“To make a vehicle autonomous, you need to gather massive streams of data from loads of sensors and cameras and process that data on the fly so that the car can ‘see’ what’s around it” Daniel Lyons
Let me add that the data must be stored somewhere, analyzed by some software, monitored and backed up by someone, and so on and so on…
Top 5 Industry Early Adopters Of Autonomous Systems are: (1) Information Technology: Oracle’s Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud, (2) Automotive, (3) Manufacturing, (4) Retail and (5) Healthcare.
Being an early adopter of ADWC, I must say that it is probably the best product created by Oracle Corporation. For sure part of Top Five.
This month (May 2018), ComputerWeekly published an article quoting Oracle CEO Mark Hurd that the long-term future of database administrators could be at risk if every enterprise adopts the Oracle 18c autonomous database.
“Hurd said it could take almost a year to get on-premise databases patched, whereas patching was instant with the autonomous version. If everyone had the autonomous database, that would change to instantaneous.”
So where does that leave Oracle DBAs around the world? Possibly in the unemployment queue, at least according to Hurd.
“There are hundreds of thousands of DBAs managing Oracle databases. If all of that moved to the autonomous database, the number would change to zero,” Hurd said at an Oracle media event in Redwood Shores, California.
If you are interested in more detail on this subject, I suggest you read the following articles in the order below:
The Robots are coming by James Anthony: “But surely we’ve been here before? Indeed, a quick Google search brings up the following examples of white papers by Oracle with a reference to the database being self-managing all the way back to 2003.”
Oracle Autonomous Database and the Death of the DBA by Tim Hall: “Myself and many others have been talking about this for over a decade. ”
Death of the DBA, Long Live the DBA by Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman: “With DBAs that have been around a while, we know the idea that you don’t need a DBA has been around since Oracle 7, the self-healing database.”
No DBA Required? by Tim Hall: “It will be interesting to see what Oracle actually come up with at the end of all this…”
Self-Driving Databases are Coming: What Next for DBAs? by Maria Colgan: “It’s also important for DBAs to remember that the transition to an autonomous environment is not something that will occur overnight.”
Death of the Oracle DBA (again) by Johanthan Stuart: “Twenty years later I run Claremont’s Managed Services practice and the DBA group is our largest delivery team.”
Don’t Fall For The “Autonomous Database” Distraction by Greg McStravick: a totally different point of view on autonomous databases.
Now, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Here are 5 screenshots from the Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud documentation:
1. Who will be creating external tables using the DBMS_CLOUD package?
2. Who will run “alter database property set.. ” in order to create credentials for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?
3. Who will restore and recover the database in case of any type of failure? Or failures never happen, right?
4. Who will manage run away SQL with cs_resource_manager and run “alter system kill session”?
5. Who will manage the CBO statistics and add hints?
As of today, we have 4 Exadata choices with Autonomous being by far the best. For data warehouse loads for now. As explained by Alan Zeichick, Autonomous Capabilities Will Make Data Warehouses — And DBAs — More Valuable. “No need for a resume writer: DBAs will still have plenty of work to do.”
So still: a database without a DBA is like a tree without roots.
P.S. Check out the book Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty and H. James (Jim) Wilson.
Julian Dontcheff's Database Blog 