Workload Type

You can configure your database to be one of either Autonomous Data Warehouse or Autonomous Transaction Processing workload types.

Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is a cloud data warehouse service that eliminates virtually all the complexities of operating a data warehouse, securing data, and developing data-driven applications.

Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing is a fully automated database service optimized to run transactional, analytical, and batch workloads concurrently.

View Connection Details

You can download client credentials and view the TNS names and connection strings of an Autonomous Database from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) console.

Oracle client credentials (wallet files) are downloaded from Autonomous Database by a service administrator. If you are not an Autonomous Database administrator, your administrator should provide you with the client credentials.

For cross-region standby Autonomous Databases, you can download region-specific connection strings.

Autonomous Database for Developers

You can create an Autonomous Database for Developers instance. Autonomous Database for Developers is a free tier offering designed for database development and functional testing activities.

Autonomous Database for Developers comes fixed at 4 ECPUs and 32GB storage, and do not support manual or auto-scaling.

As developer database instances can only be created on an ECPU-based ACDs without Autonomous Data Guard, the Free instance toggle button is disabled for ACDs with OCPU, Autonomous Data Guard, or both.

CPU Count

You can select the number of CPUs for your database from the list of provisionable CPUs.

The CPU type, that is, ECPU or OCPU is determined by the parent Autonomous Exadata VM Cluster's compute type. This value defaults to 2 ECPUs or 1 OCPU depending on the CPU type.

CPU Auto Scaling

CPU auto scaling permits Autonomous Database to automatically use up to three times as many CPUs as specified by CPU Count as the workload on the database increases.

You can enable CPU Auto Scaling while provisioning an Autonomous Database or after one has already been provisioned.

Storage

You can specify the storage to allocate to your database in terabytes (GB) while provisioning an Autonomous Database.

The minimum value is 32 GB.

The default values are 1024 GB for Autonomous Data Warehouse and 32 GB for the Autonomous Transaction Processing workloads.

Elastic Pool

Elastic pools help you improve operating efficiency and reduce costs by bringing all of your databases to the cloud. This also supports consolidating resources and simplifying administration and operations by using Autonomous Database.

Only Autonomous Transaction Processing databases that use ECPU compute model can be used to create an elastic pool.

Database Authentication

You set the database username and password while provisioning a database.

The user name and password is defined while creating the database will be the ADMIN username and password. An Application DBA can connect to this database using the ADMIN username and password to create other Database users.

Access Control

You can configure network access by creating an access control list (ACL). An ACL provides additional protection to your Autonomous Database by allowing only the client with specific IP addresses to connect to the database.

If the parent Autonomous Container Database uses Autonomous Data Guard, you can define access control for the standby database also.

Depending on the types of addresses in your list, you can choose one of the following IP notation type options:

• IP Address: Specify individual IP addresses.
• CIDR Block: Specify ranges of public IP addresses using CIDR notation.

Contact Email

You can provide contact emails where you can receive operational notifications, announcements, and unplanned maintenance notifications regarding your Autonomous Database.

Oracle recommends using the email address of an administrator group rather than an individual's, whenever possible, to ensure no important notifications or announcements are missed.

Character Set

Autonomous Database lets you choose a character set of your choice from a list of supported character sets while provisioning an Autonomous Database.

You choose a Character Set and National Character Set while provisioning an Autonomous Database.

The list of supported character sets currently includes all database character sets supported on ASCII-based platforms.

Database In-Memory

You can enable Database In-memory for your Autonomous Database by allocating a percentage of its System Global Area (SGA) to the In-Memory column store (IM column store) either while provisioning the database or later. The In-Memory Column Store (IM column store) is the key feature of Database In-Memory. The IM column store maintains copies of tables, partitions, and individual columns in a special compressed columnar format optimized for rapid scans.

You can enable or disable Database In-Memory for an existing Autonomous Database from its Details page on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) console.

You can also enable Database In-Memory on databases cloned from a database instance or backup, irrespective of whether the clone source has Database In-memory enabled.

Database Cloning

You can clone an Autonomous Database, creating a point-in-time copy of it or its backup set. You can use the cloning feature to quickly set up an Autonomous Database with historical data for purposes such as testing, development, or analytics.

Autonomous Database supports the following clone types:

• Full Clone: A full clone creates a new database that includes the metadata and data from the source database.
• Metadata Clone: This clone type creates a new database that includes all source database schema metadata, but not the source database data.

Ops Insights

Ops Insights is a cloud-native service that provides 360-degree insight into the resource utilization and capacity of databases and hosts. You can easily analyze CPU and storage resources, forecast capacity issues, and proactively identify SQL performance issues across your database fleet.

By default, Ops Insights is disabled for an Autonomous Database, and you must enable it from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure console.

With Ops Insights, you can:

• Analyze resource usage of databases/hosts across the enterprise.
• Forecast future demand for resources based on historical trends.
• Compare SQL Performance across databases and identify common patterns.
• Identify SQL performance trends across enterprise-wide databases.
• Analyze AWR statistics for database performance, diagnostics, and tuning across a fleet of databases.

Use Operations Insights on Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure

Get Started with Ops Insights

Autonomous Database Metrics

You can monitor the health, capacity, and performance of your Autonomous Databases with metrics, alarms, and notifications. The Autonomous Database metrics help you measure useful quantitative data, such as CPU and storage utilization, the number of successful and failed database logon and connection attempts, database operations, SQL queries, and transactions, and so on. You can use metrics data to diagnose and troubleshoot problems with your Autonomous Database resources.

You can use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure console or Monitoring APIs to view metrics.

Data Safe

Oracle Data Safe helps you understand the sensitivity of your data, evaluate risks to data, mask sensitive data, implement and monitor security controls, assess user security, monitor user activity, and address data security compliance requirements in your databases.

Oracle Data Safe provides the following set of features in a single, easy-to-use management console:

• Security Assessment helps you assess the security of your database configuration.
• User Assessment helps you assess the security of your database users and identify high risk users.
• Data Discovery helps you find sensitive data in your database. Data Masking provides a way for you to mask sensitive data so that the data is safe for non-production purposes.
• Activity Auditing lets you audit user activity on your database so you can monitor database usage and be alerted of unusual database activities.

Before you can register your database with Data Safe, Data Safe must be configured to access databases in your dedicated infrastructure configuration.

Oracle Data Safe Overview

Database Actions

Oracle Database Actions is a browser-based application that provides development tools, data tools,administration, and monitoring features for Autonomous Database. Using Database Actions, you can load data and run SQL statements, queries, and scripts in a worksheet, export data, create Data Modeler diagrams, and enable database administrators to monitor the database.

You can connect to Autonomous Database using Database Actions without downloading or installing additional software on your system.

Oracle Database Actions runs in Oracle REST Data Services and access to it is provided through schema-based authentication. To use Oracle Database Actions, you must sign in as a database user whose schema has been enabled for Database Actions.

About Oracle Database Actions

Connect to Autonomous Database with Database Actions

Oracle APEX (Oracle Application Express)

Oracle APEX provides you with an easy-to-use browser-based environment to load data, manage database objects, develop REST interfaces, and build applications.

Configuration, patching, monitoring, and upgrading all Oracle Application Express components are fully managed by Oracle.

There are no limits on the number of developers or end-users for your Oracle APEX applications. Autonomous Database can instantly scale compute and storage online as needed, based upon your workload.

You can deploy the Oracle APEX applications developed on-premise to Oracle APEX on Autonomous Database, or vice-versa easily.

SQL*Plus

SQL*Plus is a command-line interface used to enter SQL commands. You can connect to Autonomous Database using SQL*Plus to define the database's tables, views, triggers, types, sequences and so on.

To be able to connect SQL*Plus to an Autonomous Database, the system running SQL*Plus must have network access to the Autonomous Database.

SQLcl (Oracle SQL Developer Command Line)

SQLcl is a command-line interface for Oracle Database. It allows you to interactively or batch execute SQL and PL/SQL. SQLcl provides in-line editing, statement completion, and command recall for a feature-rich experience, all while also supporting your previously written SQL*Plus scripts.

To be able to connect SQLCl to an Autonomous Database, the system running SQLCl must have network access to the Autonomous Database.

SQL Developer

Oracle SQL Developer is a free integrated development environment that simplifies the development and management of Oracle Database in both traditional and cloud deployments. SQL Developer offers complete end-to-end development of your PL/SQL applications, a worksheet for running queries and scripts, a DBA console for managing the database, a reports interface, a complete data modeling solution, and a migration platform for moving your 3rd party databases to Oracle.

To be able to connect SQL Developer to an Autonomous Database, the system running SQL Developer must have network access to the Autonomous Database.

Oracle REST Data Dervices

Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) makes it easy to develop REST interfaces for relational data in an Autonomous Database. ORDS is a mid-tier Java application that maps HTTP(S) verbs, such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and so on, to database transactions, and returns any results as JSON data.

The Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) application in Autonomous Database is preconfigured and fully managed. ORDS connects to the database using the low predefined database service with a fixed maximum number of connections (the number of connections for ORDS does not change based on the number of CPUs). It is not possible to change the default ORDS configuration.

Simple Oracle Document Access (SODA)

Oracle provides a family of Simple Oracle Document Access (SODA) APIs for access to JSON data stored in the database. SODA is designed for schemaless application development without knowledge of relational database features or languages such as SQL and PL/SQL. It lets you create and store collections of documents in Oracle Database, retrieve them, and query them, without needing to know how the documents are stored in the database.

You can download the SODA drivers from the Details page of an Autonomous Database.

There are available implementations of SODA are:

• SODA for REST
• SODA for Java:
• SODA for PL/SQL
• SODA for C
• SODA for Node.js
• SODA for Python

Oracle Database API for MongoDB

Oracle Database API for MongoDB translates the MongoDB wire protocol into SQL statements that are executed by Oracle Database. It lets developers who have MongoDB skill sets write JSON document-store applications for Oracle Database that use drivers and tools that understand the MongoDB protocol.

To use the MongoDB API with an Autonomous Database, you must install and configure customer managed Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) separately, and the version of ORDS must be 22.3 or later.