Announcing the New Developer Options for Autonomous Database

September 10, 2024 | 4 minute read
Marcos Arancibia
Senior Principal Product Manager, Autonomous Database
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To build a great application, developers need an environment where they can freely develop and test new innovations without lots of constraints while keeping an eye on the development costs. Earlier this year, Oracle started supporting Oracle Database 23ai on our two free offerings of Autonomous Database – Autonomous Database on Oracle Free Tier and Autonomous Database Free Container Image – so that developers can experience and experiment with our latest AI-focused features.

 

We are now expanding our development-focused offerings with two new low-cost development options – Autonomous Database for Developers and Autonomous Database for Developers - Container Image. These two offerings make it simple and affordable for anyone to develop and test their application on Autonomous Database

Introducing Autonomous Database for Developers

 

Oracle is introducing Autonomous Database for Developers, a new offering that provides a simple and cost effective environment for customers to develop and test their applications, either as a proof of concept or before deploying their databases to a full a production environment. Similar to Always Free databases, Developer databases are small, fixed-shape databases that are ideal for development and test.  Unlike Always Free which have limit of 2 instances (since they are in fact totally free), users may create as many Developer database instances as needed for their projects in any OCI region.  With a flat hourly rate that comes out to less than $30 per month, this makes Autonomous Database an affordable option to get started with a database in the cloud. Despite its low cost, you have access to Autonomous Database features and built-in tools that can help your innovations, such as:

  • Build AI-powered applications with Autonomous Database Select AI and AI Vector Search,
  • Build sophisticated apps with low code APEX,
  • Access, integrate, prep data with Data Studio,
  • Build machine learning models with Oracle Machine Learning,
  • Create interactive maps with Spatial Studio or create SQL property graph models with Graph Studio,
  • …and a lot more!

 

For more information, see our product documentation. 

Introducing Autonomous Database for Developers - Container Image

 

Oracle is also introducing the new Autonomous Database for Developers - Container Image, which includes the ability to work offline for development and testing, simply clone, then easily deploy the instance in the Cloud. This new service is a new container image of Autonomous Database with the same fixed-shape flat-hourly rate as Autonomous Database for Developers. It contains everything you get in the Autonomous Database for Developers instance but packaged as a container image for offline development.  The container image enables organizations to use their critical applications supported by Autonomous Database anywhere and anytime without being online and clone or refresh your data to an instance on OCI later when it is ready to deploy in the cloud.

 

Benefits for Developers

This low-cost offering allows developers to create as many Autonomous Database Serverless container images as is required (with your preferred workload type - Data Warehousing, Transaction Processing, JSON database, or APEX service) and has most of the capabilities offered in a paid instance of Autonomous Database in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure:

  • Use the built-in tools such as SQL Developer Web, APEX, and Data Studio.
  • Access external data sources via DBMS_CLOUD.
  • Call web services via UTL_HTTP or send emails via UTL_SMTP.
  • Create database links.
  • Use JAVA and many more.

 

An important feature that makes this offering unique is that you may run Autonomous Database for Developers in container images on your preferred machine or VM registered in OCI and simply clone (or refresh, with a refreshable clone) your image to Autonomous Database in the cloud.

 

Some of the reasons why this new service is a great fit for you and your developer organization are:

  • For existing customers, it will enable the provisioning of an Autonomous Database Serverless environment for developers on the go that is still registered and easily controlled via OCI’s control plane.  The Autonomous Database for Developers - Container Image lets you develop and test offline – So wherever you go, you can access the local image of the Autonomous Database instance on your laptop even without internet connectivity.
  • Spinning up a Developer Container Image takes only a few minutes, just like provisioning an Autonomous Database Serverless instance on Oracle Cloud.

 

Benefits for Administrators

Because the container images are registered with the OCI Control Plane, the administrator can perform Life Cycle Management (LCM) operations – including starting, stopping, restarting, cloning, creating refreshable clones, and refreshing them, among other tasks. This helps the administrator keep control of these special developer container images as they pertain to specific projects with a requirement to go offline when needed. From the development perspective, the fixed-shape and low-cost, flat hourly rate billed at the instance level makes it cost-effective for deployments with developer teams that require the ability to work offline.

 

In conclusion

Both new offerings provide the versatile capabilities of Autonomous Database with cost savings through a fixed shape and flat hourly rate.  The introduction of the Autonomous Database for Developers brings the flexibility to spin-up and shutdown developer-oriented environments with fully-managed databases and a complete suite of built-in tools, with a direct upgrade path to production when needed.   Autonomous Database for Developers - Container Image provides the flexibility, efficiency, and accessibility of a container image with the Autonomous Database capabilities in offline and online mode, which makes this image a great choice for modern software development.  

 

Autonomous Database for Developers is available today and can be provisioned from the OCI console or any of the APIs, and Autonomous Database for Developers - Container Image will be available soon. Stay tuned for the additional announcement blog!

Marcos Arancibia

Senior Principal Product Manager, Autonomous Database

Marcos Arancibia is a Senior Principal Product Manager for Oracle Autonomous Database, with focus on outbound activities. He is charted with developing a comprehensive platform for enabling all customers and use cases to migrate to Autonomous Database, and attract new developers and customers to bring their Applications and workloads to the Oracle Autonomous Database. Before joining Oracle in 2010 he spent 13 years at SAS Institute Inc., from Country Manager in LAD to Regional Data Mining lead in the US. He holds a bachelor's degree with additional courses in the master's degree, both in Statistics from UNICAMP in Brazil. He has Certifications from Stanford on AI and Machine Learning, and from the University of Washington on Computational Neuroscience.

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