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A fully autonomous, mission-critical Oracle database service that runs all workloads and reduces operational costs.
A fully autonomous, mission-critical Oracle database service that runs all workloads and reduces operational costs.
Statement of use
This document provides an overview of the features and enhancements included in this release of Oracle Autonomous Database. It is intended only to help you evaluate the business benefits of upgrading to Oracle Autonomous Database and plan your IT projects.
What is an autonomous database?
Autonomous Database is a mission-critical, converged database that runs transactional and analytic workloads. It automatically scales, tunes, patches, and secures all the workloads using machine learning to provide the highest service availability, security, and performance.
It can carry key tasks and is a fusion database. It can carry transactional and analytical tasks.
It is built on Oracle database and Oracle Exadata for easier migration to the cloud at lower cost. Autonomous Database is available on the public cloud with shared and dedicated infrastructure and on-premises with Exadata Cloud@Customer.
Based on Oracle database and Exadata infrastructure, with automatic data center optimization and machine learning, it can be provided on Oracle public cloud or local ECC.
Autonomy includes 3 aspects:
• Self-driving: Provisions workload-optimized, highly available databases. Uses automated configuration
settings, minimizes tuning required for specific workloads, and scales compute resources as needed.
Self-driving: Simplifies configuration, tuning, expansion, high availability, etc.
• Self-securing: Protects sensitive and regulated data, automatically patches your database for security
vulnerabilities, and prevents unauthorized access.
Self-Hardening: Simplifies security compliance and patch upgrades.
• Self-repairing: Detects and protects against system failures and user errors and provides failover to
standby databases with zero data loss.
Self-healing: error protection and automatic failover.
Autonomous Database includes Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, Exadata and OCI.
Autonomous Database integrates and automates many advanced database technologies unique to Oracle, including:
- RAC for scale-out, failover, and online patching
- Online operation for schema modification
- Active Data Guard for database-aware disaster recovery
- Database In-Memory for High Performance
- Transparent database encryption for data protection
- Database Vault for role separation
With Exadata Exadata Database Machine, the database engine offloads critical functions to Exadata storage to perform those functions with minimal data movement. These offloaded functions include key operations ranging from filtering changed blocks during incremental backups to running SQL fragments during parallel analytical operations.
Use cases for autonomous databases include:
- ATP is used for transactional or mixed workloads such as OLTP, batch and IoT.
- ADW is used for analytical processing or data warehouse, data mart, data lake.
- AJD is used for JSON document database.
- AAA for Autonomous APEX Application Development, a fully managed low-code application development platform for building and deploying modern data-driven applications on Autonomous Database.
Autonomous Database Deployment Options
There are three deployment modes for autonomous databases. In fact, both 1 and 2 belong to OCI:
- Shared: OCI shares the Exadata infrastructure. The minimum configuration is 1 OCPU, 1TB storage.
- Dedicated: OCI's exclusive Exadata infrastructure. The benefits of captive are the customizable operational policies that govern the provisioning of new databases, update timing, availability, and the density of databases running on the infrastructure. Controlling database version and upgrade timing is especially important for applications that are more sensitive to database version and release differences. While customers can customize these operational policies, all operations are fully automated by Oracle.
- Exadata Cloud@Customer. If there is a requirement for data to reside locally, and the complex dependencies with other local applications make migration difficult. At this time, ECC is the suitable choice.
Cloud Native Capabilities
- Self-service data management
Self-service tools provide a simple, powerful environment to load data and make it available for collaboration. Business and data analysts can easily load and transform data using drag-and-drop capabilities, generate business models, quickly spot anomalies, outliers and hidden patterns, and understand data dependencies and the impact of changes. - Machine Learning
Data scientists can build and deploy machine learning models in databases using scalable and optimized in-database algorithms. Oracle Machine Learning accelerates the speed at which data scientists can create machine learning models by eliminating the need to move data to dedicated machine learning systems. - Graph Analysis
Autonomous Database includes support for Graph functionality to represent and manage complex data relationships. Graph analytics enable data scientists and developers to apply pattern recognition, classification, and statistical analysis to a deeper context. - Spatial Analytics
Spatial capabilities address all forms of applications, spatial workloads and datasets, including the most demanding large-scale location intelligence and geospatial applications. - Low-Code Application Development (Oracle APEX)
Oracle Application Express (APEX) is a low-code development platform that enables you to build scalable, secure enterprise applications. - Data Protection and Security
Autonomous Database provides built-in database security and privacy, identifying and masking sensitive data, alerting on risky users and configurations, auditing critical database activity, and spotting suspicious data access attempts. - Database Cloning
Autonomous Database provides users with database cloning to create a point-in-time copy of the database for purposes such as testing, development or analysis, which can be refreshed to capture the latest updates.
automated management
Oracle Autonomous Database simplifies database administration through autonomous administration. It provides autonomous management capabilities for provisioning, provisioning, securing, tuning, and scaling to eliminate nearly all manual and complex tasks that can introduce human error.
