Oracle Improves Scalability and Data Sovereignty for Organizations

Oracle has officially launched the Oracle Globally Distributed Autonomous Database. Leveraging Oracle’s established sharding technology, this database offers the advantages of Oracle's Autonomous Database while granting users authority over data distribution and placement policies. Consequently, organizations can effortlessly distribute and store data worldwide across numerous physical locations without impacting applications. This methodology facilitates maximum scalability and availability, meets data sovereignty mandates, and streamlines autonomous operations, leading to substantial cost reductions. 

As a comprehensive, converged database solution, the Globally Distributed Autonomous Database streamlines the development and utilization of distributed databases for critical applications. It accommodates a wide range of data types, workloads, and programming styles at scale, making it versatile for various needs.

Moreover, existing SQL applications seamlessly integrate with distributed databases, eliminating the need for rewriting. To cater to diverse application requirements, Oracle's Globally Distributed Autonomous Database offers extensive support for data distribution, replication, and deployment methods, surpassing other distributed database options.

“Organizations with global operations have specific application demands around data sovereignty, scale, and availability that can vary between continents and countries. These demands can be addressed by a mission-critical distributed database architecture capable of supporting global distribution,” said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, of Mission-Critical Database Technologies, Oracle.

 “The new Globally Distributed Autonomous Database meets this need and enables customers to leverage a serverless, elastic, and auto-scale architecture to dramatically lower costs. With its converged database capabilities, our new Globally Distributed Autonomous Database is the simplest, most functional, and most mission-critical distributed database cloud service in the world,” he added.

Deploying and managing distributed databases across numerous servers in multiple locations can pose significant challenges. However, Globally Distributed Autonomous Database simplifies this process by leveraging and expanding Autonomous Database's AI and ML-driven automation.

It automates data distribution and shard management, thus reducing complexity. Administrators can oversee the distributed database as a unified logical entity, benefiting from automated provisioning, tuning, scaling, patching, and security features. This alleviates the burden of manual tasks and mitigates potential errors. Moreover, automatic scaling per shard allows customers to adjust resource allocation according to demand, optimizing consumption and minimizing costs.

Additional Oracle Database Enhancements

Through Oracle's integration of generative AI across its technology stack, developers gain access to innovative tools like Autonomous Database Select AI, enabling seamless integration of AI and ML into their applications. Select AI employs large language models (LLMs) to translate natural language queries within conversational threads into SQL queries. With the Globally Distributed Autonomous Database, SQL queries are automatically directed to the appropriate country or shard for generating answers.

Furthermore, Oracle Database 23c featuring Raft quorum-based consensus replication will offer automatic sub-3-second application failover with zero data loss. Later this year, users can expect the integration of AI Vector Search with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) functionality.

Customer and Analyst Commentary

“Oracle’s Globally Distributed Database allows us to comply with data residency regulations by automatically distributing the data to various countries transparent to the application users, in a very economical way,” said Bilal Ramadan, chief delivery officer, of Munich Re HealthTech. 

“Many database systems feature one or another sharding technique to help users manage a set of data across multiple databases and, in some cases, achieve a distributed database capability. These usually involve placing a heavy burden on application developers to write code that will segregate and orchestrate shard updates in such a way that they avoid conflicting data and illogical data combinations. Oracle’s approach to sharding avoids all that, making application interaction with databases transparent and reliable,” said Carl Olofson, research vice president, of Data Management Software, IDC.

“In addition, Oracle’s proven RAC clustering technology extended to this distributed database approach enables it to offer a wide variety of data distribution models, replication methods, and shard deployment options that are easy to manage, straightforward to develop against and enable Oracle Database to meet unique customer requirements. Taken together, these capabilities make Oracle a key player in the distributed database category.”