Oracle Corp. early today debuted a new version of its Autonomous Data Warehouse platform that promises to simplify enterprise analytics projects, as well as reduce costs.

Companies use the Autonomous Data Warehouse to analyze their business information for useful insights. According to Oracle, the platform lends itself to tasks such as tracking subsidiaries’ financial performance and mapping out customer buying preferences. It also provides features for running machine learning models.

Oracle delivers the Autonomous Data Warehouse as a managed service. Customers don’t have to invest resources in maintenance tasks such as downloading security patches and provisioning infrastructure. The platform uses machine learning to perform some administrative chores automatically.

The new version of the Autonomous Data Warehouse that debuted today introduces an expanded set of analytics features. Most of the feature additions focus on making the platform work better with popular open-source and commercial analytics tools.

As part of the update, the Autonomous Data Warehouse is receiving support for an open-source technology called Delta Sharing. The technology, which was released by Databricks Inc. in 2021, makes it easier to move data between different analytics applications. It’s supported by Databricks’ namesake analytics platform, the Power BI business intelligence tool from Microsoft Corp. and several other products.

The ability to move data easily between applications can be useful in multiple situations.

Typically, enterprises store their business information in not one but multiple systems. Delta Sharing enables the Autonomous Data Warehouse to more easily ingest and analyze information kept in other systems. The technology also simplifies the task of sharing data between different companies, which is necessary for certain types of joint analytics initiatives.

“Customers face many obstacles when analyzing siloed data across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS applications, especially the lack of multicloud and data lake interoperability,” said Çetin Özbütün, Oracle’s executive vice president of data warehouse and autonomous database technologies. “The latest Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse innovations make it easier for customers to query, manage, share, and scale their data — regardless of location.”

The latest version of Autonomous Data Warehouse also adds support for Apache Iceberg. It’s an open-source tool that companies use to organize information into tables, or collections of rows and columns. Tables are in certain respects easier to process than other types of files, which simplifies analysis.

Alongside the support for Delta Sharing and Iceberg, Autonomous Data Warehouse is receiving new integrations with two commercial analytics products. 

The first product is Google Sheets, the spreadsheet editor built into Google Workspace. It not only allows users to organize data into rows and columns but also offers several built-in analytics features. According to Oracle, a newly introduced add-on will enable customers to analyze information stored in the Autonomous Data Warehouse through the Google Sheets interface.

The company is also updating the data warehouse with improved support for AWS Glue. It’s an Amazon Web Services Inc. service that helps companies more quickly prepare their business data for analysis. Using Glue, an analytics team can combine business records from multiple sources, remove duplicate items and perform related tasks.

Oracle is rolling out the new features alongside a price reduction. According to the company, the cost of the Exadata storage infrastructure that customers use to power their Autonomous Data Warehouse deployments is now 75% lower. It says the move brings pricing in line with object storage infrastructure, which is hardware used to store unstructured data.

Photo: Oracle