Dr. Michael Corey, a co-founder of LicenseFortress, is a successful entrepreneur, recognized Oracle Ace, VMware vExpert, and former Microsoft Data Platform MVP has worked with relational databases for over 35 years, starting with Oracle Version 3. In 2017 was recognized as one of the Top 100 people who influence the cloud.
Michael is the original Oracle Press author who has written several books published by (Oracle Press/Osborne McGraw-Hill) and VMware Press. Topics include Virtualizing SQL Server with VMware: Doing IT Right, Oracle Database 12 Install, Configure & Maintain Like a Professional to Oracle Data Warehousing. He is a frequent contributor to Database Trends and Applications and the Big Data Quarterly.
Michael is a frequent speaker at business and technology conferences throughout the world.
An active member in the technology community, a past president of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), he helped establish the Professional Association of SQL Server. Michael is the original recipient of the IOUG “Special Recognition” award, now known as the Chris Wooldridge Award, and received the only Lifetime Membership awarded by the Independent Oracle Users Group.
Michael received a gubernatorial appointment to the Massachusetts Robert H. Goddard Council for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
Michael received his doctoral degree from Temple University, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Check out his blog at http://michaelcorey.com.
Don Sullivan has been with VMware since 2010. He is the product line marketing manager for Business Critical Applications. For more information, go to www.vmware.com.
Articles by Dr. Michael Corey and Don Sullivan
The career paths of IT professionals—whether they start out as administrators, creatives, or executives—are as varied as snowflakes in a blizzard. Along the way, many of us are fortunate enough to meet mentors who guide us and help us grow into better professionals.
Posted October 16, 2024
In our last article, we discussed several great companies of Western civilization and why a poignant few of them, that were building game-changing technology, disappeared. Metaphorically they can be envisioned as having been buried in the proverbial Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse, never to be seen again.
Posted July 17, 2024
Digital Equipment Corporation, known as DEC; Peoplesoft; Sun; and now VMware all have something dark in common. At one point, they were all great American companies leading the path toward innovation in the Six Cities of Silicon Valley. They were magnificent leaders in computing innovation, each at different stages of the evolution of Silicon Valley-based technology.
Posted April 18, 2024
In 2005, "The Terminator," also known as Arnold Schwarzenegger and later "The Governator," uttered the famous catchphrase "I'll be back." Twenty years later, reflecting on the slogan "I'll be back," it could easily be applied to the current legal battle and decades-long saga between Rimini Street and Oracle. Yet it should not be surprising that this battle continues. More importantly, as this battle rages on, your right to use third-party support alternatives from any vendor is under fire.
Posted January 18, 2024
Recently, companies such as Dropbox, Amazon, Lyft, and Meta, as well as Apple, have used the draconian and cruel layoff approach to economic optimization. Yet while the "R" word is bantered around, the "mainstream media" continues to claim that a recession has not yet arrived. This is despite the academic definition of "recession," that is, consecutive quarters of negative gross domestic product growth, as was the case in the first half of 2022.
Posted October 19, 2023
On April 20, 2009, Oracle announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire Sun Microsystems. With the purchase of Sun, Oracle entered the hardware business and obtained the Java programming language. It took a decade for Oracle to realize the monetizing potential of Java.
Posted June 15, 2023
I'm going to question this Beatlemania-like hysteria that recently hovered over Taylor Swift concert tickets as if Paul McCartney himself hadn't recently delivered, most likely, his last concert in North America. If I were cynical (LOL), I would ask how many bots it would take to create demand which exceeds a sufficient mathematical panic threshold so that actual fans would become so emotionally distraught that they would effectively pay any amount to acquire tickets. How does a monopoly music concert delivery system realize exponentially higher prices than conceivable, weeks before? What exactly does this witchcraft of "dynamic pricing" do? I need to go no further than to examine a similar situation myself. Self-reflection is a wonderful exercise of discovery.
Posted April 19, 2023
Ellen Mary Challans, better known by her pen name Mary Renault, was attributed with saying, "There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare." The early years of the second decade of the 21st millennium have been scarred by the consequences of willful negligence cascading throughout the world due to the inconvenience of nonchalantly ignoring unexpected inevitabilities.
Posted December 15, 2022
Every organization, from the smallest nonprofit entities to the trillion-dollar behemoths dominating the historic landscape south of San Francisco, recognizes that tomorrow is not guaranteed. In the early days of this decade, the world's governments put the world economy into existential peril as they attempted to "lock down" public interaction, resulting in the world's economies shutting down. Even when the most destructive restrictions were loosened, there was a considerable amount of less onerous restrictions which lingered on for many months.
