics rather than values.

00:04:30:20 - 00:04:54:11 Unknown The why why is this important? Because if you look at what databases traditionally do, for those of you who've been in the database field or have studied databases, databases essentially do what we call value based searches, where given a value, they can search by that value, like for instance, finding the revenue by each product. That's a very typical search you run inside of a database.

00:04:54:13 - 00:05:22:10 Unknown And they've excelled at this through various, you know, techniques like query optimization, SQL document processing, etc.. However, there is an ever increasing volume of unstructured data which you really can't search by value, but they have to be searched by semantics or meaning, like, you know, photos or images or description. Long complex textual descriptions. There's no real value that you can search those with.

00:05:22:10 - 00:05:52:08 Unknown Effectively, you need to search them essentially by their semantic content, not by the value content. For instance, finding products that match a particular photo or match a description that's not really something a database could do very well in the past. And this is a very important, an ever growing use case, because, you know, businesses need to do this today on a routine basis, forgetting about AI just in general to keep the business running in a healthy fashion.

00:05:52:10 - 00:06:25:14 Unknown There's a lot of examples of use cases where a business needs a search its data by, sort of the semantics. For instance, if you know, you have parts going into the sub line for manufacturing, the photo, the part should, quickly tell you whether that part might be defective, when customers log in to e-commerce sites, then when you browse products, so you try to check out a certain product, there is a desire from the e-commerce site to see what else they could then recommend to you in real time.

00:06:25:16 - 00:06:43:19 Unknown These are all examples. Another one is, of course, biometrics. You know, I'm coming in to the airport. I need to, you know, I go through facial recognition. They want to make sure that I'm the person I said I am when I, you know, when I submitted my visa application. So all of these cases require semantic search, not value based search.

00:06:43:21 - 00:07:11:12 Unknown And, vector searches. Exactly. That enable searching data based semantics. That's precisely what it does. And it does that using a construct primitive known as a vector, which is very simple actually. You know, if you think about this, the beauty of this is the basic concept is very easy, very simple. A vector is simply a long string of numbers that capture the semantics of much more complex data.

00:07:11:12 - 00:07:36:14 Unknown And they're produced by something I call black magic deep learning, machine learning models that take this, you know, unstructured set of data on the left, apply these complex algorithms and machine learning algorithms to that data and then outcomes a vector. It's actually incredible that this this actually works, that you can take something as sophisticated as a Picasso painting and convert that into a string of numbers.

00:07:36:14 - 00:07:59:16 Unknown That represents that painting. That's basically what a vector does. It's a string of numbers encoding the semantics. And once you do that, well, how do you then measure for similarity? The way you do that is by measuring the mathematical distance between the vectors. Now for those of you who've of course all of you are familiar with the vector concept, I'm sure from mathematics and physics.

00:07:59:18 - 00:08:22:09 Unknown Basically, vectors are points in multidimensional space, and there's many different ways to measure distance between them. You know, a simple example, a simple distance function is what we call Euclidean squared. We just take the square of the difference, the sum of the differences of each coordinate. That's a that's one distance for a function. However, there's many formula for distance.

00:08:22:11 - 00:08:45:07 Unknown And each machine learning model and each data scientist prefers a different one. Let's talk about how vectors get used in the real world. Now, if you think about, a very simple business example, I know that most of you not not, you know, business people, but most of you use products and sometimes, you know, products go wrong and you have this file, you know, ask for help from customer support.

00:08:45:08 - 00:09:10:11 Unknown Support incidents are very complex, documents, very complex entities. They involve a lot of different attributes. And typically looking for similarity for support incidents. Is this tricky? So a very simple example here is you take a simple incident and you encode the different properties of the incident as a vector. That's really what vector embedding models do.

00:09:10:11 - 00:09:36:17 Unknown They take the different aspects of data and they convert each aspect to a numerical value. Now and these are called dimensions on the left these numbers now in practice of course in the real world nothing is as simple as this. This is a very simple example, highly idealized, but it shows you you can take a fairly complex structure, like a super incident document, which has lots of fields and lots of textual content, and convert that into a vector.

00:09:36:23 - 00:10:01:12 Unknown Okay, that's let's just take that as our baseline example for what I'm about to show you next. When you have collapse incidents into two dimensional vectors, they might look like this. So if you have incidents for laptops running slowly, maybe an incident for a desktop that's crashing, it might look like this on into the space.

00:10:01:14 - 00:10:26:19 Unknown And basically the similarity property of vectors is that things that are more similar have a smaller distance between them. So in this example, for instance, support incidents for laptops are more similar than those for desktops. And that's why you can use vector distance as a measure of similarity of these really complex components. So you just seen how this was done.

00:10:26:19 - 00:10:51:09 Unknown Now taken this complex entity known in the support incident broken that down into vectors and then measured distances between the. Now why are we doing this in the Oracle database. There's a lot of vector database out there. Like builders pinecone etc. and lots of dedicated specialists do this really well. And that's all they do really, is measure vector similarity between two given vectors.

00:10:51:11 - 00:11:14:06 Unknown But we think the big requirement we have is in business applications, sometimes you need to combine semantic search and value based search. And that requires both the search to run together. So you could imagine your business database, take the incident data, move that to a vector database and run the search there. That's one way of doing it.

00:11:14:08 - 00:11:38:21 Unknown However, you have to send other data as well because sometimes you want to filter the customer support similarity. Search with customer information. Maybe I only want customers for a certain range region, or I only want to look for incidents for a certain product. Those are things that you're better off with other kinds of data added to the search.

00:11:38:23 - 00:12:02:07 Unknown So this way, if you see what's what happens is you have to send a lot of extra data because you don't know what might be asked, what kind of question does my support incident question involve? Customer information, product information, region information. All of that has to be sent to the vector database. And this causes some issues. It makes the data still adds a bunch of complexity.

00:12:02:09 - 00:12:39:04 Unknown It also compromises security because now your vector database becomes the weakest link in your security architecture. As you know, security works in the following way. You're as secure as your weakest link. You're as secure your house, as secure as your weakest window. So the minute you add more products to your ecosystem, you end up compromising security. And of course, or databases like Oracle have a lot more capabilities, like, you know, first of all, much more sophisticated query, much better fault tolerance, much better security than dedicated vector specialists.

00:12:39:06 - 00:13:04:03 Unknown So what we said was instead of customers using a vector database to search data by semantics, let's put that functionality into the Oracle database to begin with. That way, every search runs on current data. You don't need to guess what data might be needed because it's all there in the database. There is no data movement required, no need to manage multiple products, and no compromises.

00:13:04:03 - 00:13:32:23 Unknown The security and fault tolerance by having your vectors inside your you know, production enterprise database. And now let's get into some, you know, under-the-hood stuff. Now what's once I've done this? Well, what kind of queries can I run? How do I care about similarity. But turns out SQL is really, really powerful. I would encourage everyone here who has not taken the class involving SQL to brush up on SQL.

00:13:33:01 - 00:13:56:15 Unknown You know, because SQL is actually a galactic intergalactic language standard for declarative simple queries, as this example shows. If I want to find support incidents that are similar to my support by current incident, this is the query I vectorize my current incident using the You know, the search vector. Imagine that's the vector. So I'm just going to show you make sure the pointer works here.

00:13:56:17 - 00:14:15:10 Unknown Can you guys see the pointer here. There we go. Yeah. So the search vector is a vectorization of my my own incident let's say. So vector is that I create that. And then I find the vectors and I rank them by distance from the search fit. And I say I only want the top ten. So that's how SQL works.

00:14:15:10 - 00:14:42:12 Unknown It's very simple, extremely user friendly and very easy to express sophisticated searches with. So this gets me the top ten incidents closest to me. Now let's get more interesting. I'm only I only want to look at incidents that are similar that are for a laptop. So then I would just take that same SQL statement and extend that with a simple join and filter by the product type laptop.

00:14:42:14 - 00:15:07:23 Unknown Okay, so that makes it clear to the database engine that don't, you know, not written incidents that don't correspond to laptops. And these are again ranked by the same vector distance. And again I only want the first ten rows. And you can see that you can keep expanding on this. Maybe I only care about vector incidents for laptops reported by customers in Las Vegas, because I happen to be in Las Vegas.

00:15:08:01 - 00:15:25:17 Unknown Las Vegas is kind of a hot air in the summer, for those of you who've been there, and maybe there are some unique issues for Las Vegas customers. So I can add a filter again on Las Vegas that customers to the list of joint tables, and then run the vector search on that joint result. This is the beauty of SQL.

00:15:25:17 - 00:15:53:04 Unknown SQL is decorative and SQL is extensible and composable. And you can create really sophisticated queries with very simple building blocks. This is if you look at what's on the right, it's very powerful because this combines vector data with production at the relational data in a few lines of SQL, providing you with a single solution where everything is consistent.

00:15:53:04 - 00:16:16:16 Unknown There's nothing stale here. Every customer, every product, every support incident is current. And I think developers can learn to use this within minutes. There's there's nothing new to learn for anybody who has even basic SQL knowledge. So this is the power of putting vectors into the production enterprise database and running basically this type of converge SQL on it.

00:16:16:18 - 00:16:38:12 Unknown Okay, let's now get into a little deeper dive under the hood into AI vector search itself. This is, designed more from a user end user standpoint, but I'll highlight some areas that might be of academic interest that, might do what exploration or learning more about. And there's tons of literature out there in the field and lots of stuff that's evolving daily.

00:16:38:14 - 00:16:58:02 Unknown But hopefully this will give you a high level idea of what the space includes. Okay, so I vector search from a user point of view. An Oracle database basically contains consists of four steps. You first have to take the data that you want to search and encode the data into vectors. Right. That's that's of course the step one.

00:16:58:02 - 00:17:28:16 Unknown And that's done using something we call vector and the call embedding models or vector embedding models interchangeably. Embedding is a natural language processing term from the 80s. I think it's become a standard synonym for vectors. So vectors, vector embeddings, same thing. You first encode the data, then the the data you're searching for. Like if you have a question you want to ask, you encode that search data, the question using the vector with that same model.

00:17:28:16 - 00:17:53:01 Unknown So whatever model was used to embed the original data, like if I have a list of images of, you know, I'm going to search, I use a certain vector model to encode them into vectors. What I want to search for a certain image after is encode that image using that same model. Then of course, I find the k nearest vectors ordered by distance to the question, and then return the data corresponding to the vector.

00:17:53:01 - 00:18:22:17 Unknown That's the way vector search works. So let's talk about vector generator. I want to skip some of the details and the vector generation. So typically for a database application there are three ways customers can do this. One is they can use pre-created vectors. There's a lot of data that is already vectorized. And if you already have a tier of data with the image or text and its vector, you can load that directly into the database.

00:18:22:19 - 00:18:47:08 Unknown No problem. The second thing is often you want to use, third party embedding service like OpenAI. They provide Rest endpoints to generate vector embeddings from your data, and you can do that from the database using a political function. And of course, the third approach is you can load the model into the database and do the vector generation inside the model.

00:18:47:10 - 00:19:16:03 Unknown Okay. So that's the way vector embeddings are produced. So I know very simply the benefit of this, approach is that you can make the database the API hub for your operation. So even if the vectors are being produced outside the database, like using OpenAI or come here or Google's embedding models, you can do that call out from the database so that you end user doesn't need to do two different things.

00:19:16:05 - 00:19:41:08 Unknown They can supply the credentials to the database and have the database essentially generate the embeddings directly from source data. So this this simple function takes, like a support incident description and combined creates the and creates the vector for it using the supplied embedding credential. This is an open AI credential, for instance, as an example. So very simple.

00:19:41:10 - 00:20:10:02 Unknown It keeps everything simple, consistent and SQL oriented. Now if you want to run everything inside the database, you can load models into the database. And there is a technique known as Onnx open Neural Network exchange. That's the standard sort of runtime that supports vector embedding generation. So step one is you load that model into the database, you whatever model you want.

00:20:10:02 - 00:20:35:20 Unknown This is a very common model for of Transformers. It's called it's a nice long name. All Alex. L6 v2, you can load the model into the database using the spill SQL function. And then once the model is in the database, you can use that model in the database to convert that incident descriptions, into a into a vector.

00:20:35:22 - 00:20:55:15 Unknown So this vector embedding function runs and said the database and produced vectors. Very simple okay. So now we know how to get vectors from data. Hopefully. What do we not do with them. Well the first thing to do is to store them because vectors have to go somewhere persistent. They for long term search by the database. So let's see how do we store the vectors.

00:20:55:17 - 00:21:19:03 Unknown So vectors are a new data type in Oracle. We basically can declare columns with the vector type. We can optionally give it more details like how big, how big is the vector and what are the types of each number in the vector. These are all things that we can support inside the database. Specific specify how many dimensions.

00:21:19:05 - 00:21:45:12 Unknown This is really a property of the vector embedding model. So the more in some models have smaller dimension and some larger. But depending on the model that you intend to use, you should use, vectors of that size. However, you can also just avoid specifying the dimension count and dimension type altogether because, you know, models change rapidly.

00:21:45:14 - 00:22:05:20 Unknown And if you don't want to change your table definitions, you could leave the model, the dimension cut unspecified. And this format allows you to store vectors of any size and type inside the column so that if the model changes, your schema doesn't change, which is very useful. And also this lets you support multiple models in the same column.

00:22:05:20 - 00:22:30:23 Unknown For instance, I might have a model for Japanese Brazilians versus English estimates, and I have a column of data in the table that tells me what type of resume is being stored. And I can use different models for those those rows. So that's a very powerful capability allowing vectors to be mixed and matched. Okay. As I said earlier, the main operation is vector distance, but I have two different vector values.

00:22:31:01 - 00:22:59:08 Unknown The, only thing that really makes sense to doing them is to see how similar they are using distance. And again, there's many vector distance formula. There's Euclidean cosine similarity. They're all embedding model specific. So each model is this defined or is designed rather to use a certain distance function to measure similarity. And you know, so vectors for words like tiger and lion will be closer to each other than vectors for tiger and apple as an example.

00:22:59:08 - 00:23:24:11 Unknown So this gives you the similarity property with which you can search for data by semantics. Pick. Now the real rocket science behind vector search is called vector indexes. Let's talk about that. This is the this is the part that's really interesting from an academic standpoint. Vector indexes allow you to make similarity searches happen hundreds of times faster.

00:23:24:13 - 00:23:45:09 Unknown That's why you need the indexes. So let's talk about them. So you could of course search the entire column and every value exhaustively in a vector column. And you'd get good results. But that's done slowly. But we index the vectors so that you get much faster access, and you find your top k nearest neighbors much more quickly.

00:23:45:11 - 00:24:17:12 Unknown So let's talk about the neighbor graph vector index. We have two types of indexes. Let's talk about the graph index first here. This is basically a form a type of index where the index is stored as a graph where edges between the vectors represent vector similarity. This is an in-memory index designed for high accuracy and speed. It's not meant for very large data, but today memories are getting pretty big so it can store a reasonable amount of data.

00:24:17:17 - 00:24:44:13 Unknown And one example of a graph vector index that's very popular is called each NSW hierarchical navigable small boat split Everton cluster. But it has sort of become the B-tree of indexes. It looks a bit like this, a just under the hood. So if you the way the ancient structure works, it has it's a multi layer graph and each layer is a subset of the layer below it.

00:24:44:15 - 00:25:10:00 Unknown So let's erase all the vectors and layers one and two and three have a subset of those data. The first has only one the top layer. Sorry. So what happens is you you begin your search from the top left. You, you go down a level each time to find the nearest neighbor, the next layer. And once you get to the last there, you will turn that vector and its neighbors.

