Oracle Autonomous Database Technical Overview
Oracle Autonomous Database Technical Overview
Oracle Autonomous Database Technical Overview
1 Business / Technical Brief / Oracle Autonomous Database Technical Overview / Version 2.1
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Purpose statement
This document provides an overview of features and enhancements included in this release of
Oracle Autonomous Database. It is intended solely to help you assess the business benefits of
upgrading to Oracle Autonomous Database and to plan your IT projects.
Disclaimer
This document in any form, software or printed matter, contains proprietary information that
is the exclusive property of Oracle. Your access to and use of this confidential material is
subject to the terms and conditions of your Oracle software license and service agreement,
which has been executed and with which you agree to comply. This document and
information contained herein may not be disclosed, copied, reproduced or distributed to
anyone outside Oracle without prior written consent of Oracle. This document is not part of
your license agreement nor can it be incorporated into any contractual agreement with Oracle
or its subsidiaries or affiliates.
This document is for informational purposes only and is intended solely to assist you in
planning for the implementation and upgrade of the product features described. It is not a
commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in
making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or
functionality described in this document remains at the sole discretion of Oracle. Due to the
nature of the product architecture, it may not be possible to safely include all features
described in this document without risking significant destabilization of the code.
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Table of contents
Purpose statement 2
Disclaimer 2
What is Autonomous Database? 4
Autonomous Database Deployment Options 6
Cloud Native Capabilities 6
Automated Management 7
Automated Optimization 8
Simplified Administration 10
Pay-As-You-Go Scaling 11
Complete Data Protection 12
Common Use Cases 13
Migration Tools and Services 14
Conclusion 14
Resources 15
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What is 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 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.
• Self-securing: Protects sensitive and regulated data, automatically patches your database for security
vulnerabilities, and prevents unauthorized access.
• Self-repairing: Detects and protects against system failures and user errors and provides failover to
standby databases with zero data loss.
It’s built upon a foundation of technical innovations that have been developed by Oracle over more than
three decades to meet the needs of thousands of enterprise customers worldwide.
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Foundation
The foundation for Autonomous Database includes Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, Exadata Database
Machine, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Autonomous Database incorporates and automates many advanced database technologies that are
unique to Oracle, including:
With Exadata Database Machine, the database engine offloads critical functions to the Exadata storage to
execute those functions with minimal data movement. These offloaded functions include various critical
operations, from filtering for changed blocks during incremental backup to running SQL fragments during
parallel analytic operations.
• Autonomous Database for Analytics and Data Warehousing (ADW) is a fully autonomous, mission-
critical database service optimized for analytic workloads including data marts, data warehouses, and
data lakes. It is pre-configured with columnar storage of data and optimized for workloads that require
large joins, which helps to to accelerate the full analytics lifecycle—from extracting, loading, and
transforming data to running sophisticated reports, predictions, and machine learning. Eliminating
human management and errors reduces operational costs. Data analysts, data scientists, and business
analysts can rapidly, easily, and cost effectively discover business insights using data of any size and
type.
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• Autonomous JSON Database is a cloud document database service that makes it simple to develop
JSON-centric applications.
• APEX Developer Service is a fully managed, low-code application development platform for building
and deploying modern, data-driven applications on Autonomous Database.
• Shared: This deployment option gives customers the benefits of full isolation of data and system resources
while also sharing infrastructure with other customers. The shared Infrastructure deployment option requires a
minimum commitment of just one hour, one OCPU, and one terabyte of database storage. It can be instantly
scaled both in terms of CPU and/or storage fully online, enabling users to pay only for the resources used.
Shared infrastructure is an ideal choice for line of business, departmental applications, or data marts and makes
an excellent sandbox for data scientists or developers.
• Dedicated: Customers have their own dedicated Exadata infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud, effectively giving
them a private database cloud within the Oracle public cloud. Oracle Autonomous Database on Dedicated
Infrastructure runs inside a hardware enforced virtual cloud network, offering the highest level of isolation from
other tenants. Users can easily configure one or more container databases on their dedicated infrastructure,
each of which can contain one or more pluggable databases.
Dedicated infrastructure gives customers the opportunity to customize the operational policies used to control
the provisioning of a new database, the timing of updates, the availability, and the density of databases that
they run on the infrastructure. Having control over database versions and the timing of upgrades is especially
important for applications that are more sensitive to database version and release differences. Although
customers can customize these operational policies, all operations are still fully automated by Oracle.
• Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer: Many companies cannot easily move to the public
cloud due to challenges involving the regulatory nature of their data, data residency laws requiring data to stay
in its country of origin, and the complexities of systems entanglement present in enterprise architectures. To
mitigate these challenges while providing customers the benefits of cloud self-service and a pay-per-use
financial model, Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, brings the cloud to customers who cannot simply migrate to
the public cloud.
• Machine learning: Data scientists can build and deploy machine learning models in the database using scalable
and optimized in-database algorithms. Oracle Machine Learning accelerates the creation of machine learning
models for data scientists by eliminating the need to move data to dedicated machine learning systems.
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• Graph analytics: Autonomous Database includes support for graph features to represent and manage complex
data relationships. The graph analytics enables data scientists and developers to apply pattern recognition,
classification, and statistical analysis for deeper context.
• Spatial analytics: The spatial features address all forms of applications, spatial workloads, and datasets,
including the most demanding, large-scale location intelligence and geospatial applications.
• Low code app dev (Oracle APEX): Oracle Application Express (APEX) is a low-code development platform that
enables you to build scalable, secure enterprise apps, with world-class features, that can be deployed anywhere.
• Data protection and security: Autonomous Database provides built-in database security and privacy that
identifies sensitive data and masks it, issues alerts on risky users and configurations, audits critical database
activities, and discovers suspicious attempts to access data.
• Database cloning: Autonomous Database provides database cloning for users to create a point-in-time copy of
database for purposes such as testing, development, or analytics that can be refreshed to capture the latest
updates.
Automated Management
Oracle Autonomous Database simplifies database management with autonomous administration. It provides
autonomous management capabilities for provisioning, configuring, securing, tuning, and scaling to eliminate
nearly all the manual and complex tasks that can introduce human error.
Automatic updates
Autonomous Database with shared infrastructure is automatically upgraded to the latest versions of all software
and underlying components. All updates are automatically executed by Oracle without disruption.
Automation controls
For complex and mission-critical database applications, Dedicated Infrastructure allows customers to control
software versions, patching schedules, and database density. It also gives customers finer control over the staging
of Oracle software versions and patch levels from pre-production through production deployment. The additional
level of control with Oracle Autonomous Database on Dedicated Infrastructure allows customers to separate
development, test, and production environments so each is updated independently with a trust-and-verify model
that allows validation of updates in pre-production environments before autonomous operations apply those
updates to mission-critical production environments.
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Fault detection & resolution
Faults, including hardware failures and software errors, can and do occur in any computer system. Autonomous
Databases are continually monitored for the full range of faults that might occur, and resolution is automatically
launched in response.
Autonomous Database runs on fully redundant Exadata hardware that can survive hardware failures without service
interruption. Oracle’s Cloud Operations team automatically dispatches a hardware technician to address any
hardware failures.
Software faults are often avoided through proactive health monitoring and resolution to address issues before a
system is impacted.
The majority of faults are monitored and resolved automatically without requiring customers to file service
requests.
Automated Optimization
Optimization of a database refers to making optimal use of the resources assigned to that database. Database
optimization in an Oracle database occurs at three levels, including the service, system, and application schema
level as outlined in this section.
Autonomous Database is optimized for data warehouse, data mart, and analytic workloads for efficiency and
simplicity. The data is automatically stored in Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) format. The columnar format is
automatically used in Exadata Flash Cache to accelerate analytic operations. In addition to being more space
efficient, Hybrid Columnar Compression format provides more optimal data access for analytics.
Storage indexes are automatically created both on disk and in Flash to help prune out any unnecessary data from
data scans (see the section below for more information). Oracle Database Result Cache is also enabled by default for
all SQL statements, so workloads with repetitive SQL (such as BI dashboards etc.) will benefit from accessing the
results straight from memory rather than re-executing the same statement.
Autonomous Database for transaction processing (ATP)
Autonomous Database is optimized for transaction processing and workloads that include a mixture of transaction
processing and operational reporting. The data is automatically stored in a row format to speed up transaction
processing where each transaction is only interested in a small number of records (often one or two records/rows).
The fastest way to find an individual record within a table is via an index, which is why ADB not only supports
manually created indexes but can also take advantage of automatic indexing.
Autonomous Database relies on Exadata and uses the underlying features of Exadata, such as SQL offloading and
Exadata Smart FlashCache, to meet the needs of the workload. The automatic features differ depending on the
intended workload type.
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Automatic schema level optimization
Autonomous Database applies a range sophisticated optimization techniques at the application schema level,
such as:
Automatic indexing
Beyond the use of indexes to ensure data integrity, additional indexing may be required for performance reasons.
Autonomous Database includes the automatic creation and management of these additional indexes. SQL
statements are evaluated against existing indexes, and Autonomous Database determines whether additional
indexes might be necessary for optimal performance. Autonomous Database automatically evaluates the benefits
of new indexes and will test the change (automatically and independently) before implementing those indexes.
Automatic Indexing also monitors the usage of the indexes it implements. If an index is no longer useful, it will be
automatically removed.
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Simplified Administration
Autonomous Database brings advanced automation to the operation of Oracle databases. It provides a greatly
simplified experience in comparison to legacy systems or other third-party cloud services. In this and the following
sections, we will explore what administrative functions are automated and what controls customers have over the
service.
Customers retain the degree of control necessary to deliver database services to meet business demands, while
taking advantage of this unprecedented level of automation. Oracle provides a set of robust tools to help customers
more easily adopt Autonomous Database.
Database Actions
Database Actions is a web-based interface that provides development, data tools, and administration and
monitoring features for Oracle Autonomous Database.
