Oracle CloudWorld 2022: The Biggest Announcements

Oracle Alloy, a beta for Oracle Database 23c and a beta for MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse were some of the biggest announcements.

A new Oracle platform for partners to build cloud services, a beta for the latest version of Oracle’s converged database and a beta for MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse were among the biggest announcements made this week at the vendor’s annual CloudWorld conference.

Held in person in Las Vegas and online, CloudWorld 2022 gave the Austin, Texas-based database services and cloud vendor a chance to promote its offerings in an ever-competitive cloud market.

Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison has been pointing to the popularity of multi-cloud offerings lately, telling listeners on the company’s latest quarterly earnings call in September that “multi-cloud interoperability is one of the reasons our infrastructure business is booming—growing over 50 percent in U.S. dollars and almost 60 percent in constant dollars.”

“We expect Oracle’s total cloud business to exceed a $20 billion annual run rate next year,” Ellison said.

Ellison and Oracle haven’t grown any friendlier in a multi-cloud world, with the tech pioneer’s continued attacks on Amazon Web Services and database rival Snowflake during the earnings call.

“I personally have been talking to some of Amazon’s most famous brands that are running AWS,” he said. “And the AWS bill is getting very large. And they can save a huge amount of money by moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. And we expect next quarter we’ll be announcing some brands and companies moving off of Amazon to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that will shock you.”

Ellison has also said that Oracle’s MySQL HeatWave offering delivers better performance than Snowflake and Amazon Redshift and higher throughput than Amazon Aurora.

CRN has reached out to AWS and Snowflake for comment on Ellison’s statements.

Read on for more on what Oracle unveiled this week at CloudWorld 2022.

Oracle Alloy

Oracle Alloy is a new platform for service providers, systems integrators and ISVs to offer cloud services.

Users can leverage Alloy in their own data centers and control its operations and regulatory requirements, according to Oracle. Users can serve public sector customers, for example, that have to keep workloads domestic and operate clouds independently.

Alloy allows for a customizable Oracle Cloud Infrastructure console with the partner’s own branding, with tailored customer alerts and documentation. Partners set the pricing, rate cards, account types, discount schedules, service levels and support structures, according to Oracle.

Oracle Database 23c Beta

Oracle announced a beta for the latest version of its converged database, Oracle Database 23c, during CloudWorld 2022.

23c has new capabilities meant for applications written with JSON, Graph or microservices, according to Oracle. It seeks to make SQL easier to use and adds JavaScript as a stored procedure language.

The latest version includes JSON Relational Duality for unifying data representation in applications and data storage in relational databases. With this duality capability, data can be used as app-friendly JSON documents and database-friendly relational tables.

Oracle Developer Improvements

Along with Database 23c, other improvements aimed at developers include MongoDB compatibility for Oracle Database for on-premises environments.

GoldenGate 23c has improved performance, diagnostics and security, according to Oracle. It has new replication support for blockchain and immutable tables and application patching without downtime.

GoldenGate also supports more than 40 new data connections from Oracle, AWS, Microsoft Azure and other cloud environments.

Autonomous Data Warehouse gained a new Microsoft Excel add-in. A Transforms data integration tool will be available in the future, according to Oracle.

In preview is Oracle Apex 22.2 for low-code app development. A new workflow approval component is available along with out-of-the-box integrations with third-party apps and data.

Tuxedo 22c is meant to improve Tuxedo apps in Kubernetes and cloud environments. It has container images, sample Helm charts for Kubernetes distributions and stronger security, according to Oracle.

New Oracle Fusion Offerings

This week, Oracle unveiled a host of updates for its Oracle Fusion suite of enterprise applications.

Oracle added 15 baseline artificial intelligence models to Oracle Unity, a customer data platform (CDP) inside Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX). The new AI models can predict behaviors and offer recommendations for users in consumer packaged goods, communications, financial services, health care, utilities and other industries.

The vendor introduced Asset-Based Service for High Tech and Manufacturing for Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite. The new offering aims to help improve customer satisfaction, reduce costs and grow revenue through getting the most out of the service life cycle management of assets, minimizing unplanned downtime, according to Oracle.

Oracle Recruiting Booster is a new hiring offering included in Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management. This new version of Oracle Recruiting adds hiring event promotion and support, two-way messaging for recruiters and candidates and a better way to manage interview scheduling, according to Oracle.

Oracle Health Care-Focused Offerings

About four months after Oracle completed its acquisition of health-care technology provider Cerner, the database services giant is promoting new health care-focused offerings at CloudWorld.

The vendor unveiled a new health care-focused HR Service for Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management. The Dynamic Skills feature allows for detection, tracking and analysis of skills and industry accreditation of employees. Grade Step Progression allows for compensation adjustment as workers get new skills and credentials.

Using this health care-focused version of Oracle Cloud HCM, workers can add static, rotating, split and dynamic shifts to their schedules, according to Oracle.

A health care-focused version of Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM) includes product master data management for maintaining complete patient documentation and a unified data source that integrates with electronic health records, according to the vendor.

Intelligent reordering attempts to improve supply availability, and the Oracle Procurement feature comes with rebate management, integrated pricing management and standardized billing.

Along with these industry-focused offerings, Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management added health care-specific features for modeling scenarios and determining future demand.

Health-care providers can use the offering for staff planning, and to plan capital expenses, model financials, find trends and anomalies in their data.

Expanded Oracle Applications Platform Availability

Oracle has made its design system and applications-powering platform available to customers and partners to promote a consistent consumer-grade user experience.

The Oracle Applications Platform gives organizations search, self-learning recommendation, Oracle Digital Assistant conversational experiences, telemetry and low-code development tools to help with application delivery and integration with Oracle cloud apps.

Users can embed data visualizations in their Redwood applications, use Visual Builder Studio to build new applications, and predict data input and next actions based on user behavior, according to Oracle.

MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse Coming

Oracle unveiled a beta for MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse, with general availability expected in the first half of 2023.

Lakehouse promises to combine transaction processing, analytics, machine learning and machine learning-based automation in a single MySQL database, according to Oracle.

The new offering has the ability to process and query hundreds of terabytes of data in object store, according to Oracle. It supports comma-separated values (CSV), Parquet, and backups for Amazon Aurora and Amazon Redshift.

Oracle said that MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse can load 400 terabytes of data from object storage eight times faster than Redshift and 2.7 times faster than Snowflake.

The vendor also said that Lakehouse has 17 times faster query performance compared with Snowflake and is six times faster than Redshift on a 400-terabyte workload.

The Lakehouse offering is also optimized to run on AMD EPYC-powered Oracle cloud instances.

Oracle also unveiled at CloudWorld native availability of HeatWave on Amazon Web Services, with Microsoft Azure availability coming “soon.”

Oracle Data Protection Updates

Oracle made multiple announcements for additional data protection and disaster recovery protections for users during CloudWorld 2022.

The Oracle Database Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service aims to provide more efficient ways to combat ransomware, outages and human errors, according to the company.

Oracle Full Stack Disaster Recovery Service *is meant for configuring, monitoring and managing technologies used to build middleware, databases, networks storage, compute and other applications from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure console.