Juan Loaiza is a master of database technology, and, having spent his career explaining the business value of sophisticated technology, he’s also pretty good with analogies.
Here’s how Loaiza is talking about cloud databases: What you want is something like a really great smartphone, something that has the power to run any app you have and might want, while also simplifying your life by putting it all in one place. What you don’t want is a bagful of gadgets—like a GPS, fitness tracker, and MP3 player—that each does one thing okay.
Oracle's Juan Loaiza discusses how software and hardware must work together in the cloud. ”We’re creating transformational technologies,” Loaiza says.
In too many cases, new cloud databases amount to buying that bagful of gadgets, says Loaiza, Oracle senior vice president for database technology. One of those new databases is optimized for only transaction processing, so you’ll need another database to do sophisticated analytics, and another for spatial queries, and another for JSON data, and so on. Backing up the data, making the database reliable enough to run a business on, implementing end-to-end security—doing all of those things on these new databases will require more stuff, if they can even meet those needs.
Plus, managing and connecting all those database functions is even more painful than minding a dozen power cords for all of your gadgets, and continuously moving data between the databases and dealing with varying dialects of SQL add even more complexity.
“People will say, well, my GPS is simpler because it doesn’t have all these other functions,” Loaiza says. “I think it’s actually more complicated. There is a surface simplicity to it, but things are never that isolated with a database. The minute you have that data, you want to start doing analytics on it, you want to secure that data, you want to interface it with other systems, you want to have developers who know it, and you want to have administrators who know it.”
Of course, Loaiza’s analogies help you only if your database vendor has strong technology that can deliver that smartphone-like power and simplicity. Below are five specific elements that make Oracle Database in Oracle Cloud more like that smartphone, giving it an edge over rivals’ bagfuls of gadgets.
1. It’s ready for any job.
You don’t want to buy a new phone when you download a new app, and you don’t want to buy a new database every time you want new functionality. Oracle Database can do both sophisticated transaction processing and analytics, for example.
And Oracle Database has proven itself across an array of use cases by the world’s largest and most demanding customers, in business and government. So the same Oracle Database can run a bank’s transactions, a telecom carrier’s billing, and a retailer’s analytics. An organization doesn’t need to learn and support a new database for each new use case.
“One of the things people underestimate is how difficult it is to deal with all the different kinds of applications in the world,” Loaiza says. “Having a product that can handle the wide variety and depth of data storage and analysis that occurs in the world takes many, many years, and you have to work with a lot of different customers to mature it.”
2. It makes things simple to have an identical database in the cloud and on premises.
Oracle gives you choice: Run Oracle Database in the cloud, on premises, or as a blend of both with its new Cloud at Customer option, where the Exadata Cloud Machine sits in your data center but it’s run by Oracle and paid for based on usage, just like with cloud.
“The fact that we can run the exact same thing on premises and in cloud makes it very simple to move—to leave specific applications on premises, to put just disaster recovery in the cloud, to put just testing in the cloud, to move just certain kinds of applications to the cloud,” Loaiza says. Almost no organization picks up every workload it has and moves it to the cloud in one step, he says.
3. It combines cloud simplicity with the highest performance.
A smartphone combines software and hardware, working together. So must a cloud database.
Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service gives organizations the same Oracle Database and hardware engineered system in the cloud that has been optimized and proven since 2008 to deliver high performance, high availability, compression, backup, security, and more to meet the most demanding business and government use cases. Cloud database users expect modern features such as just-in-time provisioning and elastic scaling, but they don’t want to give up enterprise-level database performance and availability. When you move to the cloud, “you don’t want to go backward,” Loaiza says.
4. It's offered at a range of prices.
With Oracle Exadata Express, developers can get the full power of Oracle Database as a cloud service starting at $175 a month. Whether the user is a startup or a department within a big company that’s testing a new idea, they can move those apps built on Exadata Express, without changes, to more sophisticated offerings as their demands grow—all the way up to Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service.
“We’ll give you everything you have on-premises without taking anything away, plus we’ll give you that extra agility that you get in a public cloud,” Loaiza says.
5. It's ready for the next technology change.
Cloud is a generational technology shift, but it’s not the end of innovation and IT disruption. When the next shift comes, will you be able to move your cloud-based database workloads and embrace new technology without breaking the applications on which you’ve built your business?
Oracle Database users can run their apps in the cloud or on premises, or move them between those modes, without rewriting their apps. The way Oracle is helping companies transition their existing workloads to the cloud reflects its heritage of not leaving its customers behind during technological shifts.
“That’s always been one of the things Oracle has been known for, we don’t leave our customers' existing investments behind,” Loaiza says. “Everything you spent years of effort and millions of dollars building during the last 40 years will run seamlessly in our cloud with little or no work on your part.”
Chris Murphy is Oracle director of cloud content.
