Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse – What is it?

Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) is one of the so-called DB as a Service (DBaaS) or probably we should call it Data Warehouse as a Service (DWaaS) with the difference that this service is completely automatic and autonomous.  

This service is comprised by an Oracle Database (of course) already pre-configured for analytics, data lakes and data warehouse workloads. This Oracle Database (PDB) has 18c features running on Exadata hardware. Oracle Exadata software is 18c with features like In-Memory delivered from the cell server.  

There’s a service console that helps to manage the ADW services.

On top of this, Machine Learning (ML) tools help with data analysis and data models.   Development tools like SQL Developer are useful to create objects, load data and more.  

Let’s now talk about tasks that happen automatically:  

Automatic statistics gathering during direct-path load operations

Automatic tuning

Automatic Partitioning

Automatic In-Memory

Automatic Indexing (soon)

Automatic Compression

Automatic Tablespace Management

Automated backups and patching  

ADW is also capable of repair itself. Machine Learning is used to detect anomalies and uses pattern recognition to determine if this problem is already in the problem knowledge-base. If is a known problem, it will apply the fix automatically.  

On the security side all the information is encrypted at rest. This means that backups and all data in the tablespaces is encrypted using TDE.

The connectivity between ADW and the rest of the world is secured be default. Oracle provides a wallet file that contains all the connectivity information required to login.

If you open this file you’ll notice that all connectivity is being done through SSL.

 (security=(ssl_server_cert_dn=…

Provisioning is quite easy using the service console.   From the main dashboard you can click on “Create a data warehouse” button.

Select the Workload type between Autonomous Data Warehouse ADW or Autonomous Transaction Processing ATP loads.
 
 
 
 
Next you choose a compartment where the ADW database is going to live. For this example I’m going to choose ADWTest01 compartment. It is not recommended to use the root compartment.
 
 
 
 
Then we are going to set the Display and Database names. For this example, I’m choosing 1 OCPU and 1 TB of storage. Keep in mind that ADW is elastic, this means we can add more OCPUs and Storage on the fly without the need for downtime.
 
 
 
 
 
From the Administrator Credentials section we are going to set the ADMIN account password.
 
 
 
 
 
Next is license type. You can choose to use a license that you already own or subscribe to a new one.
 
 
 
 
Last but not least is the Tags section. You can add a tag to this ADW database to better manage it inside your tenancy.
 
 
 
 
Let’s now click Create Autonomous Database and wait few minutes for OCI to provision it.
 
 
 
 
The orange ADW icon will turn green once the ADW database is fully provisioned.
 
 
 
 
In my next post I’ll cover how to connect o the ADW database and how to load data to it.
 
Thanks,
Alfredo