The main features include executing SQL statements and scripts, creating Data Modeler diagrams, developing
RESTful web services, and managing JSON collections, as well as using the Data Load, Catalog, Data Insights,
Business Models, and Data Transforms tools to load data from local and remote sources, view data in tables and
views, and organize, analyze, and transform data.
• Performance Hub
• SQL Monitor
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Pay-As-You-Go Scaling
Autonomous Database resources (compute and storage) are billed on a per second basis with the minimum time
being one minute. To ensure customers only pay for the resources they need, when they need them, Autonomous
Database includes the ability to instantly scale system resources online in order to meet the needs of the application
and business. Scaling can be done manually via the Cloud User Interface or via the REST APIs (scripting) or automated
via the built-in Auto-Scale feature.
Autoscaling feature
The Autoscaling feature provides the ability to automatically scale within pre-defined boundaries in response to
workload demands in real-time. The feature begins with a baseline OCPU configuration and will automatically scale
CPUs up to three times the baseline when the workload increases. The baseline can be modified either manually or
via REST API, and Autoscaling will operate from the established baseline. The additional CPUs are only used when
necessary, and the Autonomous Database instantly returns to the baseline CPU when the workload no longer
requires the additional resources.
The number of CPU cores and storage space is set during the initial creation of the database and can be changed at
any time as desired.
Best-in-class security
Information security has become an even more critical topic in recent years due to increases in cyber security
threats and breaches. Autonomous Database is built upon the foundation of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which is an
enterprise-grade cloud service, delivering the highest possible security standards in the industry.
Users of Autonomous Database are 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, but still achieve sufficient isolation. Of course, customers can also
choose to deploy as many Autonomous Databases as needed to address the requirements of application
development teams.
Application developers or development DBAs use schema owner accounts to create objects used by the application,
including tables, indexes, triggers, stored procedures, etc. We will explore the role of the development DBA in
greater detail in the section that follows. Customers can use the ADMIN user to reset passwords of any schema
owner account when necessary.
Oracle-Managed Master Encryption Keys on Autonomous Database: By default, Autonomous Database uses
Oracle-managed encryption keys. Using Oracle-managed keys, Autonomous Database creates and manages the
encryption keys that protect your data, and Oracle handles rotation of the TDE master key.
Customer-Managed Encryption Keys on Autonomous Database: If your organization's security policies require
customer-managed encryption keys, you can configure Autonomous Database to use an Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure Vault master encryption key.
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Autonomous Database when a user is unable to connect to their primary database for a few minutes. Since this is an
automated action, we allow auto-failovers to succeed only when we can guarantee no data loss will occur.
High Availability
Autonomous Database includes all the built-in redundancy and resiliency features that are part of the underlying
Exadata platform. Autonomous Database uses a high availability (HA) configuration as a non-optional, default
configuration.
Autonomous Database extends these HA capabilities to the application tier using Oracle Application Continuity.
With Application Continuity, the end-user experience is improved by masking many outages, planned and
unplanned, without the application developer needing to attempt to recover the request.
Database recovery
The Autonomous Database Console provides a simple interface to execute database recovery without specialized
knowledge. The console lists the available backups within the defined recovery window, and the customer simply
chooses the desired backup to restore or specifies the desired point in time for recovery. Oracle Autonomous
Database automatically performs the database recovery using the appropriate level of resources allocated to the
service, such as CPU cores, storage, parallelism, etc.
Unlike traditional on-premises databases, customers only need to perform recovery in order to reset the database
to an earlier point in time. With Autonomous Database, physical corruption will normally be detected by the health
framework and recovery initiated (if necessary) as part of the automated repair process. Customers are not required
to intervene to execute recovery to repair databases corrupted by failure of infrastructure.
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 a rogue user or transaction deletes or modifies data improperly.
Database consolidation
Reduce the cost of database infrastructure and administration by consolidating multiple databases onto a single set
of computing infrastructure using fractional OCPU and GB storage allocation on a dedicated infrastructure.
• Oracle Database Migration Service: A fully managed cloud service that simplifies moving 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 as well as data replication with
change data capture.
• Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM): A service with a command line interface that you install and run on a host
that you provision. The server where 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 supporting high-speed bulk data and metadata movement between
Oracle databases and Autonomous Database.
• Oracle SQL* Loader: A database utility to load data from external files into Oracle Database.
Conclusion
Oracle’s Autonomous Database is available in the Oracle public cloud as well as on-premises in customer data
centers for customers who cannot move to the public cloud. Oracle Autonomous Database automates virtually all
operations DBA functions, allowing customers to focus on building and deploying applications that more effectively
meet business requirements. Automation layers in Oracle Cloud automatically detect and correct issues much faster
and more accurately than even the most seasoned professional can accomplish using traditional manual methods.
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Oracle Autonomous Database is built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which keeps systems constantly updated with
the latest fixes and security patches and gives developers immediate access to the latest innovations in Oracle
Database. Autonomous Database delivers the high performance and cost-effective operation customers require for
their most demanding and mission-critical applications.
Resources
• oracle.com/autonomous-database
• Documentation
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