Whether this "Autonomous" product is really anything new or not, LE and company will be able to say that they no longer need as many salespeople, sales consultants, or R&D engineers. The product sells itself! It's self-driving! Look for more layoffs across the board. Hey, machine learning fixes everything! Also, look for a bad Q2 earnings report in December with "restructuring" and "shift in product mix" as the key excuses.
Let's review LE's claims this week at Oracle Open World about the new 18c "Autonomous" Database":
-It's self driving and requires no DBA. This is already true of Oracle 12c. The days of complicated tuning of undocumented underbar parameters are over for the most part. It works fine for transaction processing (OLTP) out of the box for small or moderate workloads. For heavy workloads or data warehousing, it is still going to require a lot of tuning and DBA hand-holding. Oracle has not re-written the code. Or, if they disable the tuning capabilities, then the Oracle database won't work for heavy workloads, but heavy workloads are the competitive advantage over open source databases.
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It magically tunes and secures itself through Machine Learning. ML is a marketing buzzword along with "self-driving." Oracle is not Google. They do not have over a billion users hitting away at cloud applications every minute, generating the massive data sets required to tune Machine Learning models. ML is not a magic feature you simply add to a database that solves all problems.
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It is self-patching without downtime. Oracle has promised this for years and has not delivered. Most patches require a database shutdown. There were still recent patches that required a full system shutdown of both production and Data Guard DR.
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The database fixes corruption all by itself. That is already true in some cases today, especially if you use Data Guard. DG replicates transactions in real time to a disaster recovery site and does not replicate corrupted data. I would bet dollars to donuts that this "new" feature requires DG, which of course requires a DR site - in other words, you must have two replica databases running (and billing) at all times.
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The data warehouse version will be available in December, with the OLTP version available later. This is scary as I assume it means the code is splitting into two branches, each with its own unique features, bugs, and patches. A key advantage over open source databases is the ability of Oracle to do both OLTP and DW at the same time. I wonder if that is going out the window too, or if Oracle is throwing 18c out there before it is ready.
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It's lots better than AWS. What is this guy smoking? AWS has an "autonomous" Oracle database service already with AWS RDS and has had it for years. Does he have any idea how far behind Oracle cloud is? AWS has been around since 2006 - your services that went GA in 2016 were 10 years late.