Let’s make data warehouses more autonomous — here’s why

As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. In a data-driven organization, the best tools for measuring the performance are business intelligence (BI) and analytics engines, which require data. And that explains why data warehouses continue to play such a crucial role in business. Data warehouses often provide the source of that data, by rolling up and summarizing key information from a variety of sources.

Data warehouses, which are themselves relational databases, can be complex to set up and manage on a daily basis. They typically require significant human involvement from database administrators (DBAs). In a large enterprise, a team of DBAs ensure that the data warehouse is extracting data from those disparate data sources, as well as accommodating new and changed data sources—and making sure the extracted data is summarized properly and stored in a structured manner that can be handled by other applications, including those BI and analytics tools.

On top of that, the DBAs are managing the data warehouse’s infrastructure. That includes everything from server processor utilization, the efficiency of storage, security of the data, backups, and more.

However, the labor-intensive nature of data warehouses is about to change, with the advent of Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud, announced in October 2017. The self-driving, self-repairing, self-tuning functionality of Oracle’s Data Warehouse Cloud is good for the organization—and good for the DBAs.

Data-driven organizations need timely, up-to-date business intelligence. This can feed instant decision-making, short-term predictions and business adjustments, and long-term strategy. If the data warehouse goes down, slows down, or lacks some information feeds, the impact can be significant. No data warehouse may mean no daily operational dashboards and reports, or inaccurate dashboards or reports.

For C-level executives, Autonomous Data Warehouse can improve the value of the data warehouse. This boosts the responsiveness of business intelligence and other important applications, by improving availability and performance.

Stop worrying about uptime. Forget about disk-drive failures. Move beyond performance tuning. DBAs, you have a business to optimize.

Read more in my article, “Autonomous Capabilities Will Make Data Warehouses — And DBAs — More Valuable.”