00:25:10:02 - 00:25:31:17 Unknown This is sort of the way the high level description, how the vector indexed application works for graph based vector indexes. It makes the vector search very, very fast because this basically is a log n traversal compared to being an order n traversal. So it's very fast and especially because these are basically this pointers of memory. The navigation happens of memory speed.

00:25:31:19 - 00:25:56:14 Unknown So this is the probably the fastest vector index up there. The other approach when if you have very large data that does not fit a memory, the way to search that is another vector index that's partitioned based here. What we do is we take the vectors and we divide them into different groups or clusters or partitions based on vector similarity.

00:25:56:16 - 00:26:25:10 Unknown And one example is something called the inverted file index or IVF flat, which basically groups vectors into these clusters based on vector similarity and this essentially scales up to unlimited sizes of data. So each of these is faster, but it only works if your data fits in memory. IVF can handle basically terabytes and petabytes of data. And I'll give you a, a quick illustration of how IVF works.

00:26:25:10 - 00:26:48:22 Unknown It's very simple. So imagine I have a two dimensional set of vectors. The first step is to take these vectors and classify them into groups. And this is done using an algorithm called K-means clustering. It's a very familiar algorithm for those of you who've done data science, the machine learning K-means basically identifies k clusters given your two dimensional divide.

00:26:48:22 - 00:27:09:22 Unknown Given a data set, when you get a query vector that says find me the nearest neighbors, the first thing we do is instead of look at all the vectors, we first look at the nearest clusters to that vector. So we look at all the cluster distances by measuring the distance between the query vector and the middle of each clusters.

00:27:09:22 - 00:27:32:02 Unknown Let me go back a step. So these are clusters different clusters of vectors. Each of them have a has a centroid or a center of gravity. We defined that as basically the average of those vectors that lets us that measure the distance between the query vector to the center of gravity or centroid. And what we do is we find the nearest centroids.

00:27:32:04 - 00:27:58:01 Unknown In this case here two clusters that look like the the closest to the search vector. Once I've done that, then I can do a search within those clusters for the nearest vector. So what I did first was I reduced the search space by looking at only the nearest clusters, and then searching only within those clusters. And this is essentially how, you know, neighbor partition vector indexes work.

00:27:58:03 - 00:28:23:00 Unknown Very simple. Again, this works for unlimited, say, the data, the standard algorithms or heuristics for how many classes you want. Typically what happens is if you have n vectors altogether the number of clusters is square root of n. So that gets us a reduction in the search space by a quadratic amount. There's a simple DDL just to show you how this looks from an end user standpoint.

00:28:23:02 - 00:28:47:13 Unknown You basically define the vector index and you specify how you want the index to be organized and using what distance function. Now, what's new? What's in addition, Oracle is you can also specify how accurate you want the vector index to be. By default you can specify a default target accuracy. The more accurate the index, the slower the index construction is, but the better the result is.

00:28:47:15 - 00:29:13:01 Unknown So, it's easy for developers to specify because you could specify low level index parameters that only Data Science Scientist would understand, but an accuracy number is easy. Saying, hey, I want this index to be 95%. I can because this is meant for like facial recognition that border control. But if it's product recommendations, I might be okay with the lower accuracy in order to make the index construction faster.

00:29:13:01 - 00:29:40:13 Unknown So you can define the target accuracy based on your target use case. Thank you to thank. Ha. That's all for this episode. Please join us for episode two to hear the conclusion of ten class presentation. Until then, thank you for listening. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

AI is driving a remarkable transformation throughout the industry, delivering unprecedented productivity gains and enabling rapid insights from vast amounts of data. In the second of a two-episode season premiere, Tirthankar Lahiri, SVP of Mission-Critical Data and AI Engines, discusses how Oracle AI Vector and embedded machine learning search are harnessing the power of AI to unlock value from enterprise data. AI is triggering an incredible transformation across the industry, enabling breakthrough improvements in productivity and rapid insights across massive volumes of data. However, in order to fully harness the power of AI, it is necessary to enable AI processing where the data resides. Oracle AI vector and built-in-machine learning search bring the power of AI to enterprise data, and allow developers to build sophisticated RAG and Agentic frameworks that leverage the full power of the converged database architecture of Oracle Database — including its class-leading scalability, fault-tolerance, and enterprise-grade security. Furthermore, Oracle database provides several mechanisms to make data "AI-ready" by enabling declarative data intent for AI. In this session, we will describe these techniques, and more, to explain how to truly build an AI for data solution in this rapidly changing AI landscape!

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Episode Transcript:

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:36:04 Unknown Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy prepares next generation's workforce. I'm your host, Tyra Peirce.

00:00:36:06 - 00:01:02:02 Unknown This is the second episode in our two part presentation. AI for data when data meets intelligence. In this episode, our guest speaker to thank Tirthankar Lahiri, senior vice President for mission critical data and AI engines at Oracle, concludes his presentation on AI and enterprise data. If you've not heard episode one yet, please go to oracle.com/podcast where you will find all episodes of Oracle Academy Tech Chat.

00:01:02:04 - 00:01:32:05 Unknown Now let me hand over two to thank for the conclusion of this presentation by. Hey guys, thank you very much for joining. It's a great pleasure to be presenting AI for data. Now let's talk about vector sequel. I've already mentioned this briefly earlier, so I won't spend too much time on this, but basically you can do vector distances to find similar, objects using the vector distance function and very simple query finding the customers that are similar to this photo.

00:01:32:07 - 00:01:55:00 Unknown And I wonder what the top five customers and we could add other complex conditions. Like I said earlier, maybe only one customers in San Francisco that match this photo. Again, that filter will be added to the query to find only the customers matching the photo in San Francisco. We could join, various with other tables as well.

00:01:55:01 - 00:02:25:20 Unknown For instance, we could join it with a status table that finds the customers only with a certain spending tier. So this sort of, you know, extension gives me, again, as I said earlier, the power of composing SQL with complex conditions to run very sophisticated searches. Okay. Once again, in the query, you can also specify how accurate you want the search to be, regardless of the index accuracy.

00:02:25:20 - 00:02:48:01 Unknown You can make a search more accurate by spending more time on the search by going deeper in the index. Same deal. The index. The default accuracy. Maybe the default was that 85%, but I want 95% for a certain search. I want to do a deeper search. This directive with the SQL lets me do exactly that. I can specify again how much I want in the SQL itself.

00:02:48:01 - 00:03:13:16 Unknown Maybe it's a different search. Maybe my recommendations initially were great. I want like a really deep recommendation based on my last search. My last browsing or buying patterns. So this lets me crank up the knob, crank up the dial rather for the accuracy based on my use case. Again, to allow the search to proceed deeper into the vector index.

00:03:13:18 - 00:03:34:07 Unknown Okay. All right. I'm going to, you know, vector index support transactions. There's not a whole lot to say about that. As you update the data, the vector indexes get maintained. The core indexes, you know, I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this because some of this is very oracle specific. But we scale our Oracle database in a number of different ways.

00:03:34:09 - 00:03:58:12 Unknown And each of those scale out mechanism, the Oracle database runs on multiple physical computers. All of those mechanisms support vector indexes. So vector vector search can scale out on nodes of a compute cluster easily. You could also scale out using something called sharding, which is a way to scale the vector, the result to a global scale.

00:03:58:12 - 00:04:18:02 Unknown So imagine I have, you know, a database that's logically sharding across multiple continents. I essentially can build a vector index on each shard and do a global search that runs very fast, because if I'm searching for products that are, let's say Italian coaches, for instance, I would only search the Italian shard and not the other, the other shards.

00:04:18:02 - 00:04:38:19 Unknown So you get performance improvements as well as localization of your search results. Okay. So I'm going to skip some of this and go to the next step. So I want to talk about. So some some just some simple use case vector search before I get to my other topic I wanted to cover quickly today I think I have ten minutes left.

00:04:38:23 - 00:05:03:02 Unknown So yeah. So there's lots of use cases. Like I said, for just plain vanilla I like to search lots of use case. I just find me similar support tickets. Find me someone matching this biometric pattern. Similar products find me manufacturing defects. You know, text search using some similarity. If I miss similar documents or, you know, browsing made, etc. those are very standard vector search case.

00:05:03:02 - 00:05:25:09 Unknown But let's talk about generative AI. That's, you know, the big new thing nowadays. And generative AI is really what made vector search very, very important as a primary use case for vector search because it lets you interact with business data using natural language. So why do I do a vector search for this? Because it lends to all of the work.

00:05:25:09 - 00:05:54:03 Unknown Anyway, you know, everyone here must have used GPT or Grok or Gemini. Why do I need vector search? Well, here's the reason why. Generative AI is, basically answers natural language questions. You ask a question, for instance, in the support example, I want to know why my laptop keeps rebooting as an example. I also love them. They basically uses the question and it's general knowledge to answer the question.

00:05:54:03 - 00:06:13:21 Unknown And maybe it doesn't know. It might get a bad response if you just toss them ungodly without any other other information. You may not get a good answer that you like. It might. It might tell you that just by buying your laptop with a laptop is rebooting. Buy a new one. That's not a good answer, but I spent $20 buying a laptop and I wouldn't want to hear that.

00:06:13:23 - 00:06:37:00 Unknown Especially if it was a MacBook that was expensive. That's a bad answer for me. This is not a great answer. And why is that? Because it doesn't know anything about your support incident or other incidents. So it alarms are very, very smart, but they're generalist. They're trained on broad data from the internet, not on specific private data.

00:06:37:02 - 00:06:58:07 Unknown And they can also hallucinate as we know. Right. So what we need to do is to add vector search to improve results. Search quality. What we do is using vector search, we could augment prompts with private database content to provide better answers, which avoids having to create an alarm on sensitive data and this is called drag.

00:06:58:07 - 00:07:21:01 Unknown As everyone knows, this is a very popular technique today. Retrieval augmented generation. So you could again include the question in a vector sent to a vector database to find relevant support incidents, that dig into the reports and augment them with the reports and the question, and then send the whole thing there alarm and then get a better answer.

00:07:21:03 - 00:07:54:05 Unknown It said, you know, it might say, hey, you might need to apply the OS update if that's what you're seeing, because there could be other reports that look similar. Now, you could do even better with Oracle database or the enterprise database to handle that search, because now I can also include customer data and product data, not just the support vectors, but other information that I can also use to augment the response with, to provide even further clarity on what was going on with that customer.

00:07:54:07 - 00:08:27:07 Unknown So again, same deal. I send the question to the customer, to the to the vector database to generate the vector, to look up relevant support request. So I have the question why does my laptop keep reporting a convert that to a vector? I use that to search the vector database, and then I use the vector database to not only generate the incident reports, but I also return the matching product and customer data to find the reports, the support, incident description and resolutions augment them with product information.

00:08:27:07 - 00:08:52:13 Unknown So this is the laptop with a certain middle manufacturing profile. And the customer was in Las Vegas for instance. All of that is set now back to their lab, and they will now be able to get a much better answer because now it has both the vector information as well as the business information. And this might give you a much better, more elaborate response that tells you what's really going on.

00:08:52:15 - 00:09:22:08 Unknown You need a certain update number with what's with the firmware. You got to do this. The cool place. All of that could be summarized because it has the information now for both the incident reports and the customer product, profile data. This is how I run with an enterprise database gives you a better answer. And there's many use cases for generative AI.

00:09:22:10 - 00:09:45:11 Unknown You know, customers want to know what is a document all about? The, very common use case, the one I just showed you, by the way, the support chatbot that I tried to get something done on a website, I can't, and I asked the chat bot, what's going on here? Or maybe I can't log into my, you know, internal universe to database for whatever reason, before I call tech support.

00:09:45:16 - 00:10:10:01 Unknown Can I find out of this? The known problem or what the issue is support. Chat bots are very commonplace using generative AI. You know, travel chatbot. There's a lot of different use cases where you basically have to converse with your business data. And that's what vector search lets you do. The power of vector search lets you do, combined with the power of large language models.

00:10:10:03 - 00:10:43:14 Unknown I'm going to show you a very quick demo here, built by one of our customers, a partner. We have a, an application developed platform, apex, that lets you develop Oracle apps extremely quickly. And how does apex do this? Using retrieval, augmented generation to make such a lot more intelligent and sort of chat oriented. So the first thing we want to do here is to upload a bunch of PDF documents to the database to facilitate retrieval, augmented generation submit as quickly walk you through this hopefully as the work.

00:10:43:15 - 00:11:05:05 Unknown All right. So if you can see here there's a couple of PDF documents that I want to basically augment my database with. So one is on sovereign cloud Oracle sovereign cloud. The other is how to do spatial analysis with Oracle Spatial Studio. These are big PDF documents. These are not available directly. So I want to get this to the realm by adding it to my database.

00:11:05:05 - 00:11:28:12 Unknown And I add them to this apex application. Now that they're in the in the system, I basically convert them into vectors for the loaded in the database in the schema. Now the convert into vectors and you can see these are big vectors that these PDF documents perform. So now I have my vectors in the database, I have a PDF documents and I have my vectors.

00:11:28:14 - 00:11:50:17 Unknown All inside of the database. Right. If the question you know, you have basically what we've done is we've taken the document, we've taken the document and chunk in a chunks. Each chunk has a separate vector. And all these vectors are now inside the database. You typically don't create a single vector per document. You typically divide the document, the text chunks just because the token limits for albums.

00:11:50:19 - 00:12:17:23 Unknown And then each chunk is separately vectorized. So that's basically step one though. You can do basically a have a chat session. That essentially does this. You can into this application just type your question. You know, the question is what is sovereign cloud. And you can see if you ask JNI, what happens is you're going to get a response that this is going to take a while because this is talking to a public.

00:12:18:01 - 00:12:42:22 Unknown This is not Oracle database respondent. This is a public LRM. You're going to get this, information from the from the LM. But it's augmented with Oracle information. So let's stop here for a second. It's open or I don't know how to stop this. Then how did it stop anyway? Sorry, but that,

00:12:43:00 - 00:13:01:21 Unknown Basically, the idea here is that you use the LM to generate the response augmented with the information I just uploaded. Now, if I just add vector such a message. Okay. So I don't know how to replay the stupid thing. Sorry about that. This video is something I'm not very comfortable pausing and restarting, but let's see. This will cooperate.

00:13:01:21 - 00:13:27:19 Unknown This then. So I typed in the question here for step one. You got that? The question was sent to get a lab and, hopefully it'll cooperate to give me a response in a short time. There we are, almost there. When Queequeg, it's basically taking its time talking to the end. But you can see that the information returned includes documentation from the Oracle documents.

00:13:27:20 - 00:13:50:21 Unknown You can also look about vectors such itself that. So what this question did was match itself to these text chunks in the document. And that's the document chunk. It matched in the vector search. And to generate this context, there was that said that the loan was sent the user's question plus the text chunks that matched that user question.

00:13:50:23 - 00:14:17:14 Unknown This was the augmentation payload that the lab used to generate its correct answer. Essentially, it shows you rag in action that if you give it business data and you combine it with, vector data, then you get the best possible outcome, because now it has all the information needed to answer the question. And you can keep going, can ask about things like Oracle Spatial that were the second document we uploaded.

00:14:17:14 - 00:14:36:22 Unknown So again, because it has that document and its vector chunks, it can answer questions about Oracle Spatial as well. And you know again you could iteratively go on and interrogate them and do cool things with it. So it gives you an idea of that, you know, given the documents and the vector embeddings for each chunk, you can use them to.