Posted October 04, 2022
Just as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and Cocoanut Grove fires have had long-term effects on public safety and building regulations and caused the overall cost of doing business to rise, recent cybersecurity breaches will also impact the regulatory system. Technology providers should be prepared to live in a fishbowl where customers will ask very detailed questions about the technology they deploy, the suppliers they use, the insurance they carry, and their internal cybersecurity practices.
Posted May 16, 2022
Recent cyberattacks have made customers aware that every external vendor they use is a link in their supply chain. Supply chains are only as strong as the weakest link and, in the modern era, consolidated vertical industries have very narrow supply chains.
Posted May 02, 2022
Many organizations still remember the sting of being a victim of the dreaded patent trolls. Patents were granted to encourage, recognize, and reward innovation. Awarding the inventors with a well-defined degree of exclusivity for a period of time improves their chances of both financial reward and the recouping their initial investment.
Posted April 01, 2022
The noted motivational speaker and author Zig Ziglar was quoted as saying, "When obstacles arise, you change your direction to reach your goal; you do not change your decision to get there." This sentiment rings truer today than ever. In the past 21 months, companies across every industry have had to alter their "go-to-market" strategies to simply survive. For the local diner, this may have initially meant relying on take-out orders, then finding ways to create outdoor seating areas, and later dealing with the weather inconveniently imposing itself on outdoor patrons. For much of corporate America, changing their company's direction to reach their goals has meant converting traditional workforces to remote employees.
Posted January 18, 2022
Unlike their historical ancestors who carried out their acts during a violent war, these pirates of the information superhighway hone their skills so that they can attack remotely when war is imminent or whenever else they wish. They can use these cyberskills to disrupt key infrastructure such as a gas pipeline, a hospital, or other critical facets of an ever-narrowing and fragile supply chain. While they do not carry letters of marque, we know many are state-sponsored.
Posted September 27, 2021
As many people in the world pass through the eye of the pandemic storm, aspiring to survive and experience the sun again, another catastrophe looms—albeit barely visible. This potentially devastating problem lurks around the corner from the big-box store that may have just provided their COVID-19 vaccinations, but it is of a very different nature. We are facing a pending tsunami of automation.
Posted May 26, 2021
The world changed over the last year. Future historians will complete their theses focusing on different quarters or even specific months of 2020. But one of the most overused cliches in thinking about this period of time has been the idea that "the more things change, the more they remain the same." Let's consider sports in 2020. Major League Baseball had a 60-game season, the NBA finals were played in October, and cardboard cutouts took the place of fans in every sport. However, the Lakers won the NBA finals, the Dodgers won the World Series with the Yankees playing deep into the playoffs, and Tom Brady went to his 10th Super Bowl. The more things change …
Posted April 05, 2021
As Charles Darwin famously posited, it is not strength but rather the ability to adapt that is critical for survival. We see examples of this all around.
Posted January 18, 2021
No matter where you live in the world, your life has been impacted by the technology and innovation conceived of in Silicon Valley. The wealth that has been created has been enormous. A popular British newspaper once published an article suggesting that if Silicon Valley were a country, it would be among the richest on Earth.
Posted September 11, 2020
Pandemics Happen—AI and Machine Learning Can Provide the Cures
Posted March 20, 2020
GPUs fuel AI and machine learning. Initially created for video games, they are used in sports and business analysis by fantasy baseball enthusiasts, oddsmakers, and front office executives who want to enhance their understanding of the hidden value of often obscure players. Other uses of this technology's extreme processing power include the recognition of animals, such as dog breeds or endangered species, to allow biologists to gain a more accurate understanding of species populations in a geographical area.
Posted March 17, 2020
Hybrid Clouds—Myth or Reality?
Posted December 09, 2019
There is no substitute for genius, and despite the awesome power of the GPU and the majesty of the new manifestations of AI, there is no substitute for the human mind.
Posted September 26, 2019
Next Stop, Silicon Valley Africa
Posted May 09, 2019
Asking the Tough Questions about the Starwood Data Breach
Posted April 15, 2019
What happened to the 500 million data points from the Starwood data breach?
