During a presentation at Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores, Oracle executive chairman and CTO Larry Ellison continued the company’s autonomous strategy with the announcement of the availability of the latest Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud Service, Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing.
Ellison also previewed new capabilities in the upcoming release of Oracle Database 19c due to be released in January 2019.
Oracle’s new self-driving database cloud service is built to run the demanding finance, retail, manufacturing, and government applications, supporting a mix of high-performance transaction processing, reporting, batch, and analytic workloads. Oracle’s Autonomous Database portfolio provides organizations with the most complete and advanced set of database capabilities on the market today.
In March 2018, Oracle delivered the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse service, optimized to run high performance queries for data warehouses, data marts, data lakes, and other large aggregations of data.
Complementing the existing Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse service, Ellison said, “This machine learning-based technology not only can not only optimize itself for queries for data warehouses and data marts, but it also optimizes itself for transactions. It can run batch programs, reporting, Internet of Things, simple transactions, complex transactions, all of it—and mixed workloads. Between these two systems—the system that is optimized for data warehousing and the system that is optimized for transaction processing—the Oracle Autonomous Database now handles all of your workloads.”
According to Oracle, traditionally, creating a database management system required experts to custom build and manually maintain a complex hardware and software stack. Oracle Autonomous Database improves data management by using machine learning to provide a self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing database service with cloud economies of scale and elasticity. The service enables users to instantly create new autonomous databases and easily convert existing databases, dramatically reducing costs and time to market.
According to Oracle, with its new Autonomous Transaction Processing Transaction Processing, automation of database and infrastructure operations cuts administrative costs up to 80%, while eliminating the risk of human error. The efficiency of a self-optimizing database together with elastic pay-per-use cuts runtime costs up to 90%. “It is a truly elastic system. You only pay for the infrastructure that you use,” said Ellison.
In addition, it offers automatic application of the latest security updates to eliminate cyberattack vulnerabilities including data theft, with continuous threat monitoring and detection and immediate security patching and remediation—while running, said Ellison. “Automatic threat detection and automatic remediation while the system is still running” is necessary said Ellison, because “human beings make errors; when it is a manual process, it is a risky process.”
Protection from failures, including system failures, regional outages, and user errors also delivers 99.995% availability, or less than 2.5 minutes of downtime a month, including maintenance, while Database Vault prevents administrators from seeing user data. Frequently pointing his competitive criticism at Amazon throughout his presentation, Ellison claimed, “Oracle is 100 times more reliable than Amazon.”
With version 18c of the Oracle Database, Ellison noted, “We are fully autonomous now for data warehousing and transaction processing. But it is not sufficient to make the database autonomous. The database runs on compute and storage and networking. Someone has got to manage all of that and it can be you, it can be us, or better yet, it can be the system.”
Oracle has been running improvements to the underlying software and hardware that Oracle runs on and the autonomous database is made up of three separate components, the database software, the underlying infrastructure, and the overall cloud management—and they all have to be autonomous, said Ellison. “You have to have all three pieces of the puzzle.”
Making a point of addressing concerns that automation will eliminate the jobs of Oracle DBAs, Ellison said database automation allows DBAs to focus on getting more value from data. Developers also become more agile by using databases that require no manual tuning, he added.
For more information, go to https://cloud.oracle.com/tryit and www.oracle.com/us/corporate/events/think-autonomous/index.html.