00:14:37:03 - 00:15:17:14 Unknown It's a run, essentially interactive chat sessions that give you a lot of information that combined the knowledge with the additional knowledge you just added to the them. Using those documents. Okay. Oracle database, essentially vector search is designed to power the entire pipeline for generative AI that you can take the data sources you have, load data from those from the sources, convert those, documents into, you know, essentially summaries or, or segments rather than through the vector embedding models, load them with the vector database and then run similarity searches on them.

00:15:17:16 - 00:15:49:23 Unknown And this vectorized data can be used as part of the interactive flow with the large language model. So a complete gen AI pipeline is really what brings AI to your data. Remember, the data has not moved to Oracle database. All the data is here. And all of this additional intelligence is being added to that data through the sophisticated gen AI pipeline.

00:15:50:01 - 00:16:19:09 Unknown You know, using you know, so we have native calls for generative AI. We have tight integration with third party frameworks. So a data science developer can very easily build a complete every data solution using, using the Oracle Gen AI pipeline. Okay, I think I managed just the outline. So let me quickly wrap up here. The key takeaways here is that vector search is really what brings AI to your business data.

00:16:19:11 - 00:16:46:11 Unknown And the Avoca search includes a new vector data type for a new set of SQL extensions, very simple extensions that allow you to search data by semantics or similarity. A new set of vector indexes for performance. It's very fast because as I showed you, this index lets you search data within milliseconds. The very, very fast indexes for very rapid retrievals and highly accurate retrievals.

00:16:46:13 - 00:17:10:13 Unknown And the AI vector search is not just for similarity search. It's also to enable conversations with your data using generative AI. Lots of places you can go get more information. So there's live labs that you could go try this out. You're welcome to take a screenshot of this if you'd like to see, to get more information in the future.

00:17:10:15 - 00:17:38:18 Unknown We do have a free version Oracle database. I would encourage students and faculty to explore getting this. It's a great way to get started. Oracle database to understand everything. All the concepts we have in the database are free to use. And it's a it's a, it's a basically a container image. You could download that makes it easy to develop applications with that to understand some of the, you know, concepts around things like I like vector search very quickly and that's it for my site.

00:17:38:18 - 00:18:04:02 Unknown I think I stayed on time. You did really great to thank her. And I actually have some questions for you. So does using SQL compromise on performance on vector databases compared to mechanisms by other vendors? Actually does not. SQL is a very thin wrapper. SQL basically is a declarative specification of access methods that the other vector providers use.

00:18:04:02 - 00:18:23:17 Unknown So whatever the vector access method is, is directly exposed to SQL, there's no additional overhead from the SQL itself. If you think of SQL as a very simple, like a work plan for what operation I want, and it directly goes to vector database. If you look at what happened in vector search, the actual time is spent in the search.

00:18:23:17 - 00:18:44:07 Unknown The search has to look at lots of vectors. Go to an index. The SQL engine adds like negligible overhead, to that process. So yeah, there is no, no one since then. I have two more for you. How does the system handle updates inserts, deletes, modifies in the layers? And in parentheses add the multilayer in-memory graph.

00:18:44:12 - 00:19:11:23 Unknown Does it rebalance layers or delay maintenance. Very good question. So there's a lot of literature on this. And I would encourage you to look at the people in W basically index maintenance is done just like index search. So if I delete a vector from an index, the way the delete works, essentially I have to find again the the vectors neighbors that I'm deleting from and essentially effectively rebalance the index links so that the number of links to each neighbor has remained the same.

00:19:12:01 - 00:19:37:01 Unknown This is standard literature. Other techniques for graph maintenance. We do try to optimize this by batching the operations together. So instead of doing one at a time, we wait for several to accumulate and then do them in a batch. So the way we do it is we accumulate changes in the journal to make sure that the user query can cancel both the index and the journal, and when the journal reached a certain size, we applied the journal to the index.

00:19:37:06 - 00:20:00:15 Unknown But that's a great question. It is true that vector indexes are not as easy to maintain as traditional relational indexes, but again, they're a standard techniques often, to advertise the cost. Okay, one final question when combining tabular structure with unstructured columns makes it flexible. Will this be logistically more expensive to create maintain? No, not really at all.

00:20:00:15 - 00:20:23:20 Unknown I mean, if you look at the way the storage manager works, right, it gives you full flexibility. The vectors are vec vector, the base basically just another column. And you know, creation and maintenance is done just like a regular index. So we know how to maintain indexes. In fact we support it. I like to think of this as being a superset of Mongo Atlas, because we can store Json documents just fine as well.

00:20:24:01 - 00:20:45:11 Unknown If you want to use Oracle in the document store, you can also do that. You can imagine that the call it the table is basically a Json collection and have one of the fields be a vector field for instance. So it's actually a superset. There is no additional cost. What you do get though is flexibility, which you don't get with the document stores, because now I can combine all kinds of data.

00:20:45:11 - 00:21:05:04 Unknown I can have spatial columns for a very common requirement, as I want to find similar restaurants first by description, but only within a certain search. Treatise on my current location on my phone. So that's a spatial search. It's not just a vector search. There's no you know, I've seen this. I've asked for restaurant recommendations, and I had location tracking off my phone.

00:21:05:05 - 00:21:23:10 Unknown I gave you a recommendation for a restaurant in Tokyo. I thought, that's helpful. I'm not in Tokyo right now. And asked the top sushi restaurant this. Oh, go to poke you. This is a fantastic place. I said. I would love to go to Tokyo, but I happen to not be in Oregon. I can't go to Tokyo. So that's a case where you want a spatial search combine with vector search.

00:21:23:12 - 00:21:43:10 Unknown And I did find a very nice sushi restaurant in Oregon, Portland, but it requires spatial filters, so you get flexibility. You don't really get any additional, overheads from, from the tabular representations. I love that example because that's a question that I would ask is give me a sushi restaurant in in California in Palo Alto. So I really learned so much there.

00:21:43:10 - 00:22:12:09 Unknown I think that's all of our questions. One final announcement Oracle Academy is excited. Announce new free artificial intelligence resources, including hands on workshops that introduce generative AI technologies in education bites, featuring practical labs and projects on digital assistants, natural language processing and vector search to help you and your students build essential world AI skills, faculty members log in to the member hub and explore the course catalog in our air resources.

00:22:12:11 - 00:22:34:02 Unknown Thank you to Tirthankar for a fascinating presentation and for being our guest on the Oracle Academy Tech Chop podcast. For more information about Oracle AI, visit Oracle Akamai and if you would like to learn more about Oracle Academy, our website is academy.oracle.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please like and subscribe on your podcast platform. Thanks for listening.

00:22:34:03 - 00:22:46:06 Unknown That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

In this episode host Tyra Peirce chats with Rolando Carrasco, an Oracle ACE Director based in Latin America. Rolando and Tyra speak about Multi-tenant cloud. What it is, what it isn't, and when it should be used.

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Episode Transcript:

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:34:01

Unknown

Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students with in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy prepares the next generation's workforce.

00:00:34:03 - 00:01:02:16

Unknown

I'm your host, Tyra Peirce. Today I'm joined by our Rolando Carrasco. Rolando is an Oracle Ace director based in Latin America. He has been in the IT industry for the past 25 years, working for companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. Then in 2010, he started his own consulting firm where he is currently the CTO. His work has been focused on distributed systems, working with several integration platforms, API management tools and the cloud.

00:01:02:18 - 00:01:29:06

Unknown

He is a constant speaker at both local and global development conferences. Welcome, Rolando. Oh thank you Tyra. So to start off, can you give me a bit about your background and your current job role? Yes. Thank you Tyra. Now I'm currently the CTO for a Mexican consulting firm here in Mexico. The name is CES, and I've had this role for the past 15 to 16 years now.

00:01:29:08 - 00:02:07:13

Unknown

And as you already mentioned, my experience is focused on distributed systems. And probably, I will say, the evolution of those type of needs in terms of integration in the cloud now. And I will say that I have a mixed profile in terms of, development, if you will, and also experience on sales and pre-sales and architecture, or so I will say that I have that type of hybrid more a rosary and my experience is being focused mostly and in the Latin American region, from Mexico to Brazil.

