A Guide to Oracle's Self-driving Database for Startups

Introduction

In the beginning was the Oracle database, a relational database, market leader and popular offering. It was extremely powerful, could handle an immense amount of data, resided in customer servers, and was the enterprise's main workhorse.

However, maintaining the database required an array of database administrators (or DBAs) to handle its installation, clone it, schedule backups, fix glitches, make necessary upgrades, keep it tuned, protect it from attacks, and add memory when the size would grow.

This was all manual, error-prone, and dependent on a few specific skills. It could be unpredictable—one missed step and the database could be unavailable for many hours, if not days.

So, Oracle made one of its biggest leaps and launched three "flavors" of autonomous databases in public cloud.

1. Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW)
2. Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP)
3. Autonomous JSON Database (AJD)

Wondering how autonomous databases can work for your startup? Here’s what you need to know.

Autonomous is Different from On-Premises

Oracle’s Autonomous Database (ADB) is a fully managed, preconfigured database environment within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

As a user, all you need is to set up the database in the cloud with some basic data entry, and voila! Your database is ready to be used.

After provisioning, you can scale the number of CPU cores or the database's storage capacity at any time without impacting availability or performance. Once the database is provisioned, it uses machine learning to back it up, tune it, apply patches, and upgrade if needed. Formerly the responsibility of a DBA, these tasks used to be much more prone to human error.

Modern databases capture a huge amount of data every hour for transactions or analysis, adding to their size and complexity. Queries must be tuned, the latest patches must be applied, efficiency must improve without compromising security, and operational excellence should be preserved. The management and maintenance of all this data is a complicated and extremely skillful task—a task that is now automated in OCI. Automation allows better operational efficiency, resource allocation, and a highly available database with improved performance and enterprise-grade security.

Databases are the storage area of any organization. They house critical, sensitive, personal, and financial information about the organization, as well about anyone who interacts with it. That’s a lot of information. And, add the fact that databases grow with time, becoming more complicated and harder to manage. A single failure can cause major damage to any company—a delay in customer servicing, old data being presented to decision makers, a security lapse, or a lack of proper disaster recovery protocols. These risk profiles are exaggerated when a human DBA handles all the activities.

How a Self-Driving Database Supports Your Technology

Oracle ADB is completely self-driven by AI and ML, which is built in to provide an error-free database which manages itself and keeps the data encrypted.

Machine learning helps improve the performance of queries, reduces the cost of query execution, and constantly tunes queries. Those who have used earlier versions of relational database management systems know that a better-performing query was the holy grail, especially in a complex application hooked to a large database.

ADB solves this problem through continuous learning process which bring efficiency to the applications. It is self-securing, protects the DB from malicious attack, and minimizes downtime.

It detects system failures and provides failover to backup database to prevent data loss. The behind-the-scenes technology is Exadata, which is considered the fastest Oracle Database Machine and Pluggable Database (PDB), allowing multiple tenants to share the same resources, but isolating each client to restrict their ability to peek into someone else’s PDB. It scales compute resources automatically so that you never run out.

We mentioned earlier that Oracle offers three flavors of autonomous databases in cloud. Let’s briefly see how these can be used.

Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW)

This next-generation database is high performance and is primarily used for business intelligence and analytical processing. All your reporting, dashboards, and data-driven applications can use ADW as a primary source of data. ADW provides elasticity, continuous query optimization, scalability, superior performance tuning, data warehouse repairs, etc. This database is also used in visualizations, machine learning analyses, analytical models, and general database capabilities. A data warehouse typically deals with a huge amount of data, which requires faster and more efficient scanning of the database.

Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP)

ATP is time-based transactional data. Built for mission-critical applications, ATP can perform multiple administrative operations by itself to support applications, which can range from extremely simple to large complex systems. It can be deployed in a few minutes and natively supports multiple data types, including document, graph, spatial, JSON, XML, and more. Users can monitor and audit all the activities for analysis and compliance.

Autonomous JSON Database (AJD)

AJD is a cloud document database service meant to develop JSON-centric applications. Like ATP and ADW, it provides all the features of the Oracle Autonomous Database and allows integration with popular programming languages, the flexibility of REST API and CLI, and web interface access to simplify application development. AJD is used for NoSQL-style applications and now comes with Autonomous Data Guard. This means that if the primary database goes down, Autonomous Data Guard converts the standby database to the primary database with minimal interruption.

Why Oracle Is the Autonomous Choice

When you’re talking about performance, cost, and speed, Oracle ADB is miles ahead of its managed DB counterpart. Oracle Autonomous Database runs on Real Application Cluster (RAC), and as an added bonus, all this comes with management tools that developers are already familiar with.

Oracle Autonomous Database offers 99.995% of service reliability and availability and truly empowers organizations to focus on applications and data analysis. This leaves maintenance, optimization, and operational tasks to database itself, thus helping drastically reduce costs and increase productivity by allowing experts to focus on architecture and data modeling.

For developers building applications using Pl/SQL, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers an SDK for PL/SQL which enables you to write code to interact with OCI resources, including Autonomous Database.

Take Autonomous for a Test Self-Drive

Wondering if Oracle ADB is the right product for you? Try it out using 30 days of free credits.

Two instances of Autonomous Database can be used without charge as part of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's suite of Always Free resources. Startups can use them to explore and enhance Database skills as well develop POC to test upcoming product lines. Always Free Autonomous Databases have a fixed 8 GB of memory, 20 GB of storage, 1 OCPU, and can be configured for either Autonomous Transaction Processing or Autonomous Data Warehouse workloads. Autonomous Databases are available in all Oracle cloud regions via pay-as-you-go or monthly flex payment plans.

Moving to Oracle ADB is as simple as moving from one lane to another on a highway. For data migration, one can use free tools like SQL Developer or server commands to export and import data in files before uploading them into ADB. Additionally, startups can experiment with $500 in free cloud credits, access to the Oracle Cloud free tier, and a 70% discount on Oracle Cloud for 2 years.

Want to learn more about Oracle’s cloud offerings for startups? Click here to get details and connect with the Oracle for Startups team.

History

• 25^th May, 2021: Initial version