Jeff Erickson, Oracle BRANDVOICE Contributor, wrote in Forbes about how autonomous technology – namely Oracle’s Autonomous Database – fits into a post-digital business world.

Pat Sullivan, Managing Director at Accenture, said during Oracle OpenWorld 2019 that the idea of Oracle’s Autonomous Database might have seemed novel when it was announced two years ago, but it’s quickly proven to be a bold move in the right direction. Sullivan explained that Oracle’s Autonomous Database has proven to be a solution that thrives in what we call the post-digital world. “Post-digital” means that companies are facing such high customer expectations that they are moving beyond adopting complex digital tools to get at the information that they need, and toward technologies that simply let businesses use data well at massive scale and do it securely.

In this post-digital world, companies are facing a new set of rules because customers demand products and services tailored for them and delivered on-demand. Companies behind the scenes must have an unimpeded flow of data through the business.

Into this new reality, Oracle launched its Autonomous Database – the company’s self-driving database that deploys, tunes, patches, upgrades, and secures itself with no human intervention. During Oracle OpenWorld 2019, Andy Mendelson, Executive Vice President of Database Server Technologies for Oracle, joined Sullivan to discuss the future of the self-driving database on Oracle’s second-generation Cloud Infrastructure. Mendelson explained that “it’s groundbreaking technology, but we’re not done.”

Mendelson went on to explain that Oracle is taking the concept they’ve proven with Autonomous Database – the whole exercise of eliminating the human labor around data management – and is extending that to help business analysts, data scientists, and developers build powerful analytics and data-driven applications.

5 Ways Oracle Is Focusing on Autonomous Technology

Below are five examples that Mendelson gave for how Oracle is extending the concept behind Autonomous Database.

1. Application Express, or APEX, is a popular low-code development tool that comes with every Oracle Database, including the Autonomous Database. APEX lets developers and analysts quickly build web applications around the data in their database with little to no traditional coding.
2. Data virtualization capabilities are built into the Autonomous Database. These allow analysts to easily run high-performance SQL queries across data in their autonomous database and the object store. There’s no need to write ETL code to consolidate the data before it can be queried.
3. Always Free Autonomous Database is a free cloud service that has all the power and features of Autonomous Database – including Oracle APEX, REST Data Services, SQL Developer Web, and machine learning notebooks – to let developers and data analysts try the technology and test new ideas at no cost. It includes 20GB of data, use of the free resources as long as they want, and, if their ideas go into full production, they can easily switch to a paid version for more storage and scale.
4. AutoML is an upcoming new capability that will take the drudgery out of building machine learning algorithms. The Oracle Autonomous Database already comes equipped with a set of machine learning algorithms. Mendelson explained that now, AutoML takes over the job of choosing, training, and optimizing machine learning algorithms. Oracle wants sophisticated machine learning algorithms accessible to the masses of the business analysts and not just the PhDs. Early tests show tasks that currently can take months reduced to just a few minutes.
5. An AutoETL experience in the Autonomous Database will let analysts move data into a data lake, data mart, or data warehouse with much more ease. They can simply choose the data sources and transformations they want, and the ETL code will be automatically generated for them. This feature isn’t yet launched, but users of Oracle Analytics for Fusion Applications are already benefiting from similar capabilities in Oracle Cloud.

Mendelson explained that Oracle is constantly working to empower developers, data scientists, and business analysts – including a flow of new features in Oracle Analytics Cloud, which bring easy access to new data sources, new visualizations, and even natural language capabilities to data analysis. With autonomous technology proven in Oracle’s Autonomous Database, Mendelson says that Oracle is now going to help customers unlock the possibilities in their data by moving beyond the Autonomous Database and toward an autonomous data platform that is available to every developer, data scientist, and business analyst.