Category: Autonomous Database

Oracle Database 21c is now available on the Oracle Cloud

It looks like the holidays have come early this year for those of you with an Oracle Cloud account because starting today you can now create an Oracle 21c database!

That’s right, Oracle Database 21c is now production in the Oracle Cloud on the Oracle Cloud Database Service and the Autonomous Database Free Tier Service in Ashburn (IAD), Phoenix (PHX), Frankfurt (FRA) and London (LHR) regions. General availability of Oracle Database 21c for on-prem platforms (including Exadata, Linux and Windows) will be in 2021.

Creating a 21c Oracle Autonomous Database on the Always Free Tier

New features in Oracle Database 21c include Blockchain tables, SQL Macros (checkout the LiveSQL lab), a Native JSON datatype, In-Memory Hybrid Scans (using the in-memory column store like an index) and the ability to execute JavaScript inside the Oracle Database!

More details on what to expect from Oracle Database 21c can be found on the main Oracle Database Blog or in the Oracle Database Documentation.

If you don’t have an Oracle Cloud account yet, you can always sign-up for an Oracle Always Free Tier account at https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

Generating an AWR report for Autonomous Databases

Oracle Autonomous Database automates the lifecycle management of a database, everything from provisioning, scaling, backups and patching, but what it doesn’t do yet is fully tune your application.

You are still on the hook to make sure your app doesn’t have any concurrency bottlenecks or poorly written SQL that Auto Indexing can’t address.

So, what can you do to monitor your app while it’s running on an Autonomous Database?

The first place you can start is the Performance Hub tab on the cloud console. Here you’ll find both real-time and historical performance data in the form of Active Session History (ASH) information for the last seven days, and SQL Monitor reports for the high-load SQL. You can aggregate the ASH data several different ways including by wait class, database service, resource group or SQL ID. The same information is also available in Oracle Management Cloud (OMC), and SQL Developer Web.

But if you are trying to get a holistic view of how your app is behaving on a database, nothing beats an Automatic Workload Repository report or AWR report.

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How do I scale an Autonomous Database?

Traditionally database deployments have been designed and provisioned for the peak possible workload. And in reality, a substantial margin of safety was also provisioned on top of that in order to make sure the system could cope with any unforeseen demands.

But peak workloads tend to occur infrequently, leaving most of this costly capacity idle the majority of the time.

In order to enable customers to pay for only the resources they need, Oracle Autonomous Database allow customers to elastically adjust their compute and storage resources when necessary.

An Autonomous Database can be scaled through the UI as shown in the video below or via our cloud APIs or CLI commands. In the video, you see how I can scale a 2 CPU  configuration to an 8 CPU configuration in under a minute to accommodate 48 concurrent users running a JSON workload.

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FREE Oracle Autonomous Database

Today was the first day of Oracle Open World and during Larry Ellison’s afternoon keynote he made a number of extremely exciting announcements around Oracle Autonomous Database including the launch of an Always Free Tier for Developers and students in the Oracle Cloud.  Larry said, “as long as you use the service, it will be there, free forever.”

So what’s included in Oracle’s Always Free Tier?

Along with compute and storage services, you also get access to 2 Autonomous Database with 20GB of storage each absolutely free. So you can try out both an Autonomous Data Warehouse and an Autonomous Transaction Processing system.

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Are you ready for Oracle OpenWorld 2019?

With less than a week to go until Oracle Open World kicks off, I thought I would share with you what you can expect.

Of course the whole Database team will be there and you will have multiple opportunities to meet up with us, in one of our technical sessions, our hands-on-labs or at the Oracle demogrounds.

Below are just some of the session I thought might be interesting to help get you started:

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Can I use an Autonomous Database to develop new applications?

Yes, Oracle Autonomous Database (ADB) is the ideal platform for new application development.

With this family of cloud services, developers no longer have to wait on others to provision hardware, install software, and create a database for them. With ADB, developers can easily and instantly deploy an Oracle database without worrying about having to manual tune it or capacity planning. This allows developers to start developing in minutes and concentrate on solving business problems without all of the usual distractions.

ADB has the most advanced SQL and PL/SQL support accelerating developer productivity by minimizing the amount of application code required to implement complex business logic. It also has a complete set of integrated Machine Learning algorithms, simplifying the development of applications that perform real-time predictions such as personalized shopping recommendations, customer churn rates, and fraud detection.

What Development Tools should I use with ATP?

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Cloning an Oracle Autonomous Database

Often times development and testing teams need a copy of a production database in order to develop or test using a representative dataset. Up until now, creating these cloned  environments has been a challenging and time consuming process for DBAs.

Oracle Autonomous Database makes it extremely easy for a DBA to clone a database in just a few mouse clicks, as I demonstrate in the video below.

When it comes to cloning an Autonomous Database  you have two options:

You can create a new database that is a complete copy of the original database, which includes all metadata (table and view definitions etc.) and all of the actual data. This is referred to as a FULL CLONE.

Or you can create a new database that only contains the metadata from the original database.  This is referred to as METADATA CLONE.

Either way the “cloned” database will have a completely new database name, admin password. It can also have different infrastructure criteria (CPU count and storage) from the original database.

The clone will also not have any of the AWR data  or any of the ML Worksheets from original database.

Of course you don’t need to use the UI every time you want to create a clone. All of the tasks that can be done via the UI can be done using REST APIs or CLI commands.

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Oracle Open World Wrap Up

Oracle Open World this year was a crazy busy week catching up with customers, Oracle Aces, Development Champions and partners as we all crammed into the Moscone center to hear the very latest on Oracle Technologies.

For the database, this year’s conferences saw the introduction of Oracle Database 19c and of course the continuing evolution of the Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud Services.

If you weren’t able to make it to OOW in person, don’t panic as a lot of the session presentations are now available for download in the OOW session catalog.

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Getting started with Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing

Getting started with Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing is actually much easier than you might think. In fact, with Oracle’s $300 in free cloud credits you can probably get your first 30 days on the service for free. Please note, you will require an active email address and credit card in order to sign up for a trial account. Of course, if you have existing cloud credits you can skip this step.

Once you sign up for trail account you’ll get an email with your tenancy, username and password. Armed with this information, head on over to https://cloud.oracle.com to sign in. The video below explains in detailed the simple steps needed to provision a new Autonomous Transaction Processing database. I’ve also listed these steps below the video, for  easy reference.

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What you can expect from Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing

Today Larry Ellison announced the general availability of Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP), the newest member of the Oracle Autonomous Database family, combining the flexibility of cloud with the power of machine learning to deliver data management as a service.

Traditionally, creating a database management system required a team of experts to custom build and manually maintain a complex hardware and software stack. With each system being unique, this approach led to poor economies of scale and a lack of the agility typically needed to give the business a competitive edge.

ATP enables businesses to safely run a complex mix of high-performance transactions, reporting, and batch processing using the most secure, available, performant, and proven platform – Oracle Database on Exadata in the cloud. Unlike manually managed transaction processing databases, ATP provides instant, elastic compute and storage, so only the required resources are provisioned at any given time, decreasing runtime costs.

But what does the Autonomous in Autonomous Transaction Processing really mean?

Self-Driving

ATP is a self-driving database, meaning it eliminates the human labor needed to provision, secure, update, monitor, backup, and troubleshooting a database.  This reduction in database maintenance tasks, reducing costs and freeing scarce administrator resources to work on higher value tasks.

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