As technology gets easier to use, you just manage more of it, says longtime DBA Joe Kopilash. “It’s just the nature of the beast.”

Kopilash should know: As director of database operations for a global marketing company, he is in charge of a team that oversees a growing fleet of Oracle Database instances on a mix of machines, including on-premise engineered systems such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance, as well as a large contingent of databases in the cloud. Many of these databases support marketing applications with 250-millisecond service-level agreements (SLAs), he says. Kopilash and his team manage the databases that support them, using Oracle Enterprise Manager. “It allows us to view all this data as one,” he says.

That broad view enables Kopilash to guide database teams to utilize Oracle Enterprise Manager throughout his company, helping them standardize their deployments and often see problems before they happen. No matter where the database sits, “we can see which systems are running hot and which are causing problems. We can nail down the problems from here, and we can reach out to other teams and say, ‘Hey, you might want to take a look at this.’”

As more and more companies find themselves in complex multi-cloud and on-premise architectures, this ability to view “all data as one” will grow in importance, he says. Meanwhile, new technologies such as Oracle Autonomous Database on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will shrink the work of traditional DBAs, such as patching and other database management tasks, he says.

Kopilash’s best advice for traditional DBAs? Learn about the kind of fleet management capabilities Oracle Enterprise Manager provides. “Earlier in my career, I started touting the advantages of using Enterprise Manager data to help solve problems, like identifying configuration issues we didn’t even know we had or solving problems before they became problems. That visibility got me from traditional DBA to where I am now,” he says.

As Kopilash moves into the future, Oracle Enterprise Manager will move with him, says Dan Koloski, of the Oracle Enterprise Manager product team.

Release 13.4 of Oracle Enterprise Manager provides more analytics and machine learning for cloud-based and on-premise targets, as well as integrations with open source visualization tools such as Grafana, Koloski says. The latest release also provides new guided migrations for bringing Oracle Databases—as well as all their dependencies—into cloud environments.

“It won’t matter where the Oracle Database resides,” Koloski says. “Oracle Enterprise Manager will continue to give DBAs full lifecycle management and monitoring for their entire database estate, regardless of how it’s composed.”

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Illustration: Oracle