Latest Autonomous Database Innovation Announcements at Oracle CloudWorld

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is dramatically and rapidly changing our everyday lives. Oracle is actively taking its part in its evolution, as you may have seen in several AI-related innovation announcements in recent months, including our close collaboration with NVDIA to run its AI applications on the new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Supercluster and our partnership with Cohere to provide generative AI services. We have just announced our latest Oracle Database and Autonomous Database innovations, including our plan to expand the Oracle Database’s AI capabilities by adding support for AI vector search within the database. For Autonomous Database, we are continuing our key themes to simplify customer innovations and reduce operational costs with several new feature announcements:

• With its new Select AI feature, Autonomous Database now speaks “human” , letting you query your data using natural language. Select AI makes it easy to add natural language capabilities into your database apps
• Developers have a new free and offline app dev option with Autonomous Database Free Container Image, and 
• Organizations save operational costs by consolidating compute resources in Elastic Resource Pools

For many organizations, generative AI can be a groundbreaking capability that holds tremendous opportunities in serving their customers and users because it not only understands the context but also creates something new from the context. Large language models (LLMs) like Cohere can generate creative and informative responses through advanced language processing capabilities, making it a valuable tool in various applications. Today, many organizations are either already using or considering the use of LLMs to offer tools like chatbots, virtual assistants, and customer support systems with which users can ask questions in natural language and get a direct answer instead of searching for the right one.

Autonomous Database Now Speaks Human

These AI-powered applications can be even more impactful if they can tap into the organization’s internal data, which can provide additional and valuable insights to the users. For example, what if a product manager wants to see whether the latest bookings are close to quarterly targets? Or, what if a salesperson out on a trip wants to simply talk to her sales app through the phone to ask about the latest inventory availability for an important customer in her territory? Wouldn’t it be great if users could ask any questions in natural language using any device and quickly get the answer? 

So, to answer those “what-ifs,” we’ve made Autonomous Database speak “human.” We are announcing a new generative AI-driven capability, Autonomous Database Select AI, that enables your users to interact with your data using natural language while making it simple for the developers to implement data-centric natural language apps. Autonomous Database Select AI allows database users and applications to ask their natural language queries directly within a SQL statement (for example, SELECT AI what were my top selling products last year so that every SQL application can immediately leverage natural language - no new APIs or database clients required. It taps into best-of-breed LLMs to generate SQL queries to Autonomous Database based on natural language questions. Your users can now ask questions even if they do not know the underlying data structures or the SQL language, and your developers can create new apps or extend existing apps that marry the benefits of generative AI technology with insights into your organization’s data.

Developers Can Now Build Apps on Autonomous Database—Without the Cloud

In addition to existing Oracle Autonomous Database Always Free services on Oracle’s public cloud, we are announcing a new developer-friendly, free offline deployment option – Autonomous Database Free Container Image. This new option gives developers an end-to-end Autonomous Database environment, including converged database capabilities like machine learning, graph, and spatial; built-in tools like SQL Worksheet, Data Studio and APEX; and developer APIs, including Oracle Database API for MongoDB—all in a downloadable container image. You can now develop apps with a cloud-native database service without being connected to the cloud and upload when finished. This Container Image should be every developer’s starting point when building a new cloud-native database application for OCI. 

Jump into the Pool and Reduce Your Costs 

Do you have databases with varying workloads and resource requirements? Have you ever wondered how you could save costs if some of those databases were idle while others were busy? Elastic Resource Pools bring the cost-saving benefits of database consolidation to Autonomous Database. When you group your databases into an Elastic Resource Pool, you will be billed for the total consumption of the pool, rather than billed for each database independently. The pool can scale up when the overall workload of all databases increases to meet peak demands, but each database maintains its own characteristics for network configuration, disaster recovery, and peak resource utilization. With Elastic Resource Pools, you can save up to 87% of their compute costs versus paying for each database individually. 

Summary

This was just a quick summary of what’s new in Autonomous Database. We hope you attend DatabaseWorld at CloudWorld, either in person or virtually. If you are in Las Vegas, come see us at the learning sessions, hands-on labs, and our demo booth to learn and experience the latest in Autonomous Database. 

We also invite you to learn more about the latest Autonomous Database enhancements by visiting these resources:

Blogs:

• Autonomous Database Now Speaks Human
• Introducing Natural Language to SQL Generation on Autonomous Database
• Introducing Autonomous Database Free Container Image 
• How to Save Cost While Achieving High Consolidation Density with Elastic Resource Pools on Autonomous Database 
• Oracle Database 23c: The Next Long Term Support Release

LiveLabs:

• Chat with your data in Autonomous Database using generative AI