back to article Oracle promises ‘highly automated’ security in self-driving database

Oracle has kicked off its annual OpenWorld conference with a pledge to automate in the company's “autonomous” database, plus plenty of snark directed at Amazon Web Services. Jeans-toting CTO Larry Ellison kicked off Big Red’s four-day San Franciscan extravaganza with a not-so-slick presentation that had no real big surprises …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Keep any humans out the loop, does that include oracle's own wetware?

    This is the same oracle that has a long and rich history of changing things without trying for consistancy (TNSListnr passwords changed from if you defined them they were more secure, to if you applied the same logic you made the install less secure in the next release is just one example that springs to mind from years back), the vast swathes of default users to be compared against Pete Finnigans list's, and who have just a week or two back released a strutt's update (I was pretty shocked to see that, because I hadn't realized they hadn't patched it months ago!).

    More likely the operational result will be less humans to see their dirty laundry, as the C level's will have bought the kool aid and stopped their testing of the innards, because its automated and defends itself with buzzwords like machine learning right?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Ellison emphasised that Oracle's aim is to cut out downtime by stripping out human error "

      Ah so they plan to stop people choosing Oracle in the first place?

      "It will then automatically patch itself"

      For an Oracle DB surely that would require rather a lot of processing power and bandwidth?

  2. Headley_Grange Silver badge

    It's the end......

    ......of "Something for the Weekend".

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Ellison said it would automatically provision, patch,..."

    He forgot "...bill you and tell your bank to transfer the money".

    Anyway it was quite time. Patching Oracle databases was always a time consuming task with many human steps involved - never understood why they couldn't automate it more - as most other software already did. The more complex and error prone your update process is, the more lazy, unskilled sysadmins and managers will delay them.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Ellison said it would automatically provision, patch,..."

      Easy...they got to sell you "documentation"/"help" that no one else could copy/use....training courses (directly or indirectly)....or failing that consultancy services.

    2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Re: "Ellison said it would automatically provision, patch,..."

      and "automatically backup".

      That in itself sounds like a bold claim to make. Backups need to be managed, if only to ensure that someone can find out when the backup crapped itself and failed.

      Humans are not just there to make mistakes, they also serve as monitoring equipment and pick-up-the-pieces equipment. Automating everyone away is not going to do much good when you need to restore from yesterday's backup only to find out that the backup has failed for the past week and no one knew anything about it.

      You never hear of automated restores, now do you ?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        IT Angle

        Re: "Ellison said it would automatically provision, patch,..."

        I'm skeptical about autonomous patching in an era when so many complex home-grown and third-party applications are depending on that Oracle database. The best you can say in that situation is that your constantly patching database is forcing you to constantly address old code and integrations in your applications.

        The worst you can say is that your Oracle DB patched overnight, and now your help desk is overrun with tickets from users whose applications have broken down.

  4. rob_leady
    FAIL

    Critical Patch Updates

    “The worst data thefts in history have occurred after a patch was available to prevent the theft. The patches just weren’t applied; how is that possible.”

    You might want to take a look at how you release CRITICAL security patches Larry... you know, every QUARTER.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Critical Patch Updates

      Those are the roll-up patches. Individual fixes can be made available sooner.

      1. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
        Trollface

        Re: Critical Patch Updates

        And can not be automatically installed at all.

        Niether the roll-up ones either, by the way.

  5. FuzzyWuzzys
    Facepalm

    "It will then automatically patch itself, rather than waiting for a human to schedule downtime."

    I know Larry hates Bill Gates with a passion but he should pay attention to what happens when Windows happily installs patches automatically. When the apps crash or simply won't start we'll all start switching off the autonomous crud and performing the updates manually as we can't trust it to behave itself!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      In Windows, even if you apply updates "manually" it just means you select the updates, install and the rest is automatic. In SQL Server as well, most of the time.

      In my Oracle experience (up to version 11), you had to download, unpack, stop instances, apply patches, restart instances, run scripts and so on, each and every step upon you - and each patch may have had slightly different procedures depending on what was going to be fixed. If you had RAC, ASM, etc., the procedure became more complex.

      All those steps could have been automated - and human errors and downtime reduced.

  6. Bryan Hall

    Query deleted data

    "Another claim Ellison made was that the database would contain a feature that permits queries to be made against data deleted a day earlier."

    Ummm - Larry, your Oracle database has had that feature for a LONG time (10.1 I think around 2006). It's called flashback query, and you can keep data for more than a day!

    Larry (or your current assistant) - RTFM (or not so fine in Oracle's case) before you go say stupid things.

    1. trollied

      Re: Query deleted data

      9.1 supported it (so 2001), but it was harder to use than in 10.1.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    DBA was a nice profitable gig for a long time but all good things come to an end.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Don't worry - I remember the same promises being made at least 15 years ago.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like