When you look up the word autonomous in the dictionary the key definition that relates to the use of the word in this context reads something like this, “not subject to control from outside; independent.” The OCI Autonomous Database handles many of the tasks that you currently rely on a database administrator for, without any outside intervention. Right from the creation of the database, the autonomous database begins taking care of itself. Along with the actual creation of the database it also backs itself up, administers patches, applies upgrades, and performs database tuning – all hands off.

Along with all of these automated features, the OCI Autonomous Database comes in two different configurations. First is the Autonomous Transaction Processing configuration which can be used for normal transactional database processing type operations. This configuration is well suited to high volumes of transactions with random data access. The second OCI Autonomous Database configuration is the Autonomous Data Warehouse which is, you guessed it, tuned for decision support or data warehouse type workloads.

Within the Always Free tier of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, users have access to two free instances of Autonomous Database. In the free tier these databases have a fixed 8 GB of memory, 20 GB of storage, 1 OCPU, and are available in either the Autonomous Transaction Processing or Autonomous Data Warehouse workload configurations. If you are interested in more information on Oracle’s Always Free Tier – give my recent blog post a read HERE.

Obviously, there is a lot more to know about the OCI Autonomous Database than what I’ve covered in this brief primer. I will be digging in a bit deeper on some of the more detailed functionality and processes including how to Provision Autonomous Transaction Processing, how to connect SQL developer to an OCI Autonomous Database, along with a few other bits and pieces.

Keep your head up and keep learning new stuff!