I recently wrote a Market Milestone report on Oracle’s launch of Autonomous Transaction Processing, the latest in a string of Autonomous Database announcements made by Oracle following announcements in Autonomous Data Warehousing and the initial announcement of the Autonomous Database late last year.
This string of announcements by Oracle takes advantage of Oracle’s investments in infrastructure, distributed hardware, data protection and security and index optimization to create a new set of database services that seek to automate basic support and optimization capabilities. These announcements matter because, as transactional and data-centric business models continue to proliferate, both startups and enterprises should seek a data infrastructure that will remain optimized, secure, and scalable over time without become cost and resource intensive. With Oracle Automated Transaction Processing, Oracle provides its solution to provide an enterprise-grade data foundation for this next generation of businesses.
One of Amalgam Insights’ key takeaways in this research is the analyst estimate that Oracle ATP could reduce the cost of cloud-based transactional database management by 65% compared to similar services managed on Amazon Web Services. Frankly, companies that need to support net-new transactional databases that must be performant and scalable to support Internet of Things, messaging, and other new data-driven businesses should consider Oracle ATP and should do due diligence on Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud for reducing long-term Total Cost of Ownership. This chart is based on the costs of a 10 TB Oracle database on a reserved instance on Amazon Web Services vs. a similar database on the Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud
One of the most interesting aspects of the Autonomous Database in general that Oracle will need to further explain is how to guide companies with existing transactional databases and data warehouses to an Automated environment. It is no secret that every enterprise IT department is its own special environment driven by a combination of business rules, employee preferences, governance, regulation, security, and business continuity expectations. At the same time, IT is used to automation and rapid processing of some aspects of technology management, such as threat management and logs for patching and other basic transactions. But considering the needs of IT for extreme customization, how does IT gain enough visibility to the automated decisions made in indexing and ongoing optimization?
At this point, Amalgam Insights believes that Oracle is pushing a fundamental shift in database management that will likely lead to the automation of manual technical management tasks. This change will be especially helpful for net-new databases where organizations can use the Automated Database Cloud to help establish business rules for data access, categorization, and optimization. This is likely a no-brainer decision, especially for Oracle shops that are strained in their database management resources and seeking to handle more data for new transaction-based business needs or machine learning.
For established database workloads, enterprises will have to think about how or if to transfer existing enterprise databases to the Autonomous Database Cloud. Although enterprises will likely gain some initial performance improvements and potentially reduce the support costs associated with large databases, they will also likely spend time in double-checking the decisions and lineage associated with Automated Database decisions, both in test and in deployment settings. Amalgam Insights would expect that Autonomous Database management would lead to indexing, security, and resource management decisions that may be more optimal than human-led decisions, but with a logic that may not be fully transparent to IT departments that have strongly-defined and governed business rules and processes.
Although Amalgam Insights is convinced that Oracle Autonomous Database is the beginning of a new stage of Digitized and Automated IT, we also believe that a next step for Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud will be to create governance, lineage, and audit packages to support regulated industries, legislative demands, and documentation to describe the business rules for Autonomous logic. Amalgam Insights expects that Oracle would want to keep specific algorithms and automation logic as proprietary trade secrets. But without some level of documentation that is tracable and auditable, large enterprises will have to conduct significant work on their own to figure out if they are able to transfer large databases to Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud, which Amalgam Insights would expect to be an important part of Oracle’s business model and cloud revenue projections going forward.
To read the full report with additional insights and details on the Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing announcement, please download the full report on Oracle’s launch of Autonomous Transaction Processing, available at no cost for a limited time.