Oracle unveils 18c: While the news had already been spilled by Oracle chairman Larry Ellison a few weeks ago, in a keynote at the start of the massive OpenWorld conference he gave more details on the company's Autonomous Database Cloud, which he termd "the most important thing we've done in a long, long time." Here are the details from Oracle's official annoucement:
The Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud eliminates the human labor associated with tuning, patching, updating and maintaining the database and includes the following capabilities:
Self-Driving: Provides continuous adaptive performance tuning based on machine learning. Automatically upgrades and patches itself while running. Automatically applies security updates while running to protect against cyberattacks.
Self-Scaling: Instantly resizes compute and storage without downtime. Cost savings are multiplied because Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud consumes less compute and storage than Amazon, with lower manual administration costs.
Self-Repairing: Provides automated protection from downtime. SLA guarantees 99.995 percent reliability and availability, which reduces costly planned and unplanned downtime to less than 30-minutes per year.
POV: Autonomous Database Cloud is based on version 18c of Oracle's database. Initially, Oracle will deliver data warehousing capabilities in December. Support for OLTP (online transaction processing) workloads arrives in June 2018. It last delivered a major update to the database in 2016, with release 12.2. Oracle notably went "cloud-first" with that release, providing an on-premises version some time later. With 18c, it has changed the naming convention of the database to reflect the year of release.
During his keynote, Ellison unsurprisingly targeted Amazon Web Services, even conducting a number of demos to show 18c's superiority to AWS's Redshift database. He also pledged that Oracle will beat AWS on database pricing by 50 percent, and will put it in writing.
Oracle's business is built on the database at its core, and hence there is no bigger cloud migration target than on-premises database workloads. Ellison's intent is clear: Keep Oracle database customers in the proverbial family lest they be tempted to migrate to cloud rivals for reasons such as cost savings or flexibility.
The question is whether Oracle can truly deliver what Ellison promises. It will be the better part of a year before all of 18c's capabilities are available, and that's assuming Oracle meets its delivery target dates. As seen with the likes of Fusion Applications, it isn't always successful in doing so.
But there's definitely fire behind the gunsmoke from Ellison's keynote. "I'm sure machine learning-based automation is driving huge efficiencies in deployment and administration, as well as gains in performance based on automated optimization," says Constellation VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "The gains in data warehousing performance are also tied to improvements in the column store and query optimization."
However, as for those Oracle database on AWS vs. Oracle database in Oracle's cloud, one must remember that that's running Oracle's database on Exadata machines, versus running on generic servers, Henschen notes. "That's going to make a huge difference in query performance even without any benefits from Autonomous."
The same goes for Oracle's database on Oracle Cloud versus Redshift, which is a distributed database, but the work done at the storage tier in Exadata greatly reduces query loads before they even get to query optimiztion."
Autonomous Database Cloud will require an Oracle Cloud at Customer engagement, where machines are located in customers' data centers but run in autonomous fashion by Oracle remotely.
Traditional Oracle database administrators may have cause for concern over the future of their jobs in an Autonomous Database Cloud world. Fear not, Ellison said. Rather, the new product will free up DBAs to work on concerns such as schema development, analytics and security, he argued. Considering that some automation features have been part of the Oracle database product for years, that makes sense on paper. But assuming Autonomous Database Cloud delivers to the extent Ellison says it will, Oracle IT shops should start their skills assessments sooner than later.
Harvard, MIT researchers develop "smart" tattoo tech: Taking the concept of wearables to an uncharted place, scientists at Harvard and MIT have developed a special tattoo ink that can be used to monitor bodily conditions, such as blood pressure and glucose levels. Here's how the ink, dubbed d-abyss, works, as described in the researchers' formal paper:
[C]an traditional body modification techniques embrace technology and can the skin reveal changes inside the body? We present an approach to answer this challenge through tattooing optical biosensors into the skin that can react with changes in the interstitial fluid. Chemical biosensors detect changes in physical parameters and biomarker concentrations in the human body for monitoring of health status.
Recent advances in biosensors have focused on wearable devices. Wearable biosensors offer safety, ease of development, comfort, and maintenance, but suffer from a lack of direct access to the compartments in the body containing the relevant biomarkers. D-abyss has the access of an implantable biosensor but the interactivity of a wearable device.
POV: The researchers expect that over time, biotech companies and "skin professionals"—tattoo artists—willl work together "in order to embrace the idea of human-device symbiosis."
They have gotten ahead of some of the most obvious questions, as well. For one, tattoos could be made with inks that are permanent as well as temporary ones, mitigating the all-too-common bugbar of tattoo regret. As for patient privacy, the tattoos could use inks that are only visible under certain types of light.
Bank of America chooses Azure for digitial transformation: Microsoft Azure just got a big customer win, with Bank of America choosing Redmond's cloud for ongoing digital transformation efforts. Here's how the companies termed the deal in a press release:
Bank of America will take advantage of the combined power of the Microsoft Cloud for business transformation. Microsoft Office 365 will provide modern, cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools to some of the bank's 200,000 employees. The firm will also utilize Microsoft Azure, capitalizing on the scale, economics and intelligent capabilities of the platform and services.
"We are aggressively modernizing our technology infrastructure to enable current and future growth across all our lines of business," said Howard Boville, chief technology officer at Bank of America. "Our agreement with Microsoft aligns to our target of delivering 80 percent of our technology workloads on virtual platforms within the next several years, further establishing Bank of America as a digital leader in financial services."
POV: Microsoft won the deal with the help of its Financial Services Compliance Program, which gives institutions and regulators the ability to peer into its cloud operations for proof it has mitigated risk. Bank of America has been working on a massive, cloud-oriented IT overhaul over the past couple of years, including a steep reduction in the number of data centers it operates from more than 60 to eight.
For its part, Microsoft says more than 80 percent of the world's largest banks are already using Azure. Nonetheless, getting the Bank of America logo on Azure's NASCAR slide can't hurt at all.