Oracle Releases Second Half of Autonomous DB

A lot of people might have thought Oracle’s announcement of the nautonomous database at last year’s OpenWorld and its subsequent release nearlier this year were the whole story, but there’s a lot more, and nTuesday’s webcast featuring Larry Ellison was proof.

Ellison must find his CTO role — since he handed the CEO reins to nSafra Catz and Mark Hurd — to be stimulating and liberating at the same ntime. Being CTO gives Ellison the ability to be highly creative in a npart of the industry that plays to his strengths. It’s a highly ntechnical field where few septuagenarians make a mark, and it gives him naccess to lots of smart people to trade ideas.

His evident joy was on display Tuesday as he introduced the second npart of the autonomous database. The announcement this spring focused onn autonomous data warehousing, or ADW. Tuesday was all about autonomous ntransaction processing, or ATP.

Oracle vs. Amazon
nSome of the messaging was the same: The database provisions, maintains nand repairs itself, for example. “There’s nothing to do,” Ellison said nmore than once, suggesting that database administrators’ jobs surely nwill be redefined by the announcement.

Nothing to do extends to nothing to break, and an embedded expert system very well might do a better job than the average DBA.

Toward the end of his talk, Ellison showed a graphic that provided nall the proof you might need to accept the efficacy of the automation. nIt involved the NetSuite database. After 20 years, it has been well nrefined — yet even for it, the expert system found ways to improve nperformance.

The autonomous database is an important economic milestone of sorts ntoo. Database technology solidified in the 1970s and there has been nlittle progress in automating the tasks of keeping a database operating —n until now.

Automation, which this product offers in spades, is a sign that we’ren late in the life of a disruptive innovation (i.e., the relational ndatabase). It’s a sign of commoditization, and an indicator that we’re ndealing with the biggest quantities — and market share is essential for nturning profits.

That’s why I think Ellison took such delight in making invidious comparisons between Oracle’s database and Amazon’s.

A Few Caveats
nAmazon has a market share lead, and Oracle badly wants to reverse the nsituation. That’s why there’s so much emphasis on price and performance.

For example, Oracle has introduced a guarantee that it can lower a ncustomer’s Amazon bill by half, and Ellison has boasted that his ndatabase competitors all use Oracle for their own data.

There’s no doubt this market has been commoditizing, and that only nthe biggest and most efficient producers will survive. Naturally, Oraclen and Ellison expect to be in the winner’s circle.

It takes more than software to deliver the 99.995 percent up time npromised. All of the autonomous database functionality requires Exadata nhardware, and because it is fault tolerant, multiple servers are at the nready.

In the cloud configuration supported by Oracle data centers, ncustomers experience serverless conditions — meaning that when the ndatabase is not in use, it uses no server time and incurs no server ncosts. Oracle also has made provisions for big customers that can affordn all of the hardware and who wish to keep all data processing in-house.

That said, the autonomous database represents a new era in IT, in nwhich the default position is cloud. The assumption is that business nwill be unimpeded, or at least less impeded, by IT systems that are slown or hard to change.

With the full release of the autonomous database and its associated nsecurity capabilities announced earlier this year, we’ve reached the endn of the line for common legacy applications. They will be around for nyears, but it’s hard to see how very many new ones will be made or sold