Recently, I have attended the Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. For five days, the company has spared no expenses to inform, educate and (last but not least) entertain its customers and partners as well as developers, journalists, industry analysts and other visitors – in total, a crowd of over 50 thousand. As a person somewhat involved in organizing IT conferences (on a much smaller scale, of course), I could not but stand in awe thinking about all the challenges organizers of such an event had to overcome to make it successful and safe.
More important, however, was the almost unexpected thematic twist that dominated the whole conference. As I was preparing for the event, browsing the agenda and the list of exhibitors, I found way too many topics and products quite outside of my area of coverage. Although I do have some database administrator (DBA) experience, my current interests lie squarely within the realm of cybersecurity and I wasn’t expecting to hear a lot about it. Well, I could not be more wrong! In the end, cybersecurity was definitely one of the most prominent topics, starting right with Larry Ellison’s opening keynote.
The Autonomous Database, the world’s first database, according to Oracle, that comes with fully automated management, was the first and the biggest announcement. Built upon the latest Oracle Database 18c, this solution promises to completely eliminate human labor and hence human error thanks to complete automation powered by machine learning. This includes automated upgrades and patches, disaster recovery, performance tuning and more. In fact, an autonomous database does not have any controls available for a human administrator – it just works™. Of course, it does not replace all the functions of a DBA: a database specialist can now focus on more interesting, business-related aspects of his job and leave the plumbing maintenance to a machine.
The offer comes with a quite unique SLA that guarantees 99.995% availability without any exceptions. And, thanks to more elastic scalability and optimized performance, “it’s cheaper than AWS” as we were told at least a dozen times during the keynote. For me however, the security implications of this offer are extremely important. Since the database is no longer directly accessible to administrators, this not only dramatically improves its stability and resilience against human errors, but also substantially reduces the potential cyberattack surface and simplifies compliance with data protection regulations. This does not fully eliminate the need for database security solutions, but at least simplifies the task quite a bit without any additional costs.
Needless to say, this announcement has caused quite a stir among database professionals: does it mean that a DBA is now completely replaced by an AI? Should thousands of IT specialists around the world fear for their jobs? Well, the reality is a bit more complicated: the Autonomous Database is not really a product, but a managed service combining the newest improvements in the latest Oracle Database release with the decade-long evolution of various automation technologies, running on the next generation of Oracle Exadata hardware platform supported by the expertise of Oracle’s leading engineers. In short, you can only get all the benefits of this new solution when you become an Oracle Cloud customer.
This is, of course, a logical continuation of Oracle’s ongoing struggle to position itself as a Cloud company. Although the company already has an impressive portfolio of cloud-based enterprise applications and it continues to invest a lot in expanding their SaaS footprint, when it comes to PaaS and IaaS, Oracle still cannot really compete with its rivals that started in this business years earlier. So, instead of trying to beat competitors on their traditional playing fields, Oracle is now focusing on offering unique and innovative solutions that other cloud service providers simply do not have (and in the database market probably never will).
Another security-related announcement was the unveiling of the Oracle Security Monitoring and Analytics – a cloud-based solution that enables detection, investigation and remediation of various security threats across on-premises and cloud assets. Built upon the Oracle Management Cloud platform, this new service is also focusing on solving the skills gap problem in cybersecurity by reducing administration burden and improving efficiency of cybersecurity analysts.
Among other notable announcements are various services based on applied AI technologies like intelligent conversation bots and the newly launched enterprise-focused Blockchain Cloud Service based on the popular Hyperledger Fabric project. These offerings, combined with the latest rapid application development tools unveiled during the event as well, will certainly make the Oracle Cloud Platform more attractive not just for existing Oracle customers, but for newcomers of all sizes – from small startups with innovative ideas to large enterprises struggling to make their transition to the cloud as smooth as possible.