2 Ways Oracle’s Autonomous Database Just Became More Useful
Blog: Oracle BPM
Oracle is offering two new ways to take advantage of its Autonomous Database, and each in a different way makes things more interesting for companies wanting to move their Oracle Databases to the cloud.
The first is Oracle Autonomous Database Dedicated service, which lets a company run its databases in Oracle Cloud on physical machines dedicated only to their computing workloads. This setup matters to companies that have particularly high security, reliability, and control standards.
The second is a series of developer tools now built into Autonomous Database: Oracle Application Express, Oracle SQL Developer Web, and Oracle REST Data Services. Because Oracle Autonomous Database can be provisioned and running in minutes, developers can tap these capabilities to quickly develop and deploy new data-driven applications.
Oracle launched its Autonomous Database last year, providing a database that provisions, tunes, backs up, encrypts, updates, and patches itself without human involvement. That means a company’s database experts can spend far less time on maintenance and more time helping the company get value from its data. Some early adopters have seen some significant performance improvements with Autonomous Database, because it tunes and optimizes itself. Businesses can reap cost savings because they pay only for what they use, so the performance gains and the elastic nature of cloud computing can mean companies use less.
Here are more details on the Dedicated and Developer capabilities:
Oracle Autonomous Database Dedicated
The cloud service gives companies a customizable, transaction processing database, running on dedicated Exadata infrastructure in Oracle Cloud. “This is a great option for someone who’s looking to move a larger inventory of databases to the cloud,” says Maria Colgan, a master product manager at Oracle.
The architecture was built to deliver the highest degree of workload isolation. A company’s cloud instance can run without sharing its hardware with other cloud users, and Oracle’s cloud management software also can run on different hardware, further isolating it from security threats and malicious users. Certain companies take “comfort in the isolation of being on their own dedicated infrastructure,” Colgan says. “It’s only visible on their network.”
Companies get customizable operational policies that give them a high level of control over database provisioning, software updates, and availability. “Inside that dedicated rack you can create separate clusters, you can create separate container databases, and finally individual databases for separate groups,” Colgan says. For those databases, you can have different availability, she says, “so you may want disaster recovery for your production systems, but not for test systems.”
Customers can also control the density of databases per CPU. “For test databases you might want to put multiple databases on the same set of CPUs, where with production you might not want to do that,” Colgan says. Customers can also set the timing of software updates to better fit their business cycles.
“If I’m someone like a CTO or an enterprise architect, this gives me a private cloud within the public cloud,” Colgan says. “So if I’m looking for a consolidation platform or a database-as-a-service platform or I’m looking to rethink IT for my business, Oracle Autonomous Database Dedicated is the option I would be looking at.”
New Developer Capabilities
The three aforementioned developer capabilities—Oracle Application Express (APEX), Oracle SQL Developer Web, and Oracle REST Data Services—will appeal to developers for different reasons.
APEX, around for more than a decade, is a hugely popular tool because it comes as part of Oracle Database and lets developers quickly build apps that draw on that data. Oracle SQL Developer Web is a web interface for working with Oracle Autonomous Database, letting developers run queries, create tables, and generate schema diagrams. Support for native Oracle REST Data Services means developers can develop and deploy RESTful services for Oracle Autonomous Database, in order to develop modern REST interfaces for relational data. The goal for all three capabilities is to make it easier to get started with an Autonomous Database “by taking care of the complexities of connecting to the database,” Colgan says.
Oracle says it added more than 5,000 Autonomous Database trials in its latest quarter, and one of the biggest selling points has been the speed of deployment and the boon that speed brings to productivity. Having these added developer capabilities on top of an Autonomous Database, Colgan says, means “a developer can simply provision an autonomous database and get going.”
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
