Review of Oracle Autonomous Database

As the digital economy becomes all-pervasive, there is a demand for everything to be adaptive, autonomous, and self-learning. In a truly digital world, there is no place for human errors, and no place either for people in repetitive and mundane tasks. The future is autonomous — and this applies to databases as well.

A recent Oracle survey of database administrators (DBAs) showed that 39 percent of DBAs are managing 50 or more databases, and 95 percent of those IT professionals manually create and update these databases. Database management is reaching a tipping point.

The survey also pointed out that a high proportion of DBAs say they experience some type of unplanned downtime over the course of their careers, and most of these individuals struggle to coordinate multiple management and backup tools. In such a scenario, if organisations are trying to be future-ready, how do they overcome these niggles? What do they do, and who do they trust with the future of the organisation?

Oracle might be a good answer to that question. Oracle, which has been around for more than four decades, is applying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to its next-generation Cloud platform services to help customers lower cost, accelerate innovation, reduce risk, and get predictive insights.

Oracle Autonomous Cloud Platform services gives organisations the ability to truly transform and be future-ready. Here’s why: it is built with advanced artificial intelligence and ground breaking machine-learning algorithms, which offers self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing capabilities. Consequently, it gives CTOs more time to drive smarter innovation.

The challenges

Today, organisations existing in a fast-changing VUCA (Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world face immense challenges which existing data systems cannot perhaps comprehend or handle. Sure, an organisation can just develop new applications using a cloud model, but using the cloud in such a way is not transformational. And, it won’t result in significant cost savings or fast development. For a true transformation, both existing and new applications must be moved to a cloud-computing model.

Secondly, there is way higher threat to data security today than there was a few years ago. To defend against sophisticated attacks, organisations need sophisticated partners, and adopt technologies that deliver optimum level of security.

Thirdly, organisations cannot afford downtime for critical applications, which can cause financial damage. They need a cloud architecture that can handle all kinds of software and hardware failures, without the downtime.

The solution

Oracle Autonomous Database is far more sophisticated compared to manually-managed databases. It costs less to run and performs better by eliminating human error, reducing risks, and allowing more time for innovation.

It is self-driving, which means that the user has to identify the service level to achieve, and the autonomous database will manage the rest. It is designed to be completely sealed from human access immediately after initial provisioning, exposing no management controls to the outside world. It does not need human assistance in provisioning, securing, monitoring, recovering, and troubleshooting. It reduces maintenance tasks by a significant volume, it is cheaper, and it will free up human resources for more meaningful tasks.

In provisioning for instance, some human intervention is needed. But with autonomous, the user only needs to select the intended workload type and define the amounts of computer and storage resources needed along with the geographical location of the new instance. The rest is all automated.

Oracle Autonomous Database is also self-repairing, which means that it protects itself against both external and internal attacks. It is capable of automatically applying security patches every quarter, which is sooner than manually operated databases. In effect, there is no downtime because autonomous applies patches on a rolling basis, securing itself.

Oracle Autonomous Database can enable IT leaders to modernize enterprise computing, and insulate organisations from threats, and truly be transformational. It can help migrate the entire estate to the public cloud, while also saving cost and improving agility, immediately. It can help organisations run mission-critical workloads with a secure performant. Furthermore, it can cut administration costs by about 80%, and runtime costs by almost 90% as it automates administration and bills only for the resources needed at a particular time.

With autonomous, Oracle has created an extremely advanced technology for the most demanding customers and situations, combining its decade-long experience in developing database solutions, the latest AI-powered innovations in the Oracle Database 18c and the scalability and performance of the dedicated Exadata hardware platform.