Larry Ellison teases Oracle's 'self-driving' database: Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison has spilled the beans on the company's big news announcement for OpenWorld, and it's all about the database. Here's what Ellison told analysts this week during Oracle's first-quarter earnings call:
On October 1 at Oracle OpenWorld, we'll announce the next generation of the Oracle database. When we deliver it by the end of this calendar year Oracle will become the world's first fully autonomous database. Based on machine learning, this new version of Oracle is totally automated self-driving system that does not require a human being either to manage the database or tune the database.
Using artificial intelligence to eliminate most sources of human error enables Oracle to deliver unprecedented reliability in the Cloud. We will be offering public Cloud SLAs, service level agreements for the Oracle database that guarantee 99.995% systems availability time. 99.995% availability means less than 30 minutes of planned or unplanned downtime per year.
A self-driving database eliminates the labor cost of tuning, managing, and upgrading the database, plus avoiding all of the costly downtime associated with human error. ... Running Oracle's autonomous database is much, much cheaper than running traditional human-driven databases like Amazon's Redshift.
Ellison pledged that customers who move from Amazon Web Services' Redshift database service can cut their costs by at least half. Moreover, Oracle will provide SLAs guaranteeing those cost savings to customers who make the switch, he said.
POV: It was a characterially aggressive announcement and set of pledges from Ellison, who has taken to name-checking AWS regularly as Oracle tries to catch up in IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service).
While Oracle may never accomplish those goals, it is telling that Ellison framed the upcoming database service as a migration story. There are a great many on-premises Oracle database workloads that the company would like to see running on its cloud, not Amazon's or others, even as it offers support for doing so.
Ellison left a number of crucial questions unanswered, in particular with regard to pricing. It's unclear how Oracle will undercut AWS so dramatically on cost while introducing a new feature set that one might presume is a premium add-on. It could be that Oracle will include the new automation capabilities as part of its baseline database service; answers should arise at OpenWorld.
Then there is the matter of what Oracle means by database automation, as Oracle has had automation features for tasks such as patching and testing for some time. "Perhaps they're bringing it to the next level, but I'm not sure how they get off calling it 'AI' or 'self-driving,'" says Constellation VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "I'll have to wait to see exactly what they're talking about. I'd be wary of AI-washing of what is really machine learning and automation trained on the very confined domain of database administration."
The cloud plays into the upcoming service's extremely high SLA as well. "It's not hard for Larry to promise something better than what most companies can achieve on-premises with Oracle's database or Exadata," Henschen says. "When you're doing a DBaaS for thousands or tens of thousands of customers, the administrative and workload patterns become really clear and can be automated. No one customer can amass that sort of data and metadata."