Oracle Corp. Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison has repeatedly called the firm’s new Autonomous Database “the most important thing we have ever done,” and today he announced it’s finally available for use in on-premises transaction processing environments.

In an hourlong presentation punctuated by frequent jabs at competitor Amazon Web Services Inc., Ellison (pictured) said version 18c of the Autonomous Database for Transaction Processing can now handle the full range of customer workloads, ranging from batch processes to streaming analytics. Billed as the world’s first self-securing, self-repairing and self-managing database cloud service, the product was released as a cloud service in March and is now being brought on-premises, fulfilling promises the company made in February.

Set it and forget it

Oracle claims the new release uses machine learning to fully automate everything from installation to production and performance tuning. “Everything — infrastructure, database and the data center — is automated; there’s nothing to learn and there’s nothing to do,” Ellison said. “We’re as simple as the simplest databases on the planet,” he added in reference to NoSQL engines, which are popular for their ease of use.

But simplicity doesn’t come at the expense of performance, Ellison claimed. He cited benchmarks showing that Oracle 18c is 12 times as fast as Amazon’s Aurora in typical scenarios and up to 100 times as fast as its competitor when running mixed workloads. Using dynamic resource allocation, the database engine can start and stop servers to support variable workloads, which reduces infrastructure costs.

The same dynamic management capabilities also provide automatic fail-over to secondary and tertiary servers running in a scale-out configuration. “There are no single points of failure, so we can even tolerate network and server losses without downtime,” he said. Oracle is offering a guarantee of less than 2.5 minutes per month of downtime as well as an unusual performance guarantee that gives customers credits if database speeds fall below a given threshold.

The Autonomous Database is a return to basics for Oracle, which got a late start in cloud computing and has been fighting a two-front war against cloud-based databases from competitors such as Amazon and Snowflake Computing Inc. as well as open-source NoSQL alternatives like MongoDB and Cassandra.

Amazon Web Services Chief Executive Andy Jassy tweeted late last year that his company has completed 50,000 customer database migrations, mostly from Oracle. Big data companies such as Hortonworks Inc. and Cloudera Inc. have also said publicly that customer momentum is moving strongly toward cloud deployment, a view that has been largely validated by analysts. Meanwhile, Oracle’s own cloud journey has been stuck in low gear, with growth rates lagging far behind those of much larger competitors.

Too little, too late?

The autonomous features should help stem database customer defections, but migrations away from Oracle aren’t the company’s biggest problem, said Peter Burris, chief research officer and general manager of Wikibon, a sister company of SiliconANGLE.

“Moving a database is really, really hard,” he said. The new features “give cover to enterprise developers and partners that like working with Oracle tooling, but won’t stem interest in Redshift, Aurora, [Microsoft Corp.’s] Azure SQL Database or Google’s [Cloud] Spanner.”

Oracle is hoping that a revitalized database offering will keep customer in the fold as they move to the cloud. Ellison emphasized lower cost of ownership enabled by self-tuning capabilities that competitors don’t have. He also touted security features that automatically detect intrusions and apply patches without downtime, a feature Amazon lacks, he said.

Customers can also move to the Oracle cloud without buying any new database licenses. “You continue to pay support, but those licenses are now in the cloud,” he said. “All you pay for is the infrastructure you use.”

Burris said the move is good defensively and a boost for current customers, which should see lower costs. “But my guess is that this probably isn’t going to cause AWS, Azure or Google any severe nightmares,” he added.

A panel of four customers validated Ellison’s claims about 18c’s performance and simplicity. “We were able to deploy very, very quickly, in a matter of minutes,” said Marc Caruso, chief technology officer of the application practice at Data Intensity LLC, a provider of analytics, business intelligence, and managed and cloud services. “The migration was planned for a few weeks but it only took a couple of days.”

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE