Migration is moving up. In the realm of information technology, we are experiencing migration from older legacy applications to new, we are moving from outdated data structures to more modular information management techniques and we are of course also migrating to cloud.
Some of our IT migration happens because businesses want to gain a competitive edge by responding faster to regulatory and market needs, some migration happens in response to the non-negotiable need to protect data from large-scale cyber-attacks… and some migration happens just because it can.
To truly deliver transformational change, cloud migration is widely agreed to need to include both existing and new applications. The public cloud is a key component of the transformation, but migrating the entire estate to the public cloud is usually very complex from a technical and a cultural level. Incremental changes around the edges aren’t enough to answer these challenges. Instead, IT teams need to strike at the heart of the matter and reconsider data-driven collaboration for a cloud-native world. This is the opinion of Siobhan Wilson, UK country leader, Oracle.
The ‘shape’ of data
“To enhance data-led collaboration, IT teams need data management that is capable of self-service in terms of its ability to look after core aspects and activities related to performance, security and availability,” said Wilson. “This new approach to data management should make data appear as if it were ‘stored in a shape’ and made available at a scale ideal for the current workload, without having to predict it ahead of time. To deliver data management as a service like this, IT leaders need a new kind of database.”
If we follow Smith’s rationale, we can say that this is the point at which database automation graduates to having wider autonomous self-healing controls. Like our own pancreas and the autonomic system in the human body, many ailments are rectified by the intelligence of the system itself – our organs. Autonomous databases have the intelligent traits, created by machine learning, of self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing.
“Beyond those traits, the autonomous database has now evolved to include modern data sharing features, based on the open Delta Sharing protocol, which address the limitations of traditional methods and improve data-driven collaboration,” explained Oracle’s Wilson. “Data can now be shared without duplicating or propagating data to all recipients, significantly reducing storage requirements. They also provide centralized data governance and management, ensuring users have the real source of truth at all times. Finally to maintain security, modern data sharing grants secure access centrally without directly exposing the data source system, safeguarding sensitive information.”
Databases gain human traits
Looking at databases today, Smith suggests that they can show intelligent traits and act, to some extent, as a human database administrator, also known as a DBA. Being autonomous means the database can automate some of the DBA’s administrative responsibilities such as creating and dropping indexes, changing data storage allocation parameters, and applying security patches.
“Modern databases will return time to DBAs, providing them with the freedom to bring more creativity into their work. DBAs will soon be able to focus more time on design and development activities instead of spending time administering their database installation. Indeed, it remains the case that, at the highest level of size, complexity and performance criticality, meeting the SLA for the database requires a set of skills generally regarded as something of a ‘dark art’. The human DBA can always step where intelligent automation cannot,” she said.
These innovations in data management and data sharing are designed to scale with massive data volumes and support platform-independent, open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), promoting interoperability and flexibility within diverse technological ecosystems. This means data-driven collaborations between DBAs and developers could happen at a speed (and scale) never seen before.
In conclusion, Oracle’s Wilson recommends automation as a key acceleration advantage for DBAs and developers. He insists that this is a sensible route to speed up productivity and reduce cost by minimizing the manual tasks in data management and sharing. As more businesses move to the cloud, intelligent automation could transform the perception of the IT department from one that keeps the lights on, to one that spearheads commercial success by giving customers what they want.
Shifting past stick-shift
It is perhaps not surprising to hear the Oracle country lead extol the virtues of database automation i.e. it’s a message that Larry Ellison tabled heavily in the last Oracle Open World before the pandemic… and it’s a message set that we’ve heard the company expand and iterate upon since that time too. All that said, this is clearly the era of automation, so driving any corporate database on a full stick-shift transmission might not be the best idea.
Embrace automation, but keep your hands on (or close by) the wheel, please.
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