… what does it mean.
This evening in a happen chance meeting, a gentleman (let’s call him X for the sake of his privacy) struck up a conversation around all things IT when databases were mentioned and the grand-daddy of them all – Oracle. While I was struck that this engineer didn’t know who Mark Shuttleworth was (the South African billionaire who created Ubuntu that’s been critical of Oracle’s undermining of the open source community), he clearly knew what he was talking about and the current direction of data and data manipulation. We casually chatted, in what would be ad nauseum to my non-IT friends, about SaaS, SQL, Microsofts’ influences, and the latest and greatest idea that databases could manage and heal themselves. Was I hearing him right? A database that makes decisions on its own? Have Sophia, Han and their Facebook associates gone into business (if you don’t know who Sophia is, you really have to catch up in the world of AI, and if you haven’t heard the Facebook AI story – if true, prepare to be afraid … very afraid)?
As Oracle answers the question,
“Oracle redefines data management with the world’s first autonomous database. Autonomous Database eliminates complexity, human error, and manual management, helping to ensure higher reliability, security, and more operational efficiency at the lowest cost.”
As a CIO this might be a dream come true … but what about the Database Administrator? Personally I would hope the role would be retained, merely the details of the job description refined.
Oh my. In this single statement Oracle has answered the who, what, when and why. Sounds as if Alice is going down the yellow brick road again, except this time she is going to encounter the Terminator. Skynet is here, AI is advancing, Quantum computing is an entangled moment away. Let’s see if we can hypothesize an outcome based on our observations and questions. Check out the webcast and other resources at Oracle on their Autonomous Database. Should be some pretty exciting stuff for database administrators. Run John Connor run!
Checkout Oracle’s website for the real scoop and more details than I could even begin to do justice to. I wonder what Amazon’s AWS response will be?
