The future is autonomous

Looking around we see more and more self sufficient systems. It starts with simple things like auto updates on your mobile phone, warnings when your car’s next maintenance is due, traffic congestion warnings and rerouting….
These are examples of simple automation, scheduled events.
But what if the systems can learn from previous situations.
In the morning your alarm would know in the weekends you want to wake up later, or could see if your train is delayed, and give you those extra minutes in bed.

Expertise replaced by algorithms, driven by human input

Systems become capable of gathering the data needed, to build insights, and take the tedious activities, like the need to think to set the alarm every morning, switch it off during holidays, set it later at the weekends, out of your hands. Off course we first need to teach the system how it needs to behave in the various situations (supervised learning), or in next phases (deep learning), it becomes really self sufficient by learning on its own.

Man and machine working together

Without input the algorithms can’t do much by themselves. There still needs to be human interaction, learning and supervising.
For a lot of the basics, this is already more than enough to build ‘smart’ systems, based on machine learning.

Focus on your core

Our recent visit to the Oracle Cloud Day in Belgium, showed Oracle has taken this approach into their database and cloud platform.

It takes the burden of tedious, repetitive jobs out of the hands of the dba (database administrator).
At the same time this brings the knowledge of the dba’s to the world.
The approach allows people to focus on their core, and dba’s to do more value added work, like focus on architecture, instead of running scripts and tweaking each and every parameter to have high performance and scaling systems.

To understand how it all fits together and what is under the hood, we talked to Felix Del Barrio, Vice President EMEA Cloud Platform Business Development at the Oracle Cloud Day in Belgium.

Felix Del Barrio – Vice President EMEA Cloud Platform Business Development

The Benefits of an Autonomous Database

Oracle Autonomous Database changes the way the Oracle DBAs function in organizations. The many tedious tasks that DBAs handle will be automated, Oracle says they’ll be able to focus on more value adding tasks like data security, data lifecycle management, data architecture and data modeling.

From an organizational standpoint, using Autonomous Database could reduce the need for human labor on Oracle data management teams, although Oracle says it expects the autonomous software to alter DBA jobs instead of eliminating them outright in most cases. The technology helps in minimising data loss and human error in Oracle databases, while reducing significantly on planned and unplanned downtime.

Oracle Autonomous Database runs on the Exadata hardware platform and can be used either in the Oracle Cloud or via Cloud on premise, a service that deploys systems based on Oracle’s cloud technologies in on-premises data centers.

Learn more about Oracle’s autonomous database

This article is made in collaboration with Oracle