Posted April 02, 2019
The State of Cloud Technologies: The Past Controls the Future
Posted January 31, 2019
The State of Cloud Technologies: The Past Controls the Future
Posted January 09, 2019
Both Oracle and SQL Server have very well-established communities. While they are different, they are also similar in many ways. All DBAs worry about the performance and security of the data and the database. Out of necessity, Oracle DBAs have become more specialized. Will this happen to SQL Server DBAs now that the database is offered on Linux?
Posted September 25, 2018
Silicon Valley has achieved an almost mythical status in both modern American popular culture as well as the annals of world economic history. Located south of San Francisco, the name "Silicon Valley" was coined in the early 1970s due to the volume of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers in the area. Today, the valley is synonymous with technology innovation and venture capital: two mighty forces of change.
Posted May 11, 2018
We live in a new world today, with unique challenges heretofore unseen in information technology. To remain at the expected technological apex, organizations should ask themselves these questions.
Posted March 26, 2018
A New Age: AI and Machine Learning Meet the Cloud
Posted January 03, 2018
Tic toc, tic toc—back and forth swings the privacy pendulum. While we in the U.S. continue to regress on issues of data privacy, the European Union (EU) is proceeding with bold steps to protect the privacy of its citizens. On May 25, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes the law of the land in the EU. It applies to any company that processes or holds data on EU residents, regardless of where it is located in the world. Popular applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and Airbnb are among the companies that will be directly impacted by this law. If you do business with EU residents, regardless of geographic locality, this law directly applies to you.
Posted September 20, 2017
Cloud technology has been around in some shape or form for more than 50 years. How can we make such a claim? Let's compare today's cloud computing to computer timesharing from the 1960s. Timesharing was a computing environment that supported multiple users simultaneously. This sounds suspiciously similar to the modern idea of "the cloud."
Posted June 29, 2017
To meet the new demands of managing infrastructure in the cloud in a proactive manner, the new role of the "cloud keeper" has emerged. The cloud keeper is part technologist, part accountant, and part administrator. The cloud keeper has financial responsibility for keeping control of infrastructure expenses to prevent financial chaos. The role is part technical, since it requires an understanding of how and where resources are deployed. The cloud keeper must know how a resource is paid for and have enough technical expertise to know which resources can be spun up or down or would be better suited for one cloud paradigm over another.
Posted April 07, 2017
Many providers of cloud services market the idea that all critical computing functions should be run using their public cloud services because this paradigm is the future and the future is now. While we do share that long-term vision, the reality is less impressive, and the solution is not yet complete. Amazon itself does not run 100% of its critical business systems in the AWS Public Cloud, a fact that was revealed in The Wall Street Journal article, "Cloud-Computing Kingpins Slow to Adapt to Own Movement." This is also true for Google, Microsoft, and other top cloud providers.
Posted November 15, 2016
Does GDPR Spell the End of the Cloud as We Know It Today?
Posted June 08, 2016
The pervasive corporate mindset to transition all levels of infrastructure to some cloud, somewhere, is accelerating the growth of the cloud industry with a rapidity so far unseen in the history of computing. This phenomenon has resulted in weighty pressure on CIOs to develop and deploy an effective and comprehensive cloud strategy or risk their organization falling behind this undeniable trend. The internet changed the information technology game, but now the cloud constitutes an entirely different league.
Posted March 31, 2016
"Caveat emptor" is Latin for "Let the buyer beware." In the realm of the modern information technology cloud, this sage advice rings especially true.
Posted November 13, 2015
Let's rephrase the question above: The next ticking time bomb is your database. Regardless of whether you run Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, or MySQL, the odds lean toward your organization having a ticking time bomb. The only question to be posed is whether you are going to become collateral damage or diffuse the bomb before the damage happens.
Posted August 10, 2015
Business pressures, including cost reduction, scalability, and "just-in-time" application software implementation, are just some of the requirements prompting businesses to "cloudify" at least some aspect of their IT infrastructure.
Posted May 19, 2015
In the beginning, information was unknown. Eventually, the growing populace absorbed information as it was passed on by each generation person to person, but only the elite had access to that knowledge base. King James and Guttenberg made that information more accessible to the general public but still, access to information was very limited. Galileo, the famous Italian physicist, mathematician and astronomer, originally published his finding in Latin that proved the world was in reality round not flat. Even though this science contradicted church doctrine, the population remained apathetic. When Galileo then published those same findings in Italian, he was excommunicated. By sharing this knowledge outside the "inner circle" he became an outcast. The world was not quite ready to share the "knowledge base" with the common man. As time passed, the ability of the privileged to keep the knowledge base contained to a privileged few waned.
Posted May 09, 2012