Oracle wants to make it easier for customers to power their businesses with its database. The company unveiled a new 18c version of its marquee database software today that uses machine learning to help protect customer data and automate the management of their information.
The software will use machine learning on top of a wealth of log data to help optimize the database for frequent use patterns through caching, indexing, and other techniques. In addition, it will ensure that customers don’t have someone using stolen credentials to access business data. The database software will also expand or shrink how much compute and storage it’s using automatically.
Administrators set policies for the database software to follow, and it will then manage itself following those rules. For example, users could say that they want to have disaster recovery for their data, and the database will take care of it automatically.
“If you eliminate all human labor, you eliminate human error,” Oracle cofounder and CTO Larry Ellison said during his keynote address today.
All that automation is supposed to help free up human database administrators to work on other tasks like planning and security, which would provide more value to its customers.
Oracle plans to launch 18c in December of this year for data warehouses, and in June of next year for online transaction processing workloads. Customers will be able to run the software in their private data centers on infrastructure they own, or have Oracle truck in its managed infrastructure through the company’s Cloud at Customer services. It will also be available through the Oracle Cloud.
Existing Oracle customers can also benefit from a new set of discounts the company announced a couple weeks ago that let users apply their existing database licenses to its platform-as-a-service offerings like Autonomous Database Cloud.
Ellison said that the company could guarantee customers of the new software less than 30 minutes of planned or unplanned downtime per year. In addition, the performance tuning will consume less compute and storage than a human-managed database.
Furthermore, he said that Oracle would guarantee that running its database service in its cloud would be less than half the price of running the same workloads using Amazon Redshift on AWS — and the company would write that in customer contracts without examining the workload in question.
