Database Development
For organizations, data is a tremendously useful asset. Whether you are analyzing sales transactions or conducting live analytics, organizations can leverage data to make the best informed decisions, enhance processes, and maintain competitive advantage in a digital-first economy. Managing huge amounts of data is not easy, and this is where Oracle Autonomous Database can help. When organizations scale, typically there is difficulty managing data environments efficiently.
Managing data requires continuous administration, including database backups, software patches, performance tuning, and security patches. Much of this work takes place manually—via administrators (DBA)—will have a diminished effectiveness any time there is any source of error present, and especially when there is a constant risk of human error, as human error can lead to critical failure via downtime, compromise of sensitive data, and/or compromised performance.
Oracle builds on these inherent risks and challenges with its Autonomous Database. The Autonomous Database is designed as a self-driving, self-securing, self-repairing cloud database that automates the legwork using a combination of AI and machine learning that reduces the human involvement needed. But should you consider pursuing this option for your organization? Let’s take a deep dive below.
What is Oracle Autonomous Database?
Oracle Autonomous Database is a next-generation cloud database that automates many of the functions historically performed by database administrators. It runs on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and gives organizations the power of the Oracle Database along with the benefits of automation. It relieves organizations from manual database management tasks, allowing IT teams to focus on strategic projects instead of routine operations.
There are two primary flavors:
Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) – this is designed for transactional workloads. You may have applications that expect the database to process a high volume of short, fast operations, think order processing, customer/employee records, online transactions, etc.
Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) – this is targeted for analytics workloads, business intelligence & reporting, and can typically handle larger datasets and more complex queries. Organizations that are ramping up their data analytics demand will find ADW compelling.
Three Benefits of Oracle Autonomous Database
1. Lowers Operational Expenses
One of the most attractive things is savings. Automating mundane activities, such as provisioning, patching, backups, and tuning, means that businesses can save on the time and labor costs associated with managing database administrators. DBA staff can move from maintenance to innovation, optimization, and strategic value adding.
2. Better Security
As every business knows, security is top of mind. Oracle Autonomous Database offers self-securing features — it automatically applies patches to eliminate vulnerabilities before they can be exploited, ideally without any downtime for businesses. The database also employs encryption by default, which keeps sensitive data secure at rest and during data in transit.
3. Improved Performance
Thanks to embedded machine learning, the database tunes itself specifically for the workload you use. It can determine where bottlenecks are developing and automatically shift resources to ensure speed and reliability. Your applications run faster and more efficiently without constant tweaks.
4. Demand Scalability
Most on-prem databases demand an upfront investment in hardware and infrastructure. In contrast, Oracle Autonomous Database permits that you easily add (or remove) storage and processors – to match your demand at the moment. You pay only for what you use. This flexible nature of elastic compute and storage is a valuable experience for companies in growth mode or with workloads subject to fluctuation.
5. High Availability and Reliability
Oracle states they can provide 99.995% (five 9s) uptime with its Autonomous Database. With near-zero downtime, your business can minimize service disruptions. Mechansims in place for daily automated backups & disaster recovery mean your data stays protected and available – even when problems occur unexpectedly.
Before You Migrate
Although the benefits seem clear, adoption of Oracle Autonomous Database is not the result of simply clicking the migrate button. Adopting the autonomous database and storing data in the cloud requires planning and evaluation ridden with considerations. Some things to think about with your organizations migration to the cloud:
1. Your Existing Infrastructure
Consider your own infrastructure. Are your applications and workloads cloud-ready? What of your legacy systems? Some applications are too intertwined and will require re-architecturing or re-coding to access the intended autonomous environment.
2. Moving Data
Transferring large amounts of data to the cloud has its challenges; think about how you will manage migration, downtime, and validation of a successful move. Oracle has tools and services that could help to manage your migration, but planning still plays an important role.
3. Skill Sets and Training
With an autonomous database, there is less requirement for daily administration, but your team still needs an understanding of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, how to manage data integrations, and to make decisions about workloads. To reduce the skills gap, consider investment in training or working with an established Oracle partner for an implementation.
4. Cost vs. Value
Automation can reduce operational expenditure over time, but you need to think about the initial costs — subscription fees, migration costs, and potential staff training costs. Undertake a financial analysis to see if long-term value warrants the change.
5. Compliance and Governance
If you work in a controlled industry, for example healthcare or finance, ensure that Oracle Autonomous Database meets your compliance obligation with regards to data privacy, data residency, and governance. Oracle has a large number of valid compliance certificates, but make sure these meet your industry compliance obligation.
When Oracle Autonomous Database is Well Suited
So when is it worth considering the migration? Here a few scenarios where Oracle Autonomous Database is particularly beneficial:
- Rapid Growth: If your business is scaling rapidly and your data needs are growing rapidly, having the ability to scale your resources on-demand is invaluable and will allow you to keep pace with your growth without having to make large hardware investments.
- Diminished DBA Resources: If you are a smaller IT team with limited resources, then automation is a great benefit as it enables your DBA to spend less time on operational tasks and more time on valuable, strategic work.
- Complex Data Analytics: If your business relies heavily on analytics and reporting from your data assets, an Autonomous Warehouse can offer better query performance for complex queries so that your analytic needs are met with reliable insights more quickly.
- Concerns About Securing Data: If your business is looking to improve their security posture without making significant investments in tools or additional employees, the self-securing features of the Oracle database will give you peace of mind.
Real-World Example
Real-World Example Consider a mid-sized retail company that is doing thousands of on-line transactions a day. It has a legacy on-prem database which requires constant tuning and monitoring from a small IT team. When seasonal sales spikes appear, it can cause delays and performance issues.
By migrating to Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing, the company can automate the tuning and scaling during the peaks, so the transactions will get processed quickly and without outages. It would then be out of the database management business, allowing the IT team to focus on enhancing customer experience, and launching new services, instead of worrying about database patches and backups.
Potential Challenges
It is helpful to recognize some of the unique challenges that may arise from moving to an autonomous database as well. Some find, as they transition to an autonomous database:
- Vendor Lock-In: Some businesses feel that they are ‘locked-in’ to Oracle Cloud, making it more difficult to transition away from them later.
- Initial Learning Curve: Teams need time to learn new tools, dashboards, and best practices for managing workloads in an autonomous environment.
- Cost Predictability: Pay-as-you-go pricing, while flexible, requires some vigilance on the user’s end to ensure usage doesn’t creep up unexpectedly due to misconfigured workloads or lack of governance.
Conclusion
The Oracle Autonomous Database paints an appealing picture for the future of data management: a world where standard decisions and best practices are made automatically by the data platform, and individuals can focus on innovation and revenue generation instead. For organizations committed to improved productivity, enhanced security, and better scalability, the Oracle Autonomous Database can be an excellent investment.
Still, any change in technology is a change in your business processes, and it won’t be suitable for everyone. To be successful, you really have to think about how it fits into your overall business strategy, estimated timeframes and your readiness, and a considerate migration strategy.
If you are thinking about making the change to Oracle Autonomous Database, make sure you have a strong understanding of your existing IT infrastructure, appropriate stakeholders throughout IT and compliance are involved, and have a clear migration plan. The Oracle Autonomous Database can ultimately allow you to focus on the strategy that your company needs to succeed in an increasingly data-driven world, if the change is programmed appropriately.
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