Autonomous

By Franck Pachot

.
The Oracle database has always distinguished two types of workloads: transactional (OLTP) and datawarehouse (VLDB, DWH, DSS, BI, analytics). There is the same idea in the managed Oracle Cloud with two autonomous database services.

To show how this is old, here is how they were defined in the Oracle7 Tuning Book:

The definition has not changed a lot. But the technology behind DSS/DWH has improved. Now, with In-Memory Column Store, Smart Scan, Result Cache we can even see that indexes, materialized views, star transformation, hints,.. are disabled in the Autonomous Datawarehouse cloud service.

The Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud service is a PaaS managed service where we have a PDB and an ADMIN user which has most of the system privileges. For example, we have the privilege to change initialization parameters:
SQL> select * from dba_sys_privs where grantee=user and privilege like 'ALTER S%';
 
GRANTEE PRIVILEGE ADMIN_OPTION COMMON INHERITED
------- --------- ------------ ------ ---------
ADMIN ALTER SESSION YES NO NO
ADMIN ALTER SYSTEM YES NO NO

Still, not everything is allowed for several reasons: ensure that we cannot break the Oracle managed CDB and force us to use only the features allowed in the ‘autonomous’ service. This is limited with a lockdown profile:
SQL> show parameter pdb_lockdown
 
NAME TYPE VALUE
------------ ------ -----
pdb_lockdown string DWCS

In the previous post about the Autonomous Data Warehouse Service, I’ve run queries though the Machine Learning Notebooks. But you obviously want to connect to it from your premises, with SQL*Net.

Of course the connection, going through the public internet, must be secured. If you already use a managed service like the Oracle Exadata Express Cloud Service, you already know how to do: download a .zip containing the connection string and the wallet and certificate for SQL*Net encryption.

In the previous blog posts I explained how to create, and stop/start the Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud service. And I didn’t show yet how to connect to it. It is easy, from sqlplus or SQL Developer, or SQLcl.

But there’s something more exciting to run some SQL queries: the Oracle Machine Learning Notebooks based on Apache Zepplin. At first, I didn’t realize why the administration menu entry to create users in the ADWC service was named ‘Manage Oracle ML Users’, and didn’t realize that the ‘Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud’ header was replaced by ‘Machine Learning’.

In the previous post, I’ve explained how to start and stop the Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud service from PSM (PaaS Service Manager). There’s a setup phase, and a run phase starting with service-start and ending with service-stop. And the setup is specific to an Oracle Cloud account, storing information in the local user home. You may want to run different setups, and even provide an easy way to start/stop an Oracle Cloud service without knowing the user, password and tenant name.

A Docker container is perfect to isolate this.

In the previous post, I explained how to create an Autonomous Data Warehouse with PSM (PaaS Service Manager Command Line Interface). The most common operation you want to do with it is starting and stopping the service. This is the best way to save credits for hourly billed services. And PSM is the easiest: run from everywhere (it is Python 3) and no need to provide credentials each time. In the previous post, I explained how to setup PSM for the ADWC service.

Unfortunately, for starting and stopping the instance you may realize that:

You want to try the Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service? That’s easy. Here is a Step-by-Step.

Larry Ellison has announced Oracle 18c to be the Autonomous Database, the no-human labor, and self-driven, database. Here is a quick recap of what it is behind the marketing words. My opinion only.