- Automatic Updates
Autonomous Database with shared infrastructure automatically upgrades all software and underlying components to the latest versions. All updates are performed automatically by Oracle without interruption. - Rolling Upgrades and Application Continuity
Workloads with strict application continuity requirements are moved from one node of the cluster to another without impacting applications or users. Application continuity includes moving sessions across cluster nodes, even while transactions are in progress. Transactions can often continue processing after being moved to a different node without losing session state. - Automated Control
For complex mission-critical database applications, a dedicated infrastructure allows customers to control software versions, patching schedules, and database density. It also gives customers greater control over the grading of Oracle software releases and patch levels from pre-production to production deployments. The additional level of control of Oracle Autonomous Database on dedicated infrastructure allows customers to separate development, test, and production environments so each environment is updated independently using a trust and verification model that allows these updates to be applied to mission-critical Validate updates in a pre-production environment before the production environment. - Service Health Dashboard
Customers can view system health, availability, and maintenance performed through the Service Health Dashboard, which displays the status of all OCI services, including the Oracle Autonomous Database service. Customers can subscribe to updates from the Service Health Dashboard and view records of past incidents at https://ocistatus.oraclecloud.com. - Fault Detection and Resolution
Faults, including hardware failures and software errors, can and do occur in any computer system. Autonomous Database continuously monitors various failures that may occur and automatically initiates solutions in response.
Autonomous Database runs on fully redundant Exadata hardware that can survive hardware failures without interruption of service. Oracle's Cloud Operations team automatically dispatches hardware technicians to resolve any hardware failures.
Software failures are often avoided through proactive health monitoring and resolution to resolve issues before systems are affected.
Most failures can be monitored and resolved automatically without the need for a customer service request.
automatic optimization
Optimization of a database refers to optimal use of the resources allocated to that database. Database optimization in Oracle Database occurs at three levels, including the Service, System, and Application Schema levels outlined in this section.
Workload-Optimized Autonomous Database Use Cases
Autonomous Database for Analytics and Data Warehousing (ADW) Autonomous
Database is optimized for data warehouse, data mart, and analytics workloads for efficiency and simplicity. Data is automatically stored in Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) format. Columnar formatting is automatically used in Exadata Flash to accelerate analytical operations. In addition to being more space efficient, the Hybrid Columnar Compression format provides more optimized data access for analytics.
Storage indexes are automatically created on disk and in flash memory to help remove any unnecessary data from data scans (see the section below for more information). Oracle Database result caching is also enabled by default for all SQL statements, so workloads with repetitive SQL (such as BI dashboards, etc.) will benefit from accessing results directly from memory rather than re-executing the same statements.
Autonomous Database for Transaction Processing (ATP) Autonomous Database is optimized
for transaction processing and workloads that include a mix of transaction processing and operational reporting. Data is automatically stored in row format to speed up transaction processing, where each transaction is only interested in a small number of records (typically one or two records/rows).
The fastest way to find a single record in a table is through an index, which is why ADB not only supports manual index creation but can also take advantage of automatic indexing .
Autonomous Database relies on Exadata and uses Exadata's underlying features, such as SQL offload and Exadata Smart Flash Cache , to meet workload demands. Automated features vary depending on the type of expected workload.
Automatic system and storage optimization
System-level database optimization is fully under the control of Oracle Autonomous Database and can be done without input from the database user.
