Scale up without effort with ADW?

Bergen op Zoom, May 17th, 2019

Author: Michel Sluymers, VP Cloud @Quistor 

Scale up without effort? You can with autonomous data warehousing.

He knows exactly when it’s time for a pit stop, and at which second the tire change has to take place. Max Verstappen and his data analysts are constantly in contact during the race. Anything to get the data-driven monster over the finish line first. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if Oracle’s Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) is at the heart of this feat of engineering: data management in the Cloud, fully self-driving, self-repairing and self-securing. Because making mistakes is disastrous, and real-time data are crucial. Winning is the only thing that counts.

Fascinating.
The question is, however: how accessible and interesting would such an autonomous database be for your organisation? After all, in this competitive world you also want to be a winner. What does migration to an ADW mean for your business? And for your IT staff?

Anyone can do it
First of all, any BI solution can run on the ADW platform. So for you, too, this innovation is within reach. You can join gradually, start off slow and easy.
What is revolutionary, of course, is the aspect of autonomy: skipping the administration tasks.
And that is quite a thing. All those time-consuming and stressful jobs no longer have to be done. Moreover, you avoid human error, which is always a weakness. These don’t exist in Max’s world.

So, a database administrator can pack his/her bags?
With a fully autonomous database, DBAs are relieved of tasks such as keeping applications up to date, solving problems or making connections between all kinds of systems. At the moment, there is hardly any time to work on innovations. Letting go of the administration tasks gives much more room for development.

What does the autonomous database mean for my IT department?
They can finally start focussing on the quality of the ever-growing mountain of data. With error-free reports and real-time data. Updates, patches and fixing errors? All this is fully automated and done in the background. Your data warehouse is ready for advanced analytics and machine learning. A necessary requirement in today’s world.

And what does it mean for the business?
If you have ambitious growth plans, you will be able to translate real-time data into business insights. Applications work error-free, are fast and reliable. You anticipate and react, and can scale up or downsize just as easily. Your data analyses also allow you to identify new business opportunities. In short, you can accelerate and innovate your digital transition at a very fast pace.

What does that mean in practice?
Let me give an example. One of our clients is an innovative leader in natural food products. They wanted to make an innovative impact on their Business Intelligence infrastructure and asked us to help. They were still working with outdated hardware and performance left much to be desired.
In order to achieve future growth and get information from the BI application faster, we proposed the following: we will migrate your BI application and data warehouse (Microstrategy and the Oracle Database) to the Cloud.
We quickly realised that the costs of implementation and management in the Cloud, using the latest Autonomous Database (ADW) technology, would be much lower than buying new hardware.
We then migrated this Microstrategy BI solution to Oracle IaaS, including Oracle’s Autonomous Data Warehouse.
Quistor performed various tests on the ADW and used DataSync for the staging replication. This resulted in significant cost savings, 75% higher performance for the end user and a clear enabler for international growth opportunities with the cloud.
Autonomous Data Warehousing suits you if you have an understanding of the changes taking place in the digital world. Of how customers, clients and organisations do business and share information in an increasingly sophisticated manner. Fast, accurate and reliable. By transitioning to the Cloud, you remain competitive.
Yet these are complex decisions. To what extent is your company ready for ADW? Can you earn back your investment quickly? How much will you be able to save? What opportunities or threats does it pose for your people, the organisation as a whole and not to forget: your customers?
Quistor can provide advice and support with those questions. As a partner and expert in the field of IT and business. Because you want to do improvement on yourself every day. Just like Max Verstappen.

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