Oracle Corp. is expanding its autonomous database lineup with the release of the Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database.

Announced Tuesday, the new database is being offered as a fully managed service that’s optimized for NoSQL applications that demand lower latency, data model flexibility and elastic scaling, the company said. Those kinds of applications include advertising, gaming, online fraud detection and shopping carts.

NoSQL databases are designed to accommodate a wide variety of data models, including key-value, document, columnar and graph formats. NoSQL, which actually stands for “not only SQL,” is an alternative to traditional relational databases in which data is placed in tables and data schema is carefully designed before the database is built. NoSQL databases are especially useful for working with large sets of distributed data.

The autonomous capabilities of Oracle’s new NoSQL database means developers can simply specify the capacity and throughput they need to provision, and see resources allocated and scaled automatically in order to meet their workload requirements.

Oracle announced its first autonomous database offering, the 18c Autonomous Database, last year, describing it as a “self-driving” database that’s able to handle tasks such as updates and software patches automatically to reduce the high cost of human labor. That database, which can be provisioned, do upgrades and fine tuning and patch itself while running, was initially made available for data warehousing tasks and later for online transaction processing.

Oracle Corp. Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison (pictured) has previously said the company’s autonomous databases are “the most important thing we have ever done,” critical to its plans to take on public cloud computing leader Amazon Web Services Inc.

So it’s no surprise the company is launching an autonomous NoSQL database to take on Amazon’s DynamoDB database, which is a similar product. It’s also not surprising that Oracle said its product is superior, with claims that the Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database costs 70 percent less than DynamoDB for read-only workloads and provides greater reliability than its rival.

“NoSQL remains the database of choice powering next-generation applications in the enterprise, so for Oracle to extend its self driving capabilities to its new NoSQL offering is key step for CxOs looking at deployment options,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. “As with all new offerings, it’s good to see them coming out of the gate, but they need to be validated by early adopters. Still, the autonomous capabilities of the Oracle stack remain a very interesting quality for CxOs”

The Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database boasts a full range of functionality, including support for key value application programming interfaces and command line interfaces. It can also handle flexible data models for data representation and provides a standard SQL language to provide interoperability for relational and JSON data models.

“We continue to leverage our revolutionary autonomous capabilities to transform the database market,” said Andrew Mendelsohn, executive vice president of Oracle Database. “Our latest self-driving database cloud service, Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database, provides extreme reliability and performance at very low costs to achieve a highly flexible application development framework.”

Photo: Oracle