Oracle Corp. today announced the availability of its updated flagship database offering, Oracle Database 21c, on its cloud infrastructure, featuring a raft of additions such as blockchain tables and artificial intelligence features.

The launch of Oracle Database 21c, available today on the Oracle Cloud, comes alongside a new browser-based version of the low-code Oracle APEX Application Development tool that helps companies develop and deploy data-driven applications quickly and easily.

Oracle said one of Oracle Database 21c’s biggest advantages is its converged database engine, which enables it to support multimodel, multiworkload and multitenant requirements. In other words, it can run any kind of workload, anywhere.

Jenny Tsai-Smith, vice-president of database product management at Oracle, told SiliconANGLE this kind of flexibility is necessary for enterprises because they need to move faster than ever before. Digital transformation, she said, requires enterprises to collect and process lots of different types of data and derive insights from that information as quickly as they can.

“Other database platforms from AWS, Microsoft and even Snowflake have siloed, single-purpose databases,” Tsai-Smith said. “But if you need to create modern applications to support relational data, spatial data and support machine learning algorithms, you need to spend more capital and time integrating them. With Oracle Database 21c, customers can have the same database service running on-premises or in the cloud of their choice, thereby eliminating many overheads.”

Oracle said the more than 200 innovations in Oracle Database 21c enable new use cases, optimize its performance for existing use cases and help to improve the productivity of developers, analysts and data scientists alike.

One of the most interesting new innovations is immutable blockchain tables, which bring the security benefits of blockchain to any enterprise app. With immutable blockchain tables, the rows are cryptographically chained together, which makes it virtually impossible for hackers or a malicious employee to tamper with them.

Blockchain can be hard to scale up and hard to operate, Tsai-Smith explained. But with Oracle Database 21c, it can be done with just a single click. Under the covers, she added, it’s insert-only and the row is cryptographically chained to the prior row so it can’t be tampered with.

Oracle Database 21c also adds something called AutoML for In-Database Machine Learning, which makes it easy to build and compare machine learning models at scale, even for people with no experience using them.

“It’s basically a way for us to democratize the use of machine learning algorithms in the database,” Tsai-Smith said. So, for example, a company can take sales history data and figure out who’s most likely to buy something.

For developers, Oracle has introduced In-Database JavaScript, which enables them to work more efficiently in modern programming languages, the company said. The feature makes it possible for JavaScript data processing code to run inside the database, where the data lives, eliminating expensive network round-trips.

Other new features include more automation of the database’s existing in-memory and sharding capabilities, higher performing graph models and support for persistent memory, Oracle said.

Analysts said in prepared remarks that they were impressed with Oracle’s new capabilities. Carl Olofson, research vice president of data management software at International Data Corp. said the new innovations eliminate the need for a lot of specialized and isolated cloud services and tools.

“Users can avoid the compounding of costs and operational complexity that comes with each additional cloud service that organizations ordinarily use,” Olofson said. “In this way, Oracle is effectively slicing away at this disjointed set of services with a simplified, more technically elegant, and integrated approach that is far better suited for the enterprise needs of 2021.”

“This is a refreshing contrast for organizations that leverage the likes of AWS, which has more than a dozen different databases, each requiring customers to deal with different APIs, ETL approaches and data integration processes,” said ESG Principal Analyst and Practice Director Mark Peters.

The new Oracle Database 21c is available today on Oracle’s cloud, with on-premises versions for Linux and Windows and Oracle’s Exadata database appliance set to arrive in the first half of the year.

Low-code update

The new browser-based Oracle APEX Application Development tool, available now, gives organizations an easy way to build data-drive applications that can be tightly integrated with the Oracle database.

Joel Kallman, senior director of software development for APEX, told SiliconANGLE that APEX is a declarative development environment that makes it possible to create new applications between 20 and 40 times faster than can be done with traditional coding.

Low-code development tools enable users to build apps through a simple drag-and-drop user interface, with only minimal amounts of coding required to add customizations. “Coding should be the exception, not the rule,” Kallman said.

Oracle said that it’s possible to build various types of business applications with the new tool, including those that make it possible to maintain, edit and report on data, and also visualize data. The apps are all tightly integrated with Oracle database, enabling a 10-times reduction in round trips, so users will see much faster response times with data-driven applications. All of the apps are written in the SQL language.

“It is a full-stack solution, users don’t need to buy anything else,” Kallman said. “We manage the infrastructure, middle tier, everything.”

Oracle said that developers who are just getting started can use the APEX Application Development Service for free with the Oracle Cloud Free Tier. For enterprises, the service starts at $360 per month with support for up to 500 users and an unlimited number of apps.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: SiliconANGLE