Oracle's Globally Distributed Autonomous Database has reached general availability and can help organisations achieve the highest levels of scalability and availability while addressing data sovereignty requirements.
Enterprise database, software, and cloud provider Oracle has announced its Globally Distributed Autonomous Database, powered by AI and ML, is now in general availability.
iTWire has been following the progress of Oracle's autonomous database since it was first announced in 2017. Seven years later, the product has continued to advance, and now provides the highest levels of sharding, data distribution, data placement, replication, and deployment methods with a truly global database option.
What this means in a practical sense is that customers can automatically distribute and store data across the globe in many physical locations, all transparent to applications. Customers can obtain the highest possible levels of scalability and availability, while addressing data sovereignty, and also benefit from the Oracle autonomous technology, allowing the database to self-update, self-heal, self-optimise, and more.
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The full-featured and converged globally distributed autonomous database simplifies the development and use of distributed databases for mission-critical applications by supporting virtually any data type, workload, and programming style at scale. Existing SQL applications can use distributed databases without having to be rewritten. To meet the needs of each application, the Oracle globally distributed autonomous database supports more data distribution, replication, and deployment methods than other distributed databases.
“Organisations with global operations have specific application demands around data sovereignty, scale, and availability that can vary between continents and countries. These demands can be addressed by a mission-critical distributed database architecture capable of supporting global distribution,” said Oracle executive vice president mission-critical database technologies Juan Loaiza. “The new Globally Distributed Autonomous Database meets this need and enables customers to leverage a serverless, elastic, and auto-scale architecture to dramatically lower costs. With its converged database capabilities, our new Globally Distributed Autonomous Database is the simplest, most functional, and most mission-critical distributed database cloud service in the world.”
Distributed databases can be difficult to deploy and manage due to the large number of servers deployed across multiple locations. Globally Distributed Autonomous Database eliminates this complexity by using and extending Autonomous Database’s AI and ML-driven automation with automatic data distribution and shard management. Administrators can manage the distributed database as a single logical database, and use automated provisioning, tuning, scaling, patching, and security capabilities to avoid time-consuming manual tasks and potential errors. In addition, automatic database scaling per individual shard enables customers to ramp up and draw down resources to meet demand and minimise consumption and cost.
Further, with Oracle’s integration of generative AI across its technology stack, developers have access to new tools, including Autonomous Database Select AI, to integrate AI and ML into their applications. Select AI can translate natural language questions in a conversational thread into SQL queries using large language models (LLMs). With Globally Distributed Autonomous Database, the SQL query is automatically routed to the appropriate country or shard to generate the answers. In addition, Oracle Database 23c with Raft quorum-based consensus replication will provide automatic sub-three-second application failover with zero data loss. This and AI Vector Search with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) integration will be available later this year.
“Many database systems feature one or another sharding technique to help users manage a set of data across multiple databases and, in some cases, achieve a distributed database capability. These usually involve placing a heavy burden on application developers to write code that will segregate and orchestrate shard updates in such a way that they avoid conflicting data and illogical data combinations. Oracle’s approach to sharding avoids all that, making application interaction with databases transparent and reliable,” said IDC research vice president data management software Carl Olofson. “In addition, Oracle’s proven RAC clustering technology extended to this distributed database approach enables it to offer a rich variety of data distribution models, replication methods, and shard deployment options that are easy to manage, straightforward to develop against and enable Oracle Database to meet unique customer requirements. Taken together, these capabilities make Oracle a key player in the distributed database category.”
You can try the Oracle Globally Distributed Autonomous Database for free on Oracle Cloud here.