Oracle touts advanced machine learning, Oracle 18c automation

While, the system, which Ellison dubbed as "self-driving" and "the world's first autonomous database," may be unique by some measures, it is also part of a long-standing trend that is well under way. Automation of database cluster deployment on cloud has become increasingly common, and wider automation can be anticipated, according to Tony Baer, an analyst at Ovum. "You can see how cloud databases are doing automation -- with database sharding as a major example," Baer said. Meanwhile, query performance and other database activities are also being affected by advanced machine learning technology, he said. Baer noted that "Oracle has all kinds of database activity logs. That is big data that acts as a corpus for machine learning that can figure out what is a normal pattern, and highlight queries that are going to cause trouble."