The release by Oracle of its AI-powered Autonomous Database Cloud earlier this year and just adding Transactional Processing to its abilities last week is huge for Oracle and its customers who need this cutting edge technology. Oracle considers the Autonomous Cloud a generational release because it literally is the first database in the world that can build itself and update itself without human help.

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd recently spoke to CNBC’s “Squawk Alley” about it:

Oracle Autonomous Database Is a Generational Release

Probably our most important generational database release is the Autonomous Database. This is where the database is integrated with AI and machine learning that really just self-patches and self-tunes. It actually creates a position where your security issues go down, you get higher uptime, and you pay less money. We really never in our history had a database release that had as many positive business outcomes as opposed to just technology.

This is a place where you get better performance, more uptime and you will eliminate tons of labor. Most of our customers, for example, I know this has become a bigger issue with C-Suites now where the amount of time it actually takes to patch software can be months for most of our customers.

This release of the Autonomous Database literally eliminates that need to patch. This is a generational release for us as we bring it to market.

Oracle BYOL Explained

Let me explain BYOL (Bring Your Own License). That is simply where you can buy a license and you can use it on-premise or in the cloud, so it’s basically a currency that you can move across platforms. We’re one of the very few companies that allow you to do that, so we believe it’s an advantage for our customers and what they want and that’s why we utilize that strategy.

Second,  I think you need to divide up what’s happening in the applications market versus what’s happening in the infrastructure and platform market. In the applications market, there’s an opportunity now for most companies to modernize all of their systems.

ERP is Moving to the Cloud

Let’s start with the back office systems, the biggest category of back-office applications is called ERP. ERP is basically companies financial supply chain manufacturing systems, etc.

All of those are really going to get replaced over the next several years as companies move to the cloud where there are much more innovation and much more work done by somebody else as opposed to by the customer. We’re in the very early innings of that market.

Oracles Technology is a Competitor Differentiator 

We have a significant lead technology wise in ERP and we went through a ton of customer wins in the quarter. That market is going to over the next several years be very exciting. The technology infrastructure market, that’s as you move further up the stack, meaning from compute and storage to database to other tools and systems, Oracle gets more differentiated from competition the further you move up the stack.

Just replacing somebody’s computer with somebody’s infrastructure, while that’s interesting, the more technology you have and the more IP differentiates Oracle. Oracle has always been differentiated by doing the hardest jobs the best, by investing in R&D and investing in innovation.

Oracle Autonomous Database for Transactional Processing Announced

Larry Ellison, Oracle Co-Founder, CTO, and Executive Chairman, made the announcement:

We’re announcing the immediate availability of the Oracle Autonomous Database transactional processing. Now the machine learning based technology not only can optimize itself for queries for database warehouses and Data Marts, but it also optimizes itself for transactions.

It can run batch programs, reporting, Internet of Things, simple transactions, complex transactions, and mixed workloads. Between these two systems, the system that is optimized for data warehousing and the system that’s optimized for transaction processing, the Oracle Autonomous Database now handles all of your workloads. All of them.

Larry Ellison also recently gave his take on the Autonomous Database Cloud:

The cool thing about the Autonomous Database Cloud is because it is autonomous the database is fully automated.  Human Beings don’t create the database, the database creates itself. Human Beings don’t tune the database, the database tunes itself.