00:02:07:15 - 00:02:32:21

Unknown

Today our focus is on, multi-tenancy and cloud computing. Can you tell me what a multi-tenancy is and cloud computing and how does it differ from single tenancy? I can say that multi-tenancy is the ability to have different organizations working separately, and that's the key. But we'll be using the same infrastructure okay. Even though they share this infrastructure.

00:02:32:23 - 00:02:57:07

Unknown

The main thing, as I said, we already mentioned is that those different organizations are isolated. They can see each other, they can see their data. And I can say that normally service providers work in this fashion. They offer their services to several gateway stations or customers. And from the infrastructure standpoint, they share the infrastructure now along all those organizations.

00:02:57:09 - 00:03:25:08

Unknown

And the difference, the difference between multi-tenancy and the single tenancy is that which single tenant, every organization use its own infrastructure. I mean, there is nothing to share between them or among them, but you need to deliver on a specific infrastructure for every single organization. So which follows on to my next question. Can you share a real world example of multi-tenant cloud implementations?

00:03:25:10 - 00:04:03:19

Unknown

Yes, absolutely. I will say that the software as a service market and the software as a service, providers and application owns most of them. And I can say that both big companies such as Oracle and small companies or even startups, they use these type of model offering these, those type of services. For example, an email application and the one that we normally use, Outlook or Gmail or any of that type of email application is a clear example of then we all have an account.

00:04:03:21 - 00:04:26:22

Unknown

The infrastructure is the same. We don't care as a user, we just use the service as its own, as it's been, offered to, to us. So, the users are not aware of that. And I will say that probably the users are not even interested in if it is a multi-tenancy or not, but all I what I was trying to I was trying sorry to explain.

00:04:27:00 - 00:04:51:19

Unknown

Is that mostly those type of SaaS applications use this model. For example, maybe you or the audience are aware of applications such as Monday.com or Bitly. The shortener, URL application, or any other type of application that you normally use that you just use and you just subscribe to it. It is so very clear example of behind the scenes is working in a multi-tenancy fashion.

00:04:51:21 - 00:05:15:22

Unknown

That actually makes sense. The Bitly one makes sense to me because I've used it before. And same with like my email. My email. Programs. I understand how that would work. Like, you access it one way, but you might be touching multiple clouds. So that's that's actually really, really fascinating for me. So on to my next question. Why do organizations choose a multi-tenant architecture over a single tenant one?

00:05:16:00 - 00:05:45:22

Unknown

I will answer that in two ways. And the first one is for service providers. These multi-tenancy model may imply the reduction of several cost and operations because instead of provisioning dedicated infrastructure and all the consequences that it that it has, they use just one single, infrastructure and that single infrastructure is the one that they operate. They your grade and then they maintain.

00:05:46:00 - 00:06:13:17

Unknown

But at the same time they isolate the organizations as as we mentioned in, in the past questions or in the previous questions. And the second thing is for organizations who create their own software, I mean, that they are looking to create a solution. They are building, an application they will like to or free to many customers, and they need to deliver it in, in such a way that they need to reduce their own cost.

00:06:13:19 - 00:06:43:18

Unknown

Then probably they are going to choose these type of models because it is going to be not that expensive. And for example, in terms of Oracle technology, a Oracle's database is a very clear example of the unorganized organization, sorry, an organization that is looking to create an application which uses a database. But it happens that these database needs to be separated, be separated because the departments needs to be isolated.

00:06:43:18 - 00:07:10:23

Unknown

Just to give an example, this type of organization can leverage from the Oracle database technology. And in the specific the database multi-tenant option one single database engine, but multiple databases running on that very same engine. So I would say that those two things are the ones that are going to make an organization to use this multi-tenancy model that is that also makes a lot of sense to me.

00:07:10:23 - 00:07:45:09

Unknown

Like if you need to separate your databases, you want to separate your data, you want to make sure that it's controlled and then only accessible by a certain group of people. That also makes sense to me as well. Which leads to the next question how does multi-tenancy impact database management in cloud applications? I will say that it reduces the complexity of managing different databases with a whole set of infrastructure, because if you think about it and you have separate databases, then you need probably different persons to manage those different layers.

00:07:45:11 - 00:08:10:14

Unknown

So in the Oracle database multi-tenancy model or in a database dependency model, it is just one single infrastructure. So you reduce the number of persons or the team that is managing the infrastructure. The second thing is the streamline is streamlining the database provisioning and the provisioning, because you just need to take care about let me say it in this way just as database.

00:08:10:14 - 00:08:38:22

Unknown

So for it that's that's the there's the thing that you need to manage and you need to deploy or, or provision or the provision instead of the whole infrastructure. The third thing is to consolidate the database management. You are consolidating in a single group of persons and sometimes it is just one single DBA. You leave me managing different databases with, you know, very same infrastructure or the very same infrastructure.

00:08:39:00 - 00:09:07:01

Unknown

You can also consolidate database monitoring. So you have a single glass of pane if you will, where you can check the different databases that you are running in this multi tenancy model, instead of having separated monitoring tools or monitoring applications, working on top of these different databases, you have one single glass of paint on modeling of new organization.

00:09:07:01 - 00:09:29:05

Unknown

You will be easier because you already have the infrastructure. You just need to provision the database for this new department or organization and probably already mentioned it, but I think is is okay to repeat it to reduce the number of DBA is managing all that infrastructure. I like that, I like that it's all about streamlining and making sure that they you don't need as many resources.

00:09:29:06 - 00:09:48:01

Unknown

Managing certain types of things like the DBA is can go out and expand into doing different types of work. And it's that's a little bit more interesting. Or you have like a, a person that is just an expert in one area, which I think is kind of helpless. You can spread your resources out and make them a little bit more nimble and flexible.

00:09:48:01 - 00:10:21:21

Unknown

So which leads to my next question. What are the key performance challenges and a multi-tenant system, and how are they addressed in. This is one of the most relevant questions, and I will say that this is something that every time we think about the multi-tenancy model, we need to take care of these because it is good, obviously, and we've been highlighting all these benefits of having not one single infrastructure is sharing it among different organizations, but it happens that it is the same infrastructure.

00:10:21:21 - 00:11:07:15

Unknown

So those multiple, organizations running on these very same infrastructure, are, if you will, fighting for those or competing for those available resources. And those organizations have or may have different dynamics. For example, an organization may be running batch processes while the other organizations are, having or are processing numerous transactions stream simultaneously. So you have different dynamics and that as a consequence, means that the CPU or the memory are using different ways in sometimes those different ways may block a process or may block the CPU.

00:11:07:15 - 00:11:44:05

Unknown

So then you are probably going to hit a problem with that, because one organization problem may cause the other organization, which has nothing to do with the with the one who is having the problem. And then you are creating a little bit of chaos along or among those, those different organizations. So, so you need you need to be very clever on that regard and trying to take care about those different dynamics or identify those different dynamics, and then try to mix the best as you can, the infrastructure that is supporting those different customers.

00:11:44:07 - 00:12:08:23

Unknown

So I will summarize that point, that very relevant point on different organizations, different dynamics. One single blocking process may create a chaos, along your different customers working on your multi-tenancy mode. I think that makes sense. And I think it talks about why communication and collaboration are key as you're going through in and setting up your your cloud.

00:12:08:23 - 00:12:44:17

Unknown

And if you choose to go multi-tenancy, to choose your multi-tenancy cloud is to make sure that we communicate regularly and effectively. So my last question for you, and thank you so much for joining me today is if you could give one piece of advice to faculty or students, what would it be? I always suggest to try to have a fixed time to study technology on a daily basis, to try to have a moment in the day where you just dedicate that time, or on studying something, try to learn something new daily.

