“Just enough & in time” Enterprise Architecture - Oracle EA Framework

“The real value of Enterprise Architecture is not in making better architectures…it’s in making better enterprise.”— Gary Doucet, Chief Architect, Government of Canada Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat GC

"In the early days of computing, technology simply automated manual processes with greater efficiency. As technology evolved, new innovations enabled new capabilities and processes in the enterprise that were driven by IT. Gradually, IT changed the business but not necessarily in alignment with the business strategy. This lack of alignment resulted in significant waste of resources and missed opportunities, and placed the organization in a competitive disadvantage in the market."

"To align the strategies of business with IT, a new approach for managing IT has been developed called Enterprise Architecture. Just as architecture provides a blueprint for constructing a building, Enterprise Architecture provides a blueprint and roadmap for aligning business strategy with IT."

"Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a method and an organizing principle that aligns functional business objectives and strategies with an IT strategy and execution plan. The Enterprise Architecture provides a guide to direct the evolution and transformation of enterprises with technology. This in turn makes IT a more strategic asset for successfully implementing a modern business strategy."

"An Enterprise Architecture typically produces deliverables such as:

· Current-state Enterprise Architecture model
· Future-State Enterprise Architecture reference model that is needed to execute on the proposed business strategy
· Gap analysis that identifies the shortfalls of the current state in terms of its ability to support the objectives and strategies of the business
· Architecture Roadmap that defines the initiatives required to migrate from the current state into the future state."

"By taking an enterprisewide perspective across business services, business processes, information, applications, and technology, an EA ensures the enterprise goals and objectives are addressed in a holistic way across all IT projects."

"To be successful, an Enterprise Architecture needs to be woven into the enterprise’s culture, not treated as a closed-scope project. The value of an EA is greatly enhanced when it is organically embedded into the lifecycle of the organization, including capital planning, project management, asset management, resource allocation, and strategy formulation."

"Enterprise Architecture is a journey not a project. It evolves over time and needs to maintain the flexibility required to adjust to changing market conditions, strategy shifts, and new innovations in technology."

"A number of EA frameworks exist in the industry with the goal of addressing the basic challenge of assessing, aligning, and organizing business objectives with technical requirements and strategies. Examples include the Zachman Framework (IBM framework from 1980s), The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), OMB Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA), The Gartner Methodology (formerly the Meta Framework), and the DoD Architecture Framework (DoDAF)."

"In an effort to provide effective framework to help customers align their IT and business strategies, Oracle extracted aspects from several industry frameworks, including TOGAF and FEA, to build a simple yet practical and prescriptive framework called the Oracle Enterprise Architecture Framework (OEAF). The OEAF is complementary to other EA frameworks, with clear mappings to TOGAF and FEA, such that customers can use the EA framework of their choice. The intent of building the OEAF was to leverage the strengths of the different industry frameworks and marry that with Oracle’s experience in developing enterprise solutions."

"Oracle emphasizes a “just enough” and “just in time” practical approach to Enterprise Architecture, which may be used standalone or as a complement a customer’s selected EA methodology."

So, what is "just enough" & "just in time", listen to this podcast.

To know more about OEAF, check out the Oracle EA whitepaper (http://www.oracle.com/technology/architect/entarch/pdf/oea_framework.pdf) from Oracle EA Center

Not able to afford Oracle RAC - Scale out low end / cost DB with Open Source Technology Stack - Tungsten

Open-source middleware maker released a database scale-out stack called Tungsten, which support open-source databases like MySQL as well as proprietary ones from the likes of Oracle.

The stack's capabilities include a failure protection function that keeps extra database replicas in the event the master fails, and can automatically promote a slave to master status when needed. It also enables users to maintain and replicate database copies at a number of locations to aid disaster recovery.

Scale-out works by spreading data across multiple, independent database servers connected through a network. The model offers an incremental approach to solving the following database problems:

* Preventing data loss though up-to-date replica databases and coordinated backups
* Increasing overall application availability by providing rapid database failover
* Raising performance and through-put by dispatching read traffic to replicas
* Integrating data between heterogenous systems, for example to support scaling of commercial databases using low-cost open source databases.

Scale-out implementation involves a number of complexities, including creating and maintaining replicas, managing resources spread across many hosts, and working around important problems such as maintaining data consistency when databases are spread over multiple hosts.

Tungsten offers a set of components that address these problems in a systematic way.

Tungsten Replicator
Implements database-neutral, master/slave replication.

Tungsten Manager
Group-communication based framework for managing cluster resources.

Tungsten Connector
A proxy for MySQL and PostgreSQL client programs. The Connector serves as a "front door" to clustering logic implemented in JDBC drivers.

Tungsten SQL-Router
A JDBC wrapper that adds high-performance and transparent failover, load-balancing, and partitioning to native JDBC drivers.

Tungsten Monitor
A pluggable monitoring service that checks and broadcasts state of individual resources in the cluster.

Tungsten claimed it isn't trying to supplant high-end Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), but instead hopes to provide a potential incremental scale-out offering for customers using low-end databases and hardware that either can't afford or don't want to buy into the whole Oracle RAC architecture.

However, it did provide an alternative low end / cost open source RAC solution for potential Oracle RAC customer and attract some eyeballs over.

Some reflection is What if oracle or its well known competitor come out & buy over similar technology to bridge & guide the smooth transition from low end to high end. Who will be the winner in this arena?

Further readings:

What Is Tungsten

The Scale-Out Blog