Automating Data Management With Oracle Autonomous Database

Mar 2, 2022

By Shelby Klingerman, Quest Oracle Community

Oracle Autonomous Database is a fully managed cloud service. It is a combination of Exadata infrastructure automation, Oracle Database 19c automation, and automated data center operations and machine learning.

During Quest Experience Week 2021, Gerald Venzl, distinguished product manager at Oracle, shared how Oracle Autonomous Database simplifies the management of operational and analytical database workloads and how innovation continues to improve analyst, data scientist, and developer productivity.

According to Venzl, Oracle Autonomous Database delivers simplified data management. It provides enterprise- class security, availability, scalability, and performance, and it is self-driving, meaning it is fully autonomous with true cloud elasticity for low cost. It also provides self-service tools to allow business analysts, developers, and others to be more productive.

Within Autonomous Database, users have a choice of service—each of which is optimized for specific workload use cases:

Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP)
Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW)
Autonomous JSON
Autonomous APEX AppDev

Since the same Autonomous Database services are available for both cloud and on-prem, users also have a choice of deployment platform:

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
Exadata Cloud at Customer
Dedicated Region Cloud at Customer
Hybrid Cloud Configurations

With Autonomous Database, Oracle automates and manages everything—unlike when you are running an on-prem database, Database Cloud service, or Exadata Cloud service. This allows users to spend less time on maintenance and more time on data management and innovation, which also results in lower costs for running the database.

Autonomous Database also enables the building of low-code applications using APEX (Application Express). APEX can automatically create an app starting from a spreadsheet or a table. It is possible to create an enterprise app in hours, doing so at least 10 times faster than coding, and there is built-in support for interactive reports, interactive grids, and faceted search. In addition, it is possible to easily update an app to match evolving needs of the business.

Moreover, deep integration with the database eliminates the complexity of middle tiers, connection management, state management, and mapping database types to app types. As a result, said Venzl, traditional coding of apps should now be the exception rather than the rule. There are millions of APEX apps in production and 3,000 new APEX apps are created daily.

Migrating to Oracle Autonomous Database

It’s easy to move from Oracle Database 19c on-prem to Oracle Autonomous Database, either through a manual or automated migration.

You can complete a manual migration by following these four steps:

Run the Cloud Pre-Migration Advisor Tool (CPAT).
Export on-prem database using Data Pump.
Transfer exported dump files to Object
Import into Autonomous Database using Data Pump.

You can also complete an automated migration in two simple steps:

Register source and target database on the OCI Console.
Migrate using OCI Database Migration Service.

Either way, DBAs can preserve existing tuning and run self-tuning in advisory mode. Oracle strives to ease the path to Oracle Autonomous Database by accelerating customer success on OCI. Leverage the following options that are available to you: