Oracle University reduces administration costs by 30% with Autonomous Database

Oracle Guided Learning is integrated with Oracle Cloud Applications, providing up-to-date guidance and knowledge in the user’s workflow.

Oracle MyLearn offers subscription-based, personalized training on a range of Oracle solutions, including Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Oracle Cloud Applications, and database and industry solutions.

Oracle Guided Learning incorporated technology that was acquired by Oracle in 2018 and migrated from AWS. The underlying database used on AWS was PostgreSQL, which is available on OCI. However, as part of the migration, the development team also wanted to address some PostgreSQL shortcomings. In particular, performance optimization was poor, while building an HA setup required substantial expertise. The required additional compute resources forced downtime while users had to manage the underlying block storage that PostgreSQL used. The resulting administrative overhead and required expertise were simply too high.

Oracle University 

Oracle University helps customers build proficiency with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and SaaS applications.

The Oracle University development team selected Oracle Autonomous Database for transaction processing and to replace PostgreSQL for Oracle Guided Learning. The solution supports developers who create new guides as well as end-users who interact with those guides from host applications.

In addition, Autonomous Database for analytics and data warehousing supports administrative users who can look at the entire learning environment to understand how it’s being used.

Finally, Oracle MyLearn was a new application first built on Autonomous Database for transaction processing and mixed workloads.

Developers anticipated reduced maintenance costs due to several factors. First, Oracle Autonomous Database automatically manages storage and allows additional storage or compute resources on-demand without needing specialized expertise or taking the database down. Backups, performance tuning, patching, and updates are all handled automatically, further reducing operational costs.

Autonomous Database comes with security policies and settings already in place, which reduced the work to keep data secure, and also decreased the risk of errors.

Autonomous Database also simplified the process of integrating with object storage, which is an integral part of the overall solution.

• [Efficiency Improvement - Operation]
  

  Setting up an HA configuration, which used to be a two-week operation, now takes just a few minutes with Autonomous Data Guard. 

• [Product Improvement - User Experience]
  

  Furthermore, the work can be done by employees who don’t have database expertise, and there is no ongoing maintenance—providing further savings