Automatic Schema level optimization
Autonomous Database applies a series of sophisticated optimization techniques at the application schema level, such as:
- Automatic Optimizer Statistics
Oracle Database uses a cost-based optimizer that relies on statistics to determine the best SQL execution plan. Outdated (or "stale") optimizer statistics are a major source of SQL performance problems. Oracle Autonomous Database collects statistics automatically in several ways, eliminating the need to manually collect optimizer statistics. When data is bulk loaded into Autonomous Database, statistics are automatically collected as part of the load operation. During DML operations (insert, update, or delete statements), key statistics are maintained automatically. Autonomous Database can also use high-frequency statistics collection jobs to adjust any stale optimizer statistics. - Indexes Constrained by Data Integrity Indexes
are often created to enforce data integrity. Simply defining these constraints results in automatic index creation. While creating indexes for integrity constraints is not unique to Autonomous Database, it is an important part of overall database optimization. These constraints and related indexes are used for SQL optimization. - Automatic Storage Indexing
Optimizations in Autonomous Database take into account the storage indexing capabilities of the underlying Exadata platform. Exadata software examines the offloaded SQL fragments to determine the relationship between these predicates and the data values within the data blocks held by each Exadata storage unit. In many cases, the storage index feature eliminates the need for other types of indexes, especially those created to support reporting workloads. - Automatic Secondary Indexes
In addition to using indexes to ensure data integrity, additional indexes may be required for performance reasons.
Autonomous Database includes automatic creation and management of these additional indexes. SQL statements are evaluated against existing indexes, and Autonomous Database determines whether additional indexes are needed for optimal performance. Autonomous Database automatically evaluates the benefits of new indexes and tests changes (automatically and independently) before implementing them.
Automatic indexing also monitors the usage of the indexes it implements. If an index is no longer useful, it is automatically dropped.
Schema-Level Manual Tuning Flexibility
Autonomous Database allows manual tuning at the schema level and will not be changed by the system. Manual schema-level optimization also includes the ability to implement even specialized indexing methods, such as function-based, bitmap, and compound indexes. This capability ensures customers have the broadest possible range of capabilities to optimize business applications.
simplified management
Autonomous Database brings advanced automation to the operation of Oracle Database, providing a minimal experience compared to legacy systems or other third-party cloud services.
Automated Management Capabilities
Autonomous Database automates nearly all Oracle Database management functions that typically consume a significant amount of time and effort from database administrators, system administrators, and other IT professionals.
Customers retain the degree of control needed to deliver database services to meet business needs, while taking advantage of this unprecedented level of automation. Oracle provides a robust set of tools to help customers more easily adopt Autonomous Database.
Database Actions
Database Actions is a web-based interface that provides development, data tools, and management and monitoring capabilities for Oracle Autonomous Database.
Key features include executing SQL statements and scripts, creating Data Modeler diagrams, developing RESTful web services, and managing JSON collections, as well as loading data from local and remote sources, viewing tables and View data, and organize, analyze, and transform data.
Application Development SDKs
Although application development SDKs are not typically used for database administration, administrators often use these tools to automate common tasks or application maintenance work. Autonomous Database provides native support for Oracle Call Interface (OCI), ODBC, and JDBC OCI connections. This enables Autonomous Database to support many tools on the market, including all popular development tools and frameworks.
Cloud Orchestration Tool Integration
Autonomous Database supports common cloud orchestration tools such as Terraform, which allows users to programmatically manage, version, and persist IT infrastructure using an "infrastructure as code" model. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Provider (a Terraform Provider) is provided under an open source license.
Performance Analysis Tools
Autonomous Database includes automatic (real-time) statistics, automatic indexing, and automatic SQL plan management, freeing developers and DBAs from common and tedious performance tuning. It also allows developers and DBAs to access the same deep performance analysis tools in Oracle Database to gain insight into the performance of SQL and applications using Autonomous Database. Autonomous Database performance analysis tools also include the following:
- Cloud UI
- performance center
- Oracle Automatic Workload Repository (AWR)
- SQL Monitor
Pay-As-You-Go Extensions
Autonomous Database resources (compute and storage) are billed by the second, with a minimum of one minute. To ensure that customers only pay for the resources they need when they need them, Autonomous Database has the ability to instantly expand system resources online to meet the needs of applications and businesses. Scaling can be done manually through the cloud UI or through the REST API (scripting), or automatically through the built-in autoscaling feature.
Autoscaling feature
Autoscaling feature provides the ability to automatically scale within predefined boundaries to respond to workload demands in real time. The feature starts with a baseline OCPU configuration and automatically scales the CPU up to three times the baseline as the workload increases . Baselines can be modified manually or via the REST API, and Autoscaling will run from the established baseline. Additional CPU is used only when necessary, and Autonomous Database immediately returns to baseline CPU when the workload no longer requires additional resources.
Service scaling setup
Unlike other cloud services, Autonomous Database does not require users to scale with predefined hardware shapes or configurations. Users can increase or decrease the number of CPU cores and/or storage space allocated to their configuration when needed.
