Oracle has a long history as a leader in data management and now as a pioneer in the vitally important new space of autonomous capabilities.
In the last 20 years, Oracle has been automating the core capabilities within the database technology from memory management to automatic indexes.
With built-in machine learning, Oracle Autonomous Database represents one of most important advancements in the database's history.
It automates the core data management tasks for users- ensuring higher performance, reliability, security, and operational efficiency.
DBTA recently held a webinar with Dain Hansen, Oracle Cloud platform vice president, PaaS and IaaS, Oracle, and Maria Colgan, master product manager Oracle, who discussed the top 10 capabilities that make Oracle's Autonomous Database truly autonomous.
The top 10 capabilities include:
- Auto-provisioning: Automatically deploys mission-critical databases (RAC on Exadata infrastructure) which are faulttolerant and highly available. Enables seamless scale-out, protection in case of a server failure and allows updates to be applied in a rolling fashion, while apps continue to run.
- Auto-configuration: Automatically configures the database to optimize for -Configuration 5 specific workloads. Everything from the memory configuration, the data formats, and access structures are optimized to improve performance. Customers can simply load data and go.
- Auto-indexing: Automatically monitors workload and detects missing indexes that could accelerate applications. It validates each index to ensure its benefit, before implementing it and uses machine learning to learn from its own mistakes.
- Auto-scaling: Automatically scales compute resources when needed by workload. All scaling occurs online, while the application continuously runs. Enables true pay per use.
- Automated data protection: Automatically protect sensitive and regulated data in the database, all via a unified management console. Assess the security of your configuration, users, sensitive data, and unusual database activities.
- Automated security: Automatic encryption for the entire database, backups and all network connections. No access to OS or admin privileges prevents phishing attacks. Protects the system from both cloud operations and any malicious internal users.
- Auto-backups: Automatic daily backup of database or on-demand. Restore or recover a database to any point-in-time you specify in the last 60 days.
- Auto-patching: Automatically patch or upgrade with zero downtime. Applications continue to run as patching occurs in a round-robin fashion across RAC nodes or servers.
- Automated detection and resolution: Using pattern recognition, hardware failures are automatically predicted without long timeouts. IOs are immediately redirected around unhealthy devices to avoid database hangs. Continuous monitoring for each database automatically generates service requests for any deviation.
- Automatic failover (coming soon): Automatic failover with zero-data loss to standby. It’s completely transparent to end-user applications. Provides 99.995% SLA.
According to Hansen and Colgan, Oracle Autonomous Database is the first autonomous database in the industry. It’s self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing.
Autonomy hides complexity, eliminates errors, lowers costs, Hansen and Colgan said. The platform can quickly deploy a mission critical database, can be optimized for workloads, and creates indexes and continuously monitors.
It can also provide Instant elasticity by scaling compute and storage completely independently, while users can take advantage of a “pay as you go” plan.
Security is paramount, Hansen and Colgan explained. The platform is automatically secured by default and it’s always up-to-date with timely patches.
An archived on-demand replay of this webinar is available here.