Saturday, July 25, 2020

ADB-ExaC@C ? What in the Heck Oracle Autonomous Database is?

ADB-ExaC@C ? I would love to see the expressions on the face of Corey Quinn when he learns about this naming convention used by Oracle for their Exadata in Cloud offering.

Since Oracle 10g, we have been hearing about self-managed, self-healing, and self-everything Oracle database. Oracle 10g was touted as self-healing one and if you have managed Oracle 7,8i,9i, this was infarct true how much pain 10g had taken away.

But 10g was far from self-managed or autonomous in other words. Autonomous means that you wouldn't have to manage anything and database would run by itself. Once you switch it on (or it could even that by itself), it would be on it's own. This wasn't the case with 10g, 11g, 12c, 18c, etc. Database administrators were still in vogue.

With everything moving over to cloud, is that still the case? Or in other words, with this autonomous band wagon of Oracle plus their cloud offerings, is autonomous database a reality now?

So what in the heck Oracle autonomous database is? Autonomous Database delivers a machine-learning driven, self-managed database capability that natively builds in Oracle’s extensive technology stack and best practices for self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing operation.

Oracle says that their Autonomous Database is completely self-managed, allowing you to focus on business innovations instead of technology and is consumed in a true pay-per-use subscription model to lower operational cost. Yes, we have heard almost similar claims with previous versions, but one main difference here is that this one is in the cloud.

Well, if you have opted for Exadata in Oracle's cloud then its true up to a great extent. Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer (ADB-ExaC@C) is here and as Oracle would be managing it, you wouldn't have to worry about its management. But if its autonomous why would anyone including Oracle would manage it? Shouldn't it be managing itself?

So this autonomous ADB-ExaC@C provides you something Architectural Identicality which can be easily achived by anything non-autonomous. They say its elastic as it can auto scale up and down. I think AWS Aurora, GCP Big Query is doing that for some time now. Security patching, upgrades, backups, are all behind the scene and automated for this ADB-ExaC@C. I am still at loss as what really makes it autonomous here.

Don't get me wrong. I am huge fan of Exadata despite of its blood-curdling price. Putting Exadata in Cloud and offering it as a service is a great idea too as this would enable many businesses to use it. My question is simple: ADB-ExaC@C is a managed service for sure, but what makes it autonomous?

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