Oracle - Autonomous Database | Have you ever thought of using it in your day-to-day life

What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word ORACLE.

It’s the database. Right? Yes, It’s the most widely used relational database in the world. And its rich with features, very robust and reliable to be used with enterprise grade applications as their backend storage technology.

It even gives you extended support with powerful extension PLSQL procedural language to write program units to organize and manipulate data easily in the database.

Well, As everything sounds fantastic its not an easy job to Admin a database in your own. Specially when it comes to large and enterprise databases which demands high availability, scalability and security.

Can you remember the times you develop home private projects using Oracle database as the back end? Running an oracle database on your machine or on a separate server machine. Installing oracle server and client. Maintaining that database daily. Remember the times you took daily backups and sometimes forget to back up data and you change or drop a table and you lost all the WIP information of the project. Remember the times you lost the access to that machine and had to format and re install the system? Then you lost all the database system and database. Well that’s a terrible story from our childhood programming. These are not only just childhood nightmares. These are the same nightmares of the enterprise application database administrators. The problems remain the same but the scale and the impact is just huge. Sometimes it can be the end of a corporate giant or loads of money and time just wasted in-vain. Let’s keep these things in mind and continue to read this article.

Okay. Now, what is an autonomous database?

All of you know what is an autonomous vehicle. That's a vehicle which controls itself, do not need to be maintained the state specifically. But why do you normally create autonomous things? Its just to reduce overhead of operating and maintaining those things and get rid of the possible human errors that could occur in doing so.

An autonomous database also inherits the same concepts. It’s a self maintained database which looks after itself.

Oracle Autonomous Database is a database hosted in cloud, and is self-maintained, auto scaled, highly available and like I said it looks after itself.

Database is a critical place which holds all business information of an organization. A single point of failure can cause a drastic damage to the whole information system of the organization which can make the organization cease to exist. That could be a problem of erroneously maintaining the database, hardware failure, environmental hazard, not applying the patches timely or not making backups realtime.

Enterprises generate terabytes of data and all these data demands the databases to scale rapidly and grow in to bigger and bigger databases. When the amount of data is going up the database storage and the DB system CPU requirements goes up as well. Then it becomes very hard for the DBA s to maintain and this makes it very costly to spend on managing and maintaining it on-premise.

Oracle takes all of the above overheads away from us with Oracle Autonomous Database. It gives us a database hosted in cloud with zero down time, self-patching and seamlessly scaling with automatic backups and on demand backups. When the amount of data grows it scales automatically in CPU and storage and the patches are self applied. it has a guaranteed uptime.

These are the 3 characteristics of oracle autonomous DB.

· It is self-driving. All database and infrastructure management, monitoring, and tuning processes are automated. DBAs are still needed for tasks such as managing how applications connect to the database.

· It is self-securing Built-in capabilities protect against both external attacks and malicious internal users. This helps eliminate concerns about cyberattacks on unpatched or unencrypted databases.

· It is self-repairing. This can prevent downtime, including unplanned maintenance. An autonomous database can require fewer than 2.5 minutes of downtime per month, including patching.

If you summarize the advantages or OAD in below three things..

· Maximum database uptime, performance, and security―including automatic patches and fixes

· Elimination of manual, error-prone management tasks through automation

· Reduced costs and improved productivity by automating routine tasks

Oracle Autonomous Database comes with its own service console where you can monitor the query performance and manage users and tune the database.

Last but not least, most interestingly Oracle Autonomous Database has this great feature where the data in tables can be accessed with the REST API calls, which means that they can be exposed as REST API endpoints so that your clients can access and do CRUD operations on the database tables using REST API calls. Oracle gives full database query and user support and you can use all your user roles and credential management with Oracle Autonomous Database (OAD).

OAD comes as two variants according to the workload assignments

· Autonomous Transaction Processing

· Autonomous Data Warehouse

You can read more about these and get an idea at Oracle site.

Another interesting thing is that OAD supports machine learning. For example, an autonomous database’s machine learning and AI algorithms include query optimization, automatic memory management, and storage management to provide a completely self-tuning database. This is what Oracle says about that…

“Machine learning algorithms help companies improve database security by analyzing reams of logged data and flagging outliers and anomalous patterns before intruders can do damage. Machine learning can also automatically and continuously patch, tune, back up, and upgrade the system without manual intervention, all while the system is running. This automation minimizes the possibility that either human error or malicious behavior will affect database operations or security.”

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Now that we have a good understanding about oracle autonomous databases. the most important thing is to know What’s in it for us.

If you launch the Oracle site and create an Oracle cloud account right now you will be eligible for several oracle forever free services. One of the forever free service is that you get 2 autonomous database instances in the cloud. I mean forever FREE. Your each instance is 20GB in size which is very well enough for to use as a free database for your projects or to use as a back end database for a SME transaction processing application. And any moment if you think that you are reaching to the limit of the storage you always can pay an upgrade your database storage and CPU. Its not that you are paying for keeping the account or any subscriptions for the services as Oracle provide PAYG model where you pay for only the things you use. If you read more about the Pay as you go model you would understand more about beauty of it.

As the DB authentication Oracle supports the cloud wallet and for the clients and for the REST API authentication it supports the Basic authentication and token-based authentication (OAUTH authentication). I will talk about these methods and how they work in another post soon.

As a DB admin you can use their web driven oracle SQL developer or standalone Oracle SQL developer and can authenticate the DB client using credential wallet you download after you provision the ADB in cloud.

Lets talk more about OAD in future post too. Hope you enjoyed this article.