“As revolutionary as the Internet” - Oracle CTO unveils new autonomous database

Oracle's executive chairman and CTO Larry Ellison introduced the company's new cloud database this week, labelling the new platform "as revolutionary as the Internet.

The CTO also took aim at Amazon Web Services, whose databases "cost more and do less.

"This technology changes everything," claims Ellison.

"The Oracle Autonomous Database is based on technology as revolutionary as the Internet. It patches, tunes, and updates itself.

The database uses machine learning to deliver performance, security capabilities, and availability with no human intervention.

Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud delivers all of the analytical capabilities, security features, and high availability of the Oracle Database without any of the complexities of configuration and administration - even as warehousing workloads and data volumes change.

The database features query performance without the need for tuning, and is so fast Oracle claims it can "cut your Amazon bill in half when you run the same data warehouse workload on Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service as compared to running on Amazon AWS," the company said in a statement.

The company also promotes the elasticity of the database, saying the platform is independent, online scaling of compute storage with the ability to dynamically grown or shrink resources to enable "true pay-per-use [that] dramatically lowers costs.

Additionally, Ellison promoted the new database by its three key capabilities: self-managing, self-securing, and self-repairing:

• Self-managing - Eliminates human labor and human error to provision, secure, monitor, backup, recover, troubleshoot, and tune the database. Automatically upgrades and patches itself while running.
• Self-securing - Protects from external attacks and malicious internal users. Automatically applies security updates while running to protect against cyberattacks, and automatically encrypts all data.
• Self-repairing - Provides automated protection from all planned and unplanned downtime with up to 99.995% availability, resulting in less than 2.5 minutes of downtime per month, including planned maintenance.

The company also has other Oracle Autonomous Database services in the pipeline, including, Oracle Autonomous Database for Transaction Processing, Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database, and Oracle Autonomous Graph Database for network analysis.

During this calendar year, Oracle plans to deliver Oracle Autonomous Analytics, Oracle Autonomous Mobility, Oracle Autonomous Application Development and Oracle Autonomous Integration services.