Oracle Autonomous Database for Dummies - Notes

Excerpts & paraphrased notes from the book Oracle Autonomous Database for Dummies (PDF, 83 pages) -

An autonomous database is a cloud database that uses ML to eliminate the human labor associated with database tuning, security, backups, updates, and other routine management tasks.  It combines the dynamic agility of  the cloud with the intelligent responsiveness of applied, adaptive machine learning (ML). 

The design goal is to make the database intelligent and self-reliant so as to minimize or eliminate human labor  — and associated human error  — and ensure data safety and optimal performance.

The core attributes of Autonomous Database  — self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing. At startup, it automatically establishes a triple-mirrored scale-out configuration in one regional cloud data center, with an optional full standby copy in another region.

By applying software updates in a rolling fashion across nodes of the cluster, it keeps the application online during updates of the database, clusterware, operating system (OS), virtual machine (VM), hypervisor, or firmware.

Autonomous Database is composed of the following 3 cloud database services:

1. Autonomous Data Warehouse (AWD) - optimized for analytical processing.
2. Autonomous Transaction Processing  (ATP) - simplifies database operations for OLTP and real-time analytical applications. 
3. Oracle Autonomous JSON Database  (AJD) - to develop JSON-centric applications

Oracle Autonomous Database consists of the latest Oracle database software with all the best practices automatically configured for specific workloads. It also includes database options like Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), Oracle Multitenant for the best performance and availability, and Oracle Database Vault and Oracle Data Safe to guarantee security for your data. The database software runs on Exadata. 

Because the Autonomous Database is based on the Oracle Database, and it’s running on the Oracle Exadata Database platform, it’s able to run both online transaction processing (OLTP) and analytic workloads up to 100 times faster.

Examples of Automation that is unique to Oracle Autonomous Database:

• Performance tuning

• Automatic indexing

• Autoscaling

Oracle infrastructure and Autonomous Database are both designed to deliver 99.995 percent availability including planned maintenance

Oracle ADW is integrated with Oracle Analytics.

Oracle Autonomous Database can be deployed on Oracle’s public cloud in a shared or dedicated infrastructure. It’s also available on-premises on Oracle’s Cloud@Customer infrastructure. 

On-premises Oracle data management workloads are 100 percent compatible with Oracle Cloud.

Organizations can use OCI to support zero-data-loss architectures like Oracle’s Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA), as well as scale-out architectures like Cassandra.

OCI regions generally contain three ADs. These ADs are stand-alone data centers located about 19 miles (30 kilometers) from each other and connected by high-bandwidth private networking.