This is part of a series of topics that revolve around Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Cloud.

It was two years ago, during the Oracle OpenWorld 2017, that Larry Ellison presented Oracle’s Autonomous Database in the Cloud, a database that achieves its automation through a machine learning layer that is responsible for managing and updating the system, applying adjustments and patches while it is in operation and without the need of a human being watching it, being able to even detect and counteract cyber attacks in real-time.

Under this concept, it is not strange that the technology was presented as “revolutionary” and as “true computing on-demand”, even more considering the points highlighted in the Oracle executive’s speech:

• Requires a minimum of human work, by automating the necessary security updates and adjustments while running, minimizing downtime.
• Service level agreements (SLA) that guarantee 99.995% annual availability, which represents a failure time of fewer than 30 minutes per year.
• Lower administration costs compared to the competition, given its automatic and intelligent nature in combination with compression and learning algorithms.

This last point was especially emphasized by making several comparisons with Amazon, which is the main competitor of the company. He demonstrated that the operation could be five to eight times more expensive than an Oracle Autonomous Database implementation with the same workload.

With all this, some questions arise: Has Oracle managed to keep its promises two years after its initial presentation? Is the Autonomous Database a truly suitable option for companies that want to migrate their services to the cloud? Continue reading Autonomous Database in 2019 →