Oracle takes AWS head-on with new autonomous database

USA: Oracle announced a self-managing, self-securing, self-repairing database cloud service, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud, at half the cost of Amazon Web Services(AWS).

Using machine learning, this delivers all of the analytical capabilities, security features, and high availability of the Oracle Database without any of the complexities of configuration, tuning, and administration - even as warehousing workloads and data volumes change.

“This technology changes everything,” said Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison. “The Oracle Autonomous Database is based on technology as revolutionary as the Internet. It patches, tunes, and updates itself. Amazon’s databases cost more and do less.”

The announcement follows on the heels of Oracle’s recently announced expansion of its Oracle Cloud Platform Autonomous Services. During this calendar year, Oracle also plans to deliver Oracle Autonomous Analytics, Oracle Autonomous Mobility, Oracle Autonomous Application Development and Oracle Autonomous Integration services.

The autonomous database is an entirely new class of offering which requires zero operational administration on the customer’s part, enabling cloud data warehousing that is:

Easy. One-step warehouse provisioning spins up a secure data warehouse with automatic backup, encryption, and a high availability architecture in mere seconds. Migration to cloud is simple due to full compatibility with existing on-premises databases.

Fast. Query performance with no tuning required.

Elastic. Independent, online scaling of compute and storage. The ability to dynamically grow or shrink resources enables true pay-per-use.

Oracle claims to cut the users' Amazon bill in half when they run the same data warehouse workload on Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service as compared to running on Amazon AWS.

“Our initial tests have shown that Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud offers important innovations,” said Manuel Martin Marquez, Big Data Engineer and Data Scientist, CERN. “For instance, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud automatically reduced the storage required by important control systems by a factor of ten.”

Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud is the first of many Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud services. Other services in development include Oracle Autonomous Database for Transaction Processing, Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database for fast, massive-scale reads and writes (commonly demanded by the Internet of Things), and Oracle Autonomous Graph Database for network analysis.

The Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is built on Oracle Database 18c, the first release in Oracle’s new annual database software release model. A hotbed of innovation with over 100 new features, Oracle Database 18c is now available on Oracle Cloud Services, Oracle engineered systems, and livesql.oracle.com.