With Autonomous Database you do not need to configure or manage any hardware or install any software. Autonomous Database handles provisioning the database, backing up the database, patching and upgrading the database, and growing or shrinking the database. Autonomous Database is a completely elastic service.

At any time you can scale, increase or decrease, either the compute or the storage capacity. When you make resource changes for your Autonomous Database instance, the resources automatically shrink or grow without requiring any downtime or service interruptions.

Autonomous Database is built upon Oracle Database, so that the applications and tools that support Oracle Database also support Autonomous Database. These tools and applications connect to Autonomous Database using standard SQL*Net connections. The tools and applications can either be in your data center or in a public cloud. Oracle Analytics Cloud and other Oracle Cloud services provide support for Autonomous Database connections.

Autonomous Database provides the following:

• Increase your app development velocity: Build and deploy quickly on unified platform supporting vector, JSON, graph, and more. Leverage scalable, cost-effective solutions with flexible cloud, multi-cloud, or on-premises deployment, advanced security, and self-service tools.

• Fully automated database service: Supports all modern data types, workloads including transaction processing, AI and analytics, reducing the need for multiple specialty databases.

• Maximizes data security and availability: With Oracle's automation services, you can keep your mission critical applications running by leveraging 99.995% availability.

• Allows you to bring AI to your data: Use LLMs with built-in AI Vector Search and your proprietary data to get more accurate answers. There’s no need to duplicate data to a separate vector database.

Autonomous Database also includes the following:

• Oracle APEX: a low-code development platform that enables you to build scalable, secure enterprise apps with world-class features.

  See About Oracle APEX for more information.

• Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS): a Java Enterprise Edition based data service that makes it easy to develop modern REST interfaces for relational data and JSON Document Store.

  See Developing RESTful Services in Autonomous Database for more information.

• Database Actions: is a web-based interface that uses Oracle REST Data Services to provide development, data tools, administration, and monitoring features for Autonomous Database.

  See About Database Actions for more information.

• Oracle Machine Learning Oracle Machine Learning: a set of components supporting data scientists, ML engineers, and data analysts, as well as SQL, R, and Python users. Components include SQL, R, and Python APIs, a build-in notebook interface, and no-code interfaces for AutoML, data and model monitoring, and model deployment, along with model management, deployment, and monitoring via REST endpoints.

  See Oracle Machine Learning for more information.