With Oracle Autonomous Database even the smallest tweaks in efficiency (powered by data) can lead to huge advancements.  What if you could free up 1% of your day? Would one small improvement make a difference in the life of your business?  Oracle Autonomous Database may be the answer.

At Quest’s BLUEPRINT 4D Conference in May 2023, Sean Stacey, Director of Database Product Development at Oracle, shared how Oracle Autonomous Database can complete and simplify your data management.

Why Oracle Database?

To understand how Oracle Autonomous Database can impact your organization, it may be helpful to understand Oracle Database.

Most companies have long understood the importance of collecting data, but a majority of those companies don’t know how to quickly and easily utilize the information they own. Data sits in their environments untapped, holding them back from daily opportunities to innovate and adapt to changes in the economy. Critical information is discarded instead of being used to better the organization.

To maintain a competitive edge, companies must become data-driven. This means they need to employ modern capabilities—like machine learning, real-time analytics, IoT, graph analysis, documents, text search, spatial processing, and blockchain—to utilize data and address real-world problems.

For instance, if you work for a financial institution, machine learning could be used for fraudulent activity detection or to understand your customer base and locate similar prospects. Similarly, graph analysis could be used for fraud detection or to determine the spending habits of certain populations and their connections to other audiences.

Choosing which data vendor to use for addressing business problems is a critical decision. Many modern tools are built using new development methodologies, including microservices, events, SaaS, distributed data, CI/CD, API driven development, defense in depth, and low code. These tools typically run a single-purpose, best-of-breed database for each data type and workload.

When assigned a very specific problem to address, it’s common for developers to choose a targeted solution from a data store vendor that may or may not integrate with the greater database. As a result, the singular issue is solved, but the change fails to drive innovation.

With Oracle Database, there’s a better, freer option. Whereas data store vendors are deployed for a single problem, Oracle Database can solve those very same problems on a converged database model. Features are robust, and in many cases, the Oracle tool is the most innovative in the industry.

For instance, did you know Oracle has more machine algorithms than several competing databases combined? And here’s the best part—these data tools are free as part of the Oracle Database.

Oracle Database Quick Tips & Tricks

With regard to data management, Oracle Database provides solutions for:

• Relational
• Lake House
• Spatial
• Data Warehouse
• Blockchain
• Analytics
• Document Store
• Graph
• Text Search
• Machine Learning

Instead of working with niche data store vendors to run proprietary databases for each data type and workload, you can use Oracle Database to run converged, open, SQL databases for multiple data types and workloads.

This simplifies operations, as you won’t need to manage a zoo of solutions with independent patches, updates, upgrades, and more. Converged database architecture brings all data in one place, where it can be shared across tools easily.

There’s huge value that comes with combining all of these disparate types of data in one place. They can be leveraged, shared, and consumed in one single holistic way.

The potential of a converged database can be compared to the invention of the smartphone. For instance, you no longer have to stuff all of your pockets full of a calendar, calculator, flashlight, cell phone, and camera. All of those tools are running in one place. And because it’s all in one place, you don’t have to go home, remove a memory stick from a camera, load it into your computer, and attach that to an email to share with someone. You get the value of everything available in one centralized place. That’s what a converged database is all about.

Oh, and guess what? It gets even better when you use an autonomous database to simplify your data management.

What is the Oracle Autonomous Database?

Oracle Autonomous Database is a self-tuning, self-securing software running in the Oracle Cloud. It can automatically scale, shrink, and back itself up.

Provisioning an Oracle Autonomous Database is extremely quick. It involves a couple of clicks on a dashboard, and then a database will be provisioned in as little as two or three minutes.

With the autonomous database, I.T. control of governance, best practices, budgeting, and compliance are performed for you. Admin tasks include:

• Database separation – Separate critical, general purpose, test/dev database. Separate databases by organization or budgets.
• Software updates – Deploy updates to Dev-Test before production. Avoid updates during peak periods. Control updates based on App certification
• Security controls – Self-Securing, customer-controlled access to the runtime resources stack and databases for users and Oracle operators
• Performance & HA – Control isolation for predictable latency and performance. Specify level of High Availability and Disaster Recovery for each Database

Common workloads that are supported include:

• Data Warehouse – Built for decision support and data warehouse workloads. Fast queries over large volumes of data.
• Transaction Processing – Built for transactional workloads. High concurrency for short-running queries and transactions.
• APEX – Built for Oracle APEX application development. Creation and deployment of low-code applications, with databases included.
• JSON – Built for JSON-centric application development. Developer-friendly document APIs and native JSON storage.

Autonomous optimizations differ based on the workload you’re running:

• Data Warehouse
  • Optimizes complex SQL
  • Columnar format
  • Creates data summaries
• Transaction Processing
  • Optimizes response time
  • Row format
  • Creates indexes
• JSON-Document
  • Optimizes response time
  • Row format
  • Creates JSON indexes

How does Oracle Autonomous Database drive business innovation?

Autonomous database provides:

• Zero management – online maintenance, online patching, scaling, backup, recovery
• Converged data + analytics – single data and analytics platform delivers faster agility
• Automated optimizations – Automated schema optimization and workload tuning

This is how you free up that 1% of your capacity to learn, evolve, and beat your competition.

Key Takeaways

PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, E-Business Suite, and Siebel products are all certified to run on Oracle Autonomous Database.  Once you have everything running on your Oracle Autonomous Database, if you’re running one of Oracles applications suites in the Oracle Cloud, be empowered to use pre-built, self-service data analytics and 300+ Financial KPIs to monitor business performance. Autonomous Database works with your existing applications and tools, so you can move forward unhindered.

When it comes to data warehousing, you get out-of-the-box features including:

• Load – Simple drag and drop loading
• Transforms – Declarative transformations and data cleansing
• Business Model – Automatically create powerful business models
• Insights – Guided discovery of hidden patterns and anomalies
• Graph – Prepare and explore graph data
• Spatial – Location intelligence analytics and mapping services
• Machine Learning – Easily create models with AutoML
• Share – Share data across users, teams, and organizations

Want More?

To learn more about Oracle Autonomous Database you can:

• Watch the entire BLUEPRINT 4D presentation: Complete and Simple Data Management.
• Join hands-on, self-paced workshops produced by Oracle LiveLabs. Content is available for all levels, from beginners to advanced users.
• Try out Oracle products for FREE on one of the following platforms:

• • free-oracle.github.io
  • oracle.com/free
  • oracle.com/xe

• Earn your database cloud certification at Oracle University. Certifications include:

• • Oracle Cloud Database Services Specialist
  • Oracle Autonomous Database Specialist
  • Oracle Database Cloud Migration & Integration Specialist

• Check out a full list of Oracle Database content in the Quest Education Library.