Oracle Exadata Database Machine X8 Introduces AI and ML capabilities

Oracle introduced Oracle Exadata Database Machine X8 with machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities along with hardware and software enhancements.

Oracle Exadata is essentially a powerful Oracle database server appliance for on-premise deployments. It uses Oracle RAC database software and the powerful hardware in a single box.

Executive Opinion

Executive vice president, Mission-Critical Database Technologies, Oracle, Juan Loaiza, "For the past 10 years, Exadata has been running the most critical workloads for thousands of customers around the world. Exadata now powers Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Cloud Applications. Today, we are improving the performance and capacity of the platform, and adding a broad range of capabilities based on artificial intelligence and machine learning to further increase Exadata's advantages."

Research Vice President, Data Management Software, IDC, Carl Olofson, said, "Across the entire IT infrastructure landscape, when you look at the last 10 years, Oracle Exadata stands out as a key means for Oracle Database users to make the leap from on-premises data centers to the public cloud. As the foundation for Oracle Autonomous Database, the new Exadata X8 brings a high degree of machine learning to both cloud and on-premises Oracle Database deployments while requiring minimal user effort to set up. Oracle Exadata and Oracle Recovery Appliance are helping enterprises lower costs, simplify operations, increase security and boost performance for their Oracle Database environments."

Oracle Exadata Database Machine X8

The announcement noted that the automatic indexing in Oracle Exadata X8 continuously learns and tunes the database as usage patterns change. This improves database performance and helps eliminated cumbersome manual tuning. The artificial intelligence powered automated performance monitoring detects performance issues and determines the root cause without human intervention.

Other enhancements include introduction of latest Intel Xeon processors, PCIe NVME flash technology. Now Exadata X8 storage server comes with 60 per cent more cores to offload Oracle Database processing and 40 per cent higher capacity disk drives.



Oracle claimed in the announcement that 77 per cent of the Fortune Global 100 run Exadata. Oracle Exadata forms the foundation for Oracle Autonomous Database utilizing machine learning to provide a self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing database service.

In the fiscal year 2018, Exadata set all-time product sales records with continued adoption across multiple workloads such as OLTP, Analytics, and IoT, and multiple verticals, including finance, retail, electronics, and telecommunications, the announcement noted.