Oracle Corp. is tightening its partnership with Microsoft Corp. with today’s announcement that Oracle’s Autonomous Database is now generally available on the Oracle Database@Azure comingled cloud service.

The Oracle Autonomous Database is a fully automated and managed database-as-a-service. Initially available as a private offer in the Azure East U.S. region with deployment to 14 other regions to follow, the database is managed by Oracle and can exchange data with Microsoft’s applications and infrastructure using the Azure portal, software development kits and application program interfaces.

It lets organizations migrate and run workloads securely between the two cloud services and take advantage of Oracle Real Application Clusters on its Exadata Cloud, which also runs on Oracle Database@Azure.

Filling a gap

The offering “fills a gap” in Microsoft’s managed database portfolio, said Leo Leung, vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and technology. “It’s perfect for customers who don’t have a lot of IT administrators,” he said. “It brings unified or converged database capabilities and can scale down as well as up.” Exadata, which was previously Oracle’s only database offering on Azure, is built for very large databases, making it out of reach for users with more modest capacity needs, Leung said.

“Exadata is for the customer who has expertise with the Oracle database, has a lot of control over infrastructure and can tune queries,” he said. “It scales from 2 ECPUs all the way to very large deployments.” An ECPU is an abstracted measure of compute resources based on the number of cores elastically allocated from a pool of compute and storage servers.

Oracle and Microsoft have been collaborating to improve interoperability between their cloud offerings for nearly five years as each battles a common enemy in Amazon Web Services Inc.

“The cloud has been a walled garden for many years,” Leung said. “There are a lot of limitations in the technologies you can get from a single provider. This is a strategy to break that walled garden approach.”

Full service set

Developers can provision the Autonomous Database running on OCI in Azure data centers and take advantage of the product’s performance, security and high availability, Oracle said. They can also tap into a low-code development platform called Oracle APEX, Oracle’s Data Studio data engineering tools, a machine learning notebook interface and data lakes supporting the Apache Iceberg and Delta Share open data protocols.

The Autonomous Database also supports SQL queries, JavaScript notation documents, and processing of graph, geospatial, text and vector elements. Artificial intelligence developers can tap into a choice of large language models and use integrated vector processing capabilities called AI Vector Search. Cloud instances are consistent with on-premises deployments of Oracle Database and Oracle Exadata.

Autonomous Database pricing on Azure will be the same as on OCI, and customers can apply Azure consumption credits to Oracle services. Leung said Oracle’s Azure roadmap will center on filling in services around Exadata and the Autonomous Database such as automated data protection, replication and automated recovery.

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