Oracle announces availability of Globally Distributed Autonomous Database

Oracle announced the general availability of its Globally Distributed Autonomous Database. Built on Oracle’s proven sharding technology, Globally Distributed Autonomous Database delivers the benefits of Oracle Autonomous Database while also giving customers control over data distribution and data placement policies. This enables organizations to automatically distribute and store data across the globe in many physical locations transparently to applications. With this approach, customers can obtain the highest possible levels of scalability and availability, address data sovereignty requirements, and benefit from autonomous operations, significantly reducing costs.

As a full-featured, converged database, Globally Distributed Autonomous Database simplifies the development and use of distributed databases for mission-critical applications by supporting virtually any data type, workload, and programming style at scale. Existing SQL applications can use distributed databases without having to be rewritten. In order to meet the needs of each application, Oracle Globally Distributed Autonomous Database supports more data distribution, replication, and deployment methods than other distributed databases.

“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, 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.”

Distributed databases can be difficult to deploy and manage due to the large number of servers deployed across multiple locations. Globally Distributed Autonomous Database eliminates this complexity by using and extending Autonomous Database’s AI and ML-driven automation with automatic data distribution and shard management. Administrators can manage the distributed database as a single logical database, and use automated provisioning, tuning, scaling, patching, and security capabilities to avoid time-consuming manual tasks and potential errors. In addition, automatic database scaling per individual shard enables customers to ramp up and draw down resources to meet demand and minimize consumption and cost.

Additional Oracle Database Enhancements

With Oracle’s integration of generative AI across its technology stack, developers have access to new tools, including Autonomous Database Select AI, to integrate AI and ML into their applications. Select AI can translate natural language questions in a conversational thread into SQL queries using large language models (LLMs). With Globally Distributed Autonomous Database, the SQL query is automatically routed to the appropriate country or shard to generate the answers. In addition, Oracle Database 23c with Raft quorum-based consensus replication will provide automatic sub-3-second application failover with zero data loss. This and AI Vector Search with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) integration will be available later this year.