Autonomous in the Mix

As autonomous databases become part of large database estates, monitor and manage them with Oracle Enterprise Manager.

By Jeff Erickson

July/August 2019

At a recent Customer Advisory Board meeting on the Oracle headquarters campus, product managers listened to power users of Oracle Enterprise Manager as they shared their complex use cases and reacted to product roadmaps for Oracle’s flagship IT monitoring and management tool.

One thing those product managers heard loud and clear was that customers want to leverage Oracle Autonomous Database as part of their broader database fleets and that they’re looking to Oracle Enterprise Manager to make things work seamlessly.

“Autonomous is a good solution for us, because it allows us to have power on demand,” says Marco Bettini, of Italy’s Bridge Consulting, which manages IT for several of the world’s most renowned Italian fashion brands and retailers. When those customers offer promotions, “we need to scale up quickly and offer them performance when they need it,” says Bettini. “When they’re not, autonomous allows us to scale down and save them money.”

Another potential benefit of Oracle Autonomous Database, says Bettini, a Bridge Consulting founding partner, is that the data experts on staff can work less on managing database instances and spend more time working to improve their clients’ applications.

Bridge Consulting chose Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse as its first foray into autonomous databases to bring analytics workloads online quickly. Bridge plans to follow with Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing for testing and development and eventually for mission-critical workloads, says Bettini. “We can start creating autonomous databases and aligning them with our on-premises ones, using a tool [to replicate and integrate transactional data] like Oracle GoldenGate,” he says.

What the consultants at Bridge really want is complete integration between Oracle Enterprise Manager and the autonomous databases, adds Simone Traversari, a solution architect and engineered systems specialist at the company. “We use Oracle Enterprise Manager to monitor the customer’s architecture and report on the system performance and uptime and available space and query speed.” With autonomous databases, “we want to be able to see what’s going on. We want to be able to see inside the resource manager and report to our clients” with the same level of detail they are used to getting from Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Oracle product managers at the Customer Advisory Board meeting were happy to report that the recent Oracle Enterprise Manager release, Oracle Enterprise Manager 13.3 PG, is designed to give users such as Traversari a dashboard for his database fleet, including on-premises, cloud, and autonomous databases. Bridge Consulting and other customers got more good news on advanced management capabilities for Oracle Database 19c, Oracle Exadata X7/X8, and Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance.

Bettini and Traversari are looking forward to the new release to help meet expectations: “Our customers don’t see our work, so they don’t care about automatic indexing or patching. They just expect that everything works fine,” Bettini says. “We know how to give that to them with Oracle Enterprise Manager.” Happily, that will continue as Bridge Consulting brings more autonomous databases into the mix.

Next Steps

READ “The Dashboard for the Modern Database Fleet.”

WATCH the “Introducing the Dashboard for the Modern Database Fleet” webcast.

GET Oracle Enterprise Manager as an app on Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

Illustration by Wes Rowell