Oracle Corp. has been on something of a roll in 2021. The database giant received a boost from Gartner Inc. just before the start of the new year in a report that ranked the firm high among database management leaders for its ability to leverage on-premises strength in hybrid cloud deployment.

In March, the company made headlines with a well-received string of updates to its Autonomous Data Warehouse offering. The latest releases focused on simpler loads and transforms, autonomous machine learning models and facilitating citizen data science.

“If I’m an analyst, I want data and it’s still hard for me to go and get data from various data sources, transform them, clean them up and get them to a place where I can start querying,” said Andy Mendelsohn (pictured), executive vice president of database server technologies at Oracle. “What we’ve done in the new release is give data scientists and developers a true self-service experience, where they can do their job completely without bringing in any engineers from their IT organization. That’s what this new version is all about.”

Mendelsohn spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio theCUBE. They discussed Oracle’s overall vision for database solutions, providing cloud native elasticity, the firm’s technology under the covers, recent new data management features and how the company has reshaped its offerings for current and potential enterprise customers.

Taking a converged approach

Oracle is basing its appeal to developers and data scientists on a vision for the converged database. Different forms of data demand different kinds of database tools, and Oracle sees its converged solution as providing native support for all modern data types.

“The converged approach is something we’ve been working on for a long time,” Mendelsohn noted. “Why did the smartphone win? It’s just simply much more productive for you to carry one device around that is actually best of breed in all of the different categories instead of lots of separate devices. That’s what we’re doing with converged database.”

With converged, Oracle is also seeking to differentiate itself from other cloud services vendors by providing what it refers to as cloud native instant elasticity. This allows Oracle to offer precise CPU capacity to its customers instead of shaped clusters commonly provided in groups of 16, 32 or 64, according to Mendelsohn.

“That is not a cloud native experience at all; it’s an archaic way of doing things,” Mendelsohn said. “With our instant elasticity we can go from 17 to 18 to 19, whatever you want. Because of that true elasticity, we are really the only ones who can deliver true pay-for-what-you-need capability.”

Power behind the curtain

How does Oracle drive this capability from a technology standpoint? The company has spent years building and refining its Exadata Database Machine, an architecture featuring scale-out database and intelligent storage servers connected through a high-speed internal RDMA network fabric.

“The big secret under the covers is this Exadata technology, our real application cluster scale-out technologies, our multitenant technologies,” Mendelsohn explained. “These are things we’ve been working on for a long time, and they are very mature, very powerful technologies. We can do mixed workloads; we can do transactions and analytics all on the same data.”

Oracle has leveraged its Exadata architecture to introduce a number of new features as part of its Autonomous Data Warehouse. One of these provides access to its APEX low-code development platform for use by developers to build data-driven enterprise applications more rapidly and easily.

“We’ve published a benchmark on our website showing you can get the job done 20 to 40 times faster using a no-code/low-code tool like APEX,” Mendelsohn said. “If you have a bunch of data and you want to get some value out of it, if you want to build dashboards or more sophisticated reports, APEX is an incredible tool for doing that.”

Adding persistent memory

In January, the company also updated a flagship database offering, 21c, which included the addition of blockchain tables and intriguing new support for persistent memory.

“A lot of people haven’t noticed this very interesting technology that Intel shipped a couple of years ago called Optane Data Center Persistent Memory,” Mendelsohn said. “It’s basically a hybrid of flash memory, which is persistent memory and standard DRAM. With persistent memory, you can have a database stored persistently in memory all the time. It’s a very disruptive technology to the database market.”

Behind Oracle’s fast start in 2021 is a clear message that it intends to compete aggressively in creating a powerful, functional platform to view and self-provision data. In doing so, the company is not only carving out its own space versus the competition, but also fashioning a retooled image for itself.

“We’d like the message to get out there that those of you who think you know what Oracle is all about and how it might be to work with Oracle from your on-premises days, you should really check out how Oracle is now on the cloud,” Mendelsohn said. “It’s the same technology that you’re used to, but now it’s delivered in a way that’s much easier to consume at a much lower cost.”

Here’s the complete video interview below, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE