Building upon the next generation of the industry-leading database Oracle Database 18c, Oracle recently introduced the world’s first autonomous database cloud. Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud is supposed to eliminate complexity, human error, and manual management, helping to ensure higher reliability, security, and more operational efficiency at the lowest cost.

Does it? At what expense?

The autonomous database cloud is being sold with a promise it integrates adaptive machine learning to deliver self-driving, self-tuning, self-recovering, and self-scaling administration—without human intervention—resulting in streamlined operations, more efficient consumption of resources, and higher security and reliability. With built-in automation at all levels it could perform maintenance tasks. With companies could now use their valuable IT resources to focus on extracting more value from the data they currently manage to directly influence business opportunities and outcomes.

Big promises. Bold vision.

Quotes from Larry Ellison’s Keynote Presentation

• “Companies are losing the cyber war. And it gets worse every year. Companies have to defend themselves against nation-states who are stealing their data, and very sophisticated cyber criminals who are stealing their data.”
• “We have to reprioritize and re-think about how we defend our information. We need new systems. It can’t be our people versus their computers. We’re going to lose that war. It’s got to be our computers versus their computers. And make no mistake: it’s a war.”
• “The way to secure our data, the way to prevent data theft is more automation. And we need a cyber defense system that automatically detects vulnerabilities and attacks.”
• “And these two systems, the Oracle Autonomous Database and our highly, highly automated cyber defense systems are designed to stop data theft.”
• “The Autonomous Database and our automated security system, is based on a new technology called machine learning. Machine learning is the most important new technology to show up for a long time. It looks at all of these logons with all the IP addresses and URLs, distinguishes normal behavior from abnormal, risky behavior.”
• “The database automatically provisions itself, upgrades itself, patches itself, backs itself up, and tunes itself while running. And because there is no human intervention, there is no human error.”
• “The Oracle Management Cloud has a unified data architecture. Manage anyone’s technology — on-premise, other clouds, our cloud, no integration required. We engineered all of these pieces to fit together. We unify the data, we analyze the data, we detect the anomalies and we automatically remediate it. It’s one system. And it’s relatively easy to use, much easier to use than the other systems.”
• “It is not simply an analytical system, like Splunk. It is a security monitoring and management system designed to detect and remediate the problem.”