Modern Data Platforms, A Beast of Tech that you can feed after midnight!

You look like someone who needs a Data Solution, one that fulfils your data needs you haven't even thought up yet to ensure that your Mogwai - I mean stakeholders remain fun and happy and don't turn into angry data deprived Gremlins.

There are many choices of Data Platforms - Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and many more. But with all this choice, which is the best choice?

Well look no further, the future of Data Platforms is here for you in the present, and it is via the Oracle Cloud!

Tired of hand-coding your data solutions? Or annoyed that you don't have full control of your Databases in one easy to find location? Then Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (or OCI as it is known) is for you.

It is a single platform that helps you collect, curate, and manage all your transactional, warehouse, analytical, and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning assets in one place.

The end goal is that rather than hand-coding anything, we can generate purpose-orientated data and applications by declaring data usage intent rather than being dictated by the data storage format the data comes in.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves: I will be detailing the functions you can find on the Oracle Data Platform that get you the outcomes you desire. Here are some of its key features you should and would use:

Data Warehouse - A data warehouse is a type of data management system that is designed to enable and support business intelligence (BI) activities, especially analytics. Data warehouses are solely intended to perform queries and analysis and often contain large amounts of historical data. Oracle's data warehouse is automated, meaning it is optimised for analytic workloads, including data marts, data warehouses, data lakes, and data lakehouses.

Key Point to Note, Oracle has something that others don't - an Autonomous Data Warehouse. Does everything that a normal Data Warehouse does, but uses machine learning to automate database tuning, security, backups, updates, and other routine management tasks traditionally performed by DBAs. Try creating an Autonomous Data Warehouse for free on OCI here.

Data Lake - This is a repository for structured, semistructured, and unstructured data in any format and size and at any scale that can be analysed easily. A data lake on OCI is tightly integrated with your preferred data warehouses and analytics as well as with other OCI services, such as data catalog, security, and observability services. You can build a Data Lake for free here.

Autonomous Transaction Processing - This is a fully automated database service optimised to run transactional, analytical, and batch workloads concurrently. To accelerate performance, it’s preconfigured for row format, indexes, and data caching while providing scalability, availability, transparent security, and real-time operational analytics.

Data Integration - An important part of Oracle that provides a fully unified solution for building, deploying, and managing real-time data-centric architectures in an SOA, BI, and data warehouse environment. In addition, it combines all the elements of data integration—real-time data movement, transformation, synchronisation, data quality, data management, and data services—to ensure that information is timely, accurate, and consistent across complex systems. Speaking of those systems that make up Oracle Data Integration they include:

• Oracle Golden Gate - a managed service providing a real-time data mesh platform, which uses replication to keep data highly available, and enabling real-time analysis. 
• Oracle Data Integrator - a the comprehensive data integration platform that covers all data integration requirements: from high-volume, high-performance batch loads, to event-driven, trickle-feed integration processes, to SOA-enabled data services. 
• Oracle Enterprise Data Quality - provides a comprehensive data quality management environment, used to understand, improve, protect and govern data quality.
• Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management - a comprehensive metadata management platform that can harvest and catalog metadata from virtually any metadata provider, including relational, Hadoop, ETL, BI, data modeling, and many more.

Oracle Analytics Cloud - A cloud native service that provides the capabilities required to address the entire analytics process including data ingestion and modeling, data preparation and enrichment, and visualisation and collaboration, without compromising security and governance.

Machine Learning and AI - In Oracle Database it supports data exploration, preparation, and machine learning (ML) modelling at scale using SQL, R, Python, REST, automated machine learning (AutoML), and no-code interfaces. It enables data scientists and other data professionals to build models quickly by simplifying and automating key elements of the machine learning lifecycle.

Application Development - On Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), developers find a comprehensive portfolio of tools and developer services to build new cloud native applications, modernise, and extend enterprise applications. Here are a few of the services available as part of AppDev:

• Develop - Develop with any language or framework. OCI is built to work the way you work.
• Build and Deploy - Build and iterate faster with OCI-native toolchains to simplify the process of adopting containers, automation, and infrastructure as code.
• Low Code - Quickly extend enterprise applications, add new application interfaces, and build secure web and database GUI apps.
• Integrated Ecosystem - Connect the tools, frameworks, and technologies you’re already using: GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, Ansible, Rancher, EFK, Spinnaker, VMware Tanzu, Azure, Pulumi, and many others.

All this capability at your disposal, and just waiting for you to embrace the future not just the present of Data Migration, Management, Visualisation and Analysis. Find out more here.

And all of this in the palm of your hands for free (forever, unless you want more)...you can try it here and explore everything for yourself!

Before you ask, I am not kidding, they have free tier services including:

• 2 Autonomous Databases, 20 GB each
• AMD and Arm Compute VMs
• 200 GB total block storage
• 10 GB object storage
• 10 TB outbound data transfer per month
• 10+ more Always Free services
• US$300 in free credits for 30 days for even more

It's almost too many gifts for no cost at Christmas. With all this there is almost no chance of you becoming a Gremlin.

Merry Christmas!