Oracle continues to roll out features to its cloud-only product, Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud. Their patch process will roll out features on an ongoing basis to ensure the database is on self-driving mode.

Let’s look at some high points about these self-driving databases.

Updates

You’re going to get new features, improvements, and fixes much faster in the database world than you ever would in a car. Oracle has already announced that security patches will automatically be applied each quarter, which is much faster than most manually operated Oracle databases.

And when it comes time to upgrade or patch, the Autonomous Database can apply the real production workload on a test database to be sure there are no unexpected side effects.

Guarantee

Traditionally, Oracle has not been known to give guarantees. But with this product, they’re actually giving two of them.

First, they’re guaranteeing downtime is limited to 30 minutes a year, including maintenance. Second, they’re guaranteeing that they’ll beat Amazon’s price for AWS by 50%.

Need for DBA

Of course, just like a self-driving car still needs a driver, the Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud still needs a database administrator. However, the overall hours needed to perform routine DBA tasks will be greatly reduced.

Let’s say, for example, that you had ten database systems running in the cloud already. You would probably no longer need two database administrators for that, so one of those individuals could take on a new role or additional duties.

And if you have just one database administrator, this will free up their time to work on other projects. I can’t tell you how many times over the years I couldn’t work on a project because a third of my time was taken up with basic database administration tasks.

Routine tasks around performance, storage, and uptime will continue to be automated, which will eliminate many of those from a database administrator’s to-do list.

No tags for this post.