The number of CPU cores and storage space are set when the database is initially created and can be changed at any time as needed.
Automated Script Scaling
Advanced users may consider using the REST API to scale the Autonomous Database Service through automated scripts, eliminating the need for manual intervention. Auto Scripted Scaling can also be used in conjunction with the Auto Scaling feature to provide dynamic scaling to better meet business needs regarding performance, capacity, and cost.
Top-notch SecurityIn
recent years, information security has become an even more important topic due to the increase in cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities. Autonomous Database is built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, an enterprise-grade cloud service that offers the highest security standards in the industry.
The user of the autonomous database is responsible for creating database users and schema owners. Oracle allows tens, hundreds, or even thousands of schemas in a single database. Multiple applications, application modules, or microservices can share a single database and still achieve sufficient isolation. Of course, customers can also choose how many autonomous databases to deploy according to the needs of the application development team.
The application developer or development DBA uses the schema owner account to create the objects used by the application, including tables, indexes, triggers, stored procedures, and so on. We'll explore the role of the development DBA in more detail in the next section. Customers can use the ADMIN user to reset the password of any schema owner account if necessary.
Best Practice Security Configuration
Systems running Autonomous Database are secured using best security practices at every level including Virtual Machines, O/S, Drivers, Exadata Storage, Oracle Clusterware, Real Application Clusters and Oracle Database. Autonomous Database is continuously scanned to ensure compliance with current best practice security configurations. If anomalies are detected, changes are implemented automatically without customer intervention. Autonomous Database also includes Oracle Data Safe, which provides comprehensive tools to ensure data security.
Automatic Security Updates
Security fixes are automatically applied as soon as possible, usually quarterly . Autonomous Database uses the Exadata product stack, which includes security fixes at every level from virtual machines and device drivers to Oracle Database. Scan your stack for security issues with an industry-leading security scanner and integrate fixes into your stack before applying them to Autonomous Database. Any emergency security updates are also Oracle's responsibility and will be applied automatically.
Automatic Database Encryption
Oracle Autonomous Database uses Oracle's Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) technology as a standard ( mandatory ) configuration. TDE provides data-at-rest encryption for Oracle Database. Database backups are also encrypted .
Encryption Key Management
Encryption/decryption keys are managed automatically as part of Oracle Autonomous Database Services without customer intervention. Encryption keys are used to control the encryption of data within the database, as well as the encryption of network communications. Autonomous Database provides two options for Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) to encrypt your database:
- Oracle-managed master encryption key on Autonomous Database: By default, Autonomous Database uses an Oracle-managed encryption key. With Oracle-managed keys, Autonomous Database creates and manages the encryption keys that protect the data , while Oracle handles the rotation of the TDE master key.
- Customer-managed encryption keys on Autonomous Database: If your organization's security policy requires customer-managed encryption keys, you can configure Autonomous Database to use an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Vault master encryption key.
Network Access Control
Customers can specify an access control list (ACL) to block all IP addresses not in the ACL from accessing the database. When an access control list is specified, the autonomous database only accepts connections from addresses on the access control list, and the database rejects all other client connections.
Auditing Database Access
Customers can audit database access and other activities using Oracle Unified Auditing. Customers can view audit information using the OCI Service Console under Governance (Audit). Oracle Data Safe also provides comprehensive tools for assessing endpoint security, monitoring user actions, and meeting security compliance requirements.
complete data protection
Once the Autonomous Database is created, data protection is automatically configured. Oracle Autonomous Database provides strong data protection due to the underlying architecture based on Exadata and Oracle Database backup/recovery capabilities.
Autonomous Data Guard
Autonomous Data Guard enables a standby database per ADB instance. It protects data from unforeseen disaster situations by automatically failing over to a standby database when the primary database fails. In the event of a disaster, the autonomous database will automatically trigger an automatic failover (without user action) when users are unable to connect to their primary database for a few minutes. Since this is an automatic operation, we only allow automatic failover to succeed if we can guarantee that no data loss will occur.
High Availability
Autonomous Database includes all built-in redundancy and resiliency features as part of the underlying Exadata platform. Autonomous Database uses a high availability (HA) configuration as a non-optional default configuration.
Autonomous Database uses Oracle Application Continuity to extend these HA capabilities to the application layer. With Application Continuity, the end-user experience can be improved by masking many planned and unplanned outages without requiring application developers to attempt to recover requests.
