Oracle brings Autonomous Database to Microsoft Azure

Oracle is announcing that its Autonomous Database is now generally available on Microsoft Azure. This is another step by the company to break down the “walled garden of different cloud providers.” It’s the second Oracle Database to run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and is initially available on Microsoft Azure’s East U.S. region through Oracle Database@Azure program. There are plans to eventually expand into more data centers in 2024. The technology enables organizations to speed up app development and migrate their on-premises workloads and infrastructure to the cloud.

With the Microsoft Azure integration, companies using this managed equivalent of Oracle Database will also benefit from having access to the Azure portal and relevant APIs. It’s powered using Real Application Clusters that run on Oracle’s Exadata Cloud Infrastructure, so workloads are secure, scalable and high-performing. They receive all the capabilities but don’t have to deal with any upkeep.

Another advantage is that Oracle Autonomous Database requires fewer resources, making it accessible to more businesses. The lowest entry point uses two ECPUs or two cores of computing, so it’s affordable for small and mid-size companies. It can also process different types of data, including tabular relational data, documents and vectorized data which is useful when dabbling with AI.

“There’s a lot of interest in enterprises to take advantage of this type of technology that is intrinsically part of this offering,” Leo Leung, Oracle’s vice president of products and strategy, tells VentureBeat. “And it has additional built-in tools for low-code application development, data modeling, and data processing for analytics. Tons of rich capabilities, as you might expect, out of a database that’s been developed for several decades.”

Here’s a list of benefits customers receive through this Oracle-Microsoft integration:

• The ability to build new cloud-native applications using OCI and Azure technologies, including the rich set of Azure development and AI services
• Flexible options to simplify and accelerate migrating their Oracle databases to the cloud, including compatibility with proven migration tools such as Oracle Zero-Downtime Migration
• The highest level of Oracle database performance, scale and availability, along with feature and pricing parity with OCI
• The simplicity, security, and low-latency to build integrated solutions with Autonomous Database and Azure services
• Consistency with on-premises deployments of Oracle Database and Oracle Exadata to reduce the need to rearchitect or refactor solutions
• Unified customer experience and support from Oracle and Microsoft
• Simplified purchasing and the ability to leverage Oracle and Microsoft licenses, commitments and discount programs
• The assurance of a unified service and architecture that are tested and supported by two of the most trusted names in the cloud

“We’ve worked with [Microsoft] for years on interconnecting our clouds,” Leung says. A recent example of this collaboration is Oracle Database@Azure, an extension bringing services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to Azure. “We do believe it’s a unique offering. We’re not aware of any other cloud providers doing this where we’re extending our capabilities inside of another cloud,” he says. “The rationale behind that is while we still have interconnection with Microsoft, there’s a set of use cases that require our physical infrastructure to be close to each other—it’s ‘speed of light’ kind of stuff—where we need to achieve sub-millisecond latency, and the only way to do that is to actually be next to each other.”

For business leaders, Leung says Autonomous Database presents a “great opportunity” for those with a beachhead on Microsoft’s cloud. Organizations can take their existing data, put it inside an Azure database, anonymize and vectorize it, and keep it all in the same infrastructure. Then, they can combine it with tools like Azure OpenAI, training AI against their own data and public large language models to beef up enterprise knowledge bases or to provide better customer support. “The combination of being able to generate really good responses with enterprise data in a confidential manner is what is getting a lot of enterprises excited…Oracle is managing a huge amount of private data for enterprises, either on-prem, in our cloud, or now in Microsoft Azure. Being able to combine these things together with Azure’s set of services, we think, is a huge opportunity, for Microsoft customers.”

Customers who want to use Oracle Autonomous Database can do so through a “private offer” in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.