Oracle Autonomous Database ! World’s First Autonomous Database

Sangam 2017 was a great hit with around 800+ attendees. The Organizers did a great job in managing the show effectively. As mentioned in my earlier post, this year I presented sessions on “Indexing : Facts and Myth” on 8th December and “Autonomous Database” on 9th December. Apart from these, I also hosted a “Fireside Chat on Database/Application Performance” along with other speakers including Tirthankar Lahiri, VP for Oracle In-Memory Technologies Product Management. Andrew Holdsworth, VP for Oracle Real World Performance joined us as well. Together, we could address some of the queries raised by the participants of this Fire side chat. We had around 100+ attendees for the fire side chat.

While there is always a demand for a technical session and I rightly guessed a descent crowd for my Indexing Session. However, I was surprised to see a full house (around 200+) attendance for the session on Autonomous Database. This clearly means that the Technical Community wanted to know more about this interesting new technology, which is world’s first Autonomous Database. The session was very interactive and I tried responding to many of the queries, including the top most concern on the DBA Role.

My presentation kicked off with a Q&A on some of the Automated Features Oracle introduced since Oracle 9i. In my opinion, Automatic Segment Space Management (ASSM) introduced in Oracle 9i was the very first self-tuning feature as it dynamically adapts to (re)configuration of RAC Nodes without any changes required. This shows that Oracle’s journey to Autonomous Database started more than a Decade ago. Remember, Oracle 9i was released in 2001. Since then, Oracle introduced many features that reduced the burden off the DBA’s. All these features had one thing in common – AUTOMATIC. Automation is obviously one of the key drivers when it comes to Autonomous Database.

During the session, I also discussed about the difference between Automatic and Autonomous. Many organizations has introduced some or the other Automation to reduce or eliminate some of the mundane tasks. Certain amount of Automation can be done, however, to make a critical database entirely Autonomous, Full end-to-end Automation that too Automation of Complex tasks is required.

The underlying database for Autonomous DB is Oracle 18c. However, many were confused that Oracle 18c is an Autonomous Database. Therefore, it is important to know that Oracle 18c alone is not an Autonomous Database.

Autonomous Database = Oracle 18c + Oracle Cloud Automation and Innovation + Secret Sauce

So, Autonomous Database is made up of multiple component. The core underlying database version is 18c, which is integrated with Oracle Cloud and then uses some specialized tooling and automation that Oracle has created on cloud and some of them developed over the years. Machine Learning algorithm is used at every layer to make it more proactive.

Exadata has been a proven innovation when it comes to running an Oracle Database. Autonomous Database runs on Exadata, which further provides a healthy, highly available and best performance database for any kind of workload.

I can write more about Autonomous Database, but would want to hold for some other part. Thought of writing on this, as it generated a huge interest during Sangam and this excited me a lot. 🙂

Would be happy to respond to any of the queries related to Autonomous Database.