Standard database backup
Standard database backup uses a weekly full backup and daily incremental backup strategy with a default configured recovery window of 60 days . This means weekly full backups and daily incremental backups . A backup of the REDO log is also included for point-in-time recovery to any time or system change number (SCN) within the backup window.
Supplemental database backups (manually)
Customers can also supplement standard backups as needed, eg for compliance purposes. Additional backups can be taken manually or via the REST API and stored in Oracle's Object Storage .
Database Recovery
The Autonomous Database Console provides a simple interface to perform database recovery without specialized knowledge. The console lists the available backups within the defined restore window, and the customer simply selects the desired backup to restore or specifies the desired restore point in time. Oracle Autonomous Database automates database recovery using the appropriate level of resources allocated to the service, such as CPU cores, storage, parallelism, and more.
Unlike traditional on-premises databases, customers can reset the database to an earlier point in time simply by performing a restore. With Autonomous Database, physical corruption is usually detected by the health framework and recovery is initiated (if necessary) as part of the automatic repair process. Recovery is performed without customer intervention to repair databases corrupted by infrastructure failures.
Autonomous Database includes full support for Oracle's Flashback technologies , including Flashback Database, Flashback Table, and Flashback Query. Flashback is often used as an alternative to database recovery, especially for recovering individual tables , such as when data is improperly deleted or modified by a rogue user or transaction.
common use case
Departmental Data Warehouse: Improve Line-of-Business Analytics
Customers can deploy a self-service departmental data warehouse that brings together multiple enterprise systems, spreadsheets, and third-party data sources into one trusted, maintainable, and integrated dashboard. Integrated self-service data tools allow users to load and transform data via drag-and-drop, generate business models, quickly spot anomalies, and build machine learning models.
Enterprise Data Warehouse: Simplify and Modernize the Enterprise Data Warehouse
Use all your data to answer more complex questions. Simplify your enterprise data warehouse to support multimodal, fused data with autonomous capabilities.
Low-Code Application Development Build scalable,
secure, data-driven applications with minimal coding using APEX, a low-code development tool built into Autonomous Database.
Migrate Custom Applications
Optimize and scale your custom and ISV applications to improve performance, availability and security while reducing management complexity. Lower total cost of ownership through autonomous operations.
Migrate Oracle Applications (JDE, Peoplesoft, Siebel)
Optimize and scale your Oracle applications such as PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel while reducing administrative complexity. Get more value from your applications while reducing costs.
Database Consolidation
Reduce database infrastructure and management costs by consolidating multiple databases onto a set of compute infrastructures using fractional OCPU and storage allocations on dedicated infrastructure.
Deploy mission-critical applications with autonomous services in your data center
Provide secure, governed, and high-performance self-service databases while IT controls budgeting, capacity planning, availability, security, and governance of the data.
Build real-time mixed-workload applications with large-scale IoT data
Deliver billions of inserts and retrieves per second through powerful analytics on key-value transactions such as IoT data, without the operational complexity of single-purpose databases.
Migration Tools and Services
There are various options for moving your data into Autonomous Database. These options are listed below.
- Oracle Database Migration Service: A fully managed cloud service that simplifies the process of migrating established databases from on-premises, third-party, or Oracle Cloud to Autonomous Database.
- Oracle GoldenGate: Oracle's data replication tool for one-time data migration and data replication with change data capture.
- Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM): A service with a command-line interface that you install and run on hosts that you provide. The server on which the zero downtime migration software is installed is called the zero downtime migration service host. You can run one or more database migration jobs from the Zero Downtime Migration Service host.
- Oracle Data Pump: A database utility that supports high-speed bulk data and metadata movement between Oracle Database and Autonomous Database.
- Oracle SQL* Loader: A database utility for loading data from external files into an Oracle database.
Summarize
Oracle's Autonomous Database is available in the Oracle Public Cloud and also on -premises in the customer's data center for customers who cannot migrate to the public cloud. Oracle Autonomous Database automates nearly all DBA operational functions, freeing customers to focus on building and deploying applications that more effectively meet business needs. The automation layer in Oracle Cloud automatically detects and corrects issues far faster and more accurately than the most seasoned professionals can accomplish using traditional manual methods.
Built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle Autonomous Database keeps the system constantly updated with the latest fixes and security patches, and gives developers immediate access to the latest innovations in Oracle Database. Autonomous Database provides customers with the high performance and cost-effective operation required for the most demanding and mission-critical applications.