00:12:44:19 - 00:13:05:03

Unknown

So try to make an assessment of yourself on a daily basis about what was the thing that you learned that day and if you didn't, and if you continue doing, in the next day, then probably do not going to feel okay. And then if the third day you are not learning something new, then probably you are going to identify a problem.

00:13:05:05 - 00:13:27:18

Unknown

So always try to learn something new on a daily basis. Go to sleep and as yourself if you learn something new, as I already mentioned, try new technology or try technology, maybe this maybe is not new technology, but just try technology. Experiment with it. It's not going to happen anything if you fail with that, just try it and just try to understand it and try to learn.

00:13:27:18 - 00:14:01:20

Unknown

As I mentioned, try to be active in events. No, not doesn't a speaker, but just try to attend different events and try to learn from others. I will say that. Thank you Alondra. I think that's a really wonderful answer. I think that being curious and being willing to try new things is is always really important, cause I think it helps us to learn more about the technology and not to be afraid as we're going through and trying to become, learn the latest and greatest, things, which is is very much one of those newer technologies is coming out.

00:14:01:20 - 00:14:28:15

Unknown

So thank you to Rolando for being the guest today on the Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast. For more information, visit our website academy.oracle.com and subscribe to our podcast. Thanks for listening. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

In this episode host Tyra Peirce speaks with Oracle development data center manager Ryan Lucas. Ryan tells Tyra about the key components of a data center, and what it takes to run a data center.

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Episode Transcript:

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:34:09

Unknown

Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps our next generation's workforce.

00:00:34:11 - 00:00:58:17

Unknown

I'm your host, Tara Crockett Pierce. In this episode, I speak with Oracle Data Center manager Ryan Lucas. Ryan breaks down the basics of data centers what they are, how they work, and why they're essential for empowering your favorite streaming services to securing business critical data. So far to securing business critical data. Data centers are the unseen force behind modern technology.

00:00:58:17 - 00:01:27:03

Unknown

Welcome, Ryan. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So go ahead and start off. Ryan, can you give me a little bit about your background and your role at Oracle? Yeah. So I first started working as a system administrator, for the Java group at Sun Microsystems back in 2002. My responsibilities included deploying and maintainingsystems, like Solaris, Linux, and even windows servers.

00:01:27:05 - 00:02:03:20

Unknown

And I would also troubleshoot network, software and hardware issues. Eventually my responsibilities included backing up important files like source code for the Java Development Kit or otherwise known as JDK. I've been at Oracle for 16 years. Yeah. So in my current role, I help manage labs that, are essentially on-premise data centers. They may not be as large as something you would see like an on OCI site.

00:02:03:22 - 00:02:33:11

Unknown

But the labs that I support, they when you're inside them, they look like data centers. And we, they basically are used to to test Oracle engineered systems. So my group we help provide local support for the engineers of Oracle Engineered Systems. We have systems that have been released to the public. And we have systems that have not been released to the public.

00:02:33:13 - 00:03:01:03

Unknown

And so what we are responsible for, you know, deploying, maintaining, keeping these servers running and helping create testing environments so that engineers can make sure that the engineered, that their hardware works as advertised. And then, sometimes even after hardware has been released, if a customer has some kind of concern, we may have to recreate their environment in our lab.

00:03:01:09 - 00:03:21:06

Unknown

Well, I call it lab, but it's a data center. And that way, we can try to discover if the customer's having a lot of times the customers having an issue because it's a customer error. So, you know, maybe the customer is trying to use our hardware in ways that we hadn't, you know, thought about or wasn't really designed for.

00:03:21:08 - 00:03:47:03

Unknown

But, yeah, eventually there will be some issues that we have to work through. And, and so it's it's very dynamic. So a typically like a, like an OCI production data center, you know, that is very structured. You know, all the cables are pristine a specific length. You know they push they push a new rack of servers into a gridlock station.

00:03:47:05 - 00:04:11:16

Unknown

It's there for the life of the of the rack. You may they have a field engineer come in and service some hardware, but then after it's decommissioned, they roll it out and they put in a new server. But in my in my group, we are constantly moving things around to recreate environments. It's very dynamic, very different. But it also makes it the challenge makes it very fun as well.

00:04:11:18 - 00:04:45:09

Unknown

So Ryan, kind of with that really cool introduction and background, what is a data center and what are its core components? Gotcha. Okay. So I'm going to read a formalized explanation. Just so I don't ramble off or get too technical. And then I'm going to talk about some things in my own words. So a data center is a physical facility to house a group of networked computers, servers for the remote storage, processing and distribution of data.

00:04:45:11 - 00:05:07:23

Unknown

A data center provides security, physical space, power, and cooling for racks of servers and network equipment. Those are the core components. But let me let me just I think I was trying to imagine what it would be like for someone who's never been in a data center to try to grasp the magnitude of scale that is a data center.

00:05:08:01 - 00:05:35:09

Unknown

You know, like you're if you're at home and you have your home computer, maybe it has a gigabit Ethernet port, and maybe you connect to the internet with with one internet service provider and your speed, you know, depending on what you're paying, is your bandwidth isn't huge, right? It's so hard, I think. Had I not had the experience I have, it's can be very difficult to try to imagine what a data center is capable of.

00:05:35:11 - 00:05:56:18

Unknown

It's kind of like if I were, you know, I'm driving a car and trying to imagine what it's like to drive a Formula One car, but that's not even a good analogy because it's not even a formula One car. It's a fleet of Formula One cars in each of them. Each of my racks, we have switches that can process 100 gigabits per second, 100 gigabits per second.

00:05:56:20 - 00:06:32:23

Unknown

And between each of our data centers, each of our labs, we have switches that are can process 400 gigabits per second. There's switches out there that will do 800 gigabits per second. Then there's probably even switches beyond that that I'm, you know, not familiar with yet, but so it's really hard for someone who, when you talk about the scale of what is involved and what these data centers can do and how much planning and organization goes into building them and running them, it's it can be a little hard to comprehend, you know, but it makes it fun, right?

00:06:32:23 - 00:06:56:22

Unknown

I mean, that's one of the reasons why I love my job is because I get to to work with, work with, and touch hardware that is just sometimes blows my mind. I also think about Oracle probably has some of the most advanced data centers in the world, just based on what we do as well. So like this is like the Rolls Royce of like and the Maserati of data centers and what we do every day.

00:06:57:00 - 00:07:22:08

Unknown

Which leads me to my next question. What are the different types of data centers? Right. So I was thinking back to some of my early days when I was at CERN, and I can remember someone telling me that one of the early developers of MySQL or MySQL had a server under his kitchen table. I can't even imagine what I mean.

00:07:22:10 - 00:07:40:02

Unknown

It probably was I'd like a desktop PC or a workstation. It wouldn't have even been a server because that would have been too loud. But if you think about what what happens if your power goes out or if your internet service provider goes out, there goes, you know, so I, I don't know if that's true or not. I just remember somebody telling me about being blown away.

00:07:40:04 - 00:08:11:00

Unknown

But, so you there's some companies that have, on premise, you have an on premise data center. So that's like, if I want to do all the heavy lifting myself, you know, so I'm going to build the data center. I'm going to have a facilities group that is responsible for providing power and cooling. And then I'm also going to have my own teams, you know, like system administrators, network administrators to support all the hardware in that lab.

00:08:11:02 - 00:08:39:09

Unknown

And then, you know, you're also responsible for making sure you have, you know, connections to the theinternet backbone. There's there's a lot involved. So, so on premises, if some, you know, you're a company and you want to control, have that data center managed by you, then there's something called co-location or colo. And what a colo is.

00:08:39:09 - 00:09:08:16

Unknown

And then you have like a third party and they specialize in the planning and the building of the data center. They provide the cooling and, the power and you, the different companies, different corporations or different entities, they can rent space, like maybe you'll rent a floor or you'll rent a cage. And they're also responsible for the security.

00:09:08:18 - 00:09:36:06

Unknown

So I know at colo facilities, you know, they'll have retinal scanners, they'll have man traps. I've been to data centers where they have armed guards, where they have conference rooms that generate, like, white noise. So if you're in a conference room and you're trying to have a private conversation and somebody walks by, they can't overhear you, you know, now, not that anybody would be trying to listen in on your conversation.

00:09:36:06 - 00:10:06:04

Unknown

But if you know, if you're with the NSA or something, you want to make sure that nobody can overhear sensitive information. So it can be very cloak and dagger. So yeah, that's that would be one concern. If you'reat a Colo facility and you're not managing the data center, you know, but having an on premise data center, then you have like a cloud data center, which is, third party that provides compute, storage and networking, resources as a service.

00:10:06:06 - 00:10:52:23

Unknown

And here's where it gets kind of interesting. Now, I'm sure Oracle, we have our own data centers that we build out, but we can also I think OCI also has cloud services at a Colo facility. Right. So Oracle can rent a floor or floors a different, buildings of a Colo facility and they can host their environment for the cloud to others, but they don't have to worry about, you know, maintaining the facility maintenance, providing the power or providing, you know, they just pay, a third party to do that for them.

00:10:53:01 - 00:11:17:04

Unknown

So, Ryan, which leads to my next question. How do data centers manage non software concerns such as power cooling and security. So as you can imagine there's a lot of monitoring. There's a lot of planning and monitoring to ensure everything is stable and secure. A data center typically receives power from the electrical grid of a power company.

00:11:17:04 - 00:11:41:21

Unknown

But what if the grid goes down? So many data centers have diesel generators that will provide power if there'san outage or if there's a disruption. And they'll also have contracts with fuel trucks, to deliver more diesel if there's a sustained outage. Some data centers have other sources, like natural gas. I was always kind of jealous of that.

00:11:41:22 - 00:12:14:11

Unknown

Know that. Wouldn't even have to worry about. Like, if if the electrical grid went down from the local power company. If I could use thermal gas, or natural gas. Excuse me. To to generate power where I didn't have to go to diesel generators, though, you know, so you can have multiple lines of redundancy and then, you know, now with some of the newer data centers with AI and the demands of AI, now they're talking about, nuclear power.

00:12:14:13 - 00:12:40:03

Unknown

And, so I can't even imagine what's involved with that. That's something I still have to learn about and look into. But, Yeah, I know that Oracle is planning to build a there's a new this is public information. Oracle is building a gigawatt scale data center in, that uses three small nuclear reactors or smart. Yeah.

00:12:40:05 - 00:13:08:02

Unknown

So, I'd like to learn more about that, but it's interesting. Right? You know, and then there's thermal. There's the I don't know if you talk in the news when they talk about this interest in Greenland and I've heard, well, they're people are interested in Greenland because of their precious metals, but also it's the amount of space that is there to build out data centers and how you can use the ice sheets for thermal power generator generation.

00:13:08:04 - 00:13:43:13

Unknown

So it's it's yeah, it's really there's a lot there. Then it's a lot more than just precious metals and the strategic strategic location of Greenland. So anyway, but so so yeah there's that. We talked about power cooling obviously. Yeah. If you're in Greenland too cooling you could literally pull in cooler air into the data center. I mean, one of the problems we have locally sometimes in California is if they're if it's a really warm summer and there's a lot of demand on the grid, the grid goes, goes down and you know them.

00:13:43:13 - 00:14:00:18

Unknown

Yeah. Again, we have to work, rely on generators or sometimes I've had a situation where we had to, at least for my data centers, we just had they just had to shut down temporarily. And then we had to bring it back up, which you can never do in a production environment. Keep that in mind. So my environment is more development.

00:14:00:20 - 00:14:26:23

Unknown

I'll also point out so security, physical security. Luckily in my labs, my data centers, we don't have customer data. Right. So that that's nice. We do we do a lot of testing of hardware, but we don't have customer data. The second you have customer data, then you're talking. That's when you're talking again, you know, physical security man traps.

00:14:27:01 - 00:14:57:18

Unknown

Armed guards in some cases, retinal scanners, there's multiple lines, you know. Yeah, I don't know. They'rebuilding a huge new data center near my off of 101 in Montague, near my near where I work in Santa Clara, California. And I don't know if some people, I'm sure people in the know can can immediately spot that it's a data center, but they're they're always like these nondescript buildings.

00:14:57:20 - 00:15:18:19

Unknown

And if you know what a diesel generator looks like and if you see diesel generators can you can pick them out really fast. But, you know, a lot of the times when you have like a data center that has, customer information, there's going to be a fat, you know, there's going to be a perimeter, there's a guard station just to get into the parking lot.

00:15:18:21 - 00:15:38:00

Unknown

And then from the parking lot to get in the data center, there's going to be, you know, kind of like a security checkpoint that you would find the like at the airport. Where are they going? They're going to scan your bags. You can scan your person, and then you get in there and then there's further man traps and checkpoints depending on where you need to go in the data center.

00:15:38:05 - 00:16:08:22

Unknown

You know, because again, like if it's a colo facility, you could have multiple customers in different areas. You want to make sure that nobody who shouldn't be in your area can can get access to it. So where my labs, we do have, you know, badge access and key codes and there's local security personnel, but it's nothing like you would see in some of the data centers that are out there where it's they have very sensitive information and they need they need to make sure that there's no nobody's getting in there.

00:16:09:00 - 00:16:36:01

Unknown

It's like a modern fortress. Really. Ryan, my next question for you, what is the role of data centers in the era of cloud computing in the internet? Yeah. So again, I'm going to read something here. Cloud computing is a term used to describe the delivery of on demand computing resources, hardware storage, database networking and software to businesses and individuals via a network, usually the internet.

00:16:36:03 - 00:16:53:07

Unknown

Cloud computing enables organizations to access and store information without managing their own physical devices or I.T infrastructure. So yeah, I mean, think about if you're let's say you're a smaller organization and you want to.

00:16:53:09 - 00:17:31:11

Unknown

You don't want to have to have pay for the, you know, experienced employees that could handle all this internally, you know, or, or or pay for having a small data center, you know, you want to be able to start in the cloud and then be able to scale in the cloud as you grow, rather than trying to, you know, have a server in your basement or in a in a closet somewhere that's not going to be secure, that doesn't have the power of redundancy, you know, that doesn't have the security.

00:17:31:13 - 00:17:52:02

Unknown

So I really you know, obviously, and it cloud computing is good for any size of corporations. But I really see that for something especially small that wants to this, I think it's really important to to start in the cloud and then to grow, grow as necessary. And that way you don't have to specialize in all of these things.

00:17:52:02 - 00:18:14:04

Unknown

You know, you want to outsource to people that know what they're doing, that have the experience and the expertise to so you can sleep at night, basically. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. One final question, Ryan. And I think it's really important for students and faculty to hear this, as maybe some of them won't work in a data center.

00:18:14:04 - 00:18:46:21

Unknown

Are they do want to work in a data center. What is one piece of advice or maybe multiple pieces of advice that you would give to faculty and students that are interested in either working in a data center or understanding a little bit more about them? You know, it's thinking about this. And the biggest piece of advice I could give to anyone that I would want to give to anyone is to stay curious, question the status quo, dig into the minutia of why things are done a certain way, and look for ways to innovate.

00:18:46:23 - 00:19:17:22

Unknown

For example, improving efficiency. Recognize the value in finding ways to do something better. Innocence is bliss, but ignorance can be fatal. If you're going to build a future, you have to envision the future. You have toimagine it and take the time to think about it and and where your place will be in the future. A big thanks to Ryan for give me a primer on data centers.

00:19:17:22 - 00:19:40:03

Unknown

What's so interesting? I learned so much today, and I think it's really important that we learn and understand where our our data is going and some of the protections that are in place, which I'm really grateful for. So to learn more about Oracle Academy and our resources, check out academy.oracle.com and subscribe to our podcast. Thanks for listening. That wraps up this episode.

00:19:40:08 - 00:19:50:18

Unknown

Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.