There will always be an art to business analysis. It takes a knack for combining the right data and asking the right questions. But business analytics and data science have also been a laborious process of sourcing, loading, transforming, and cleansing data before the analysis can begin. That vital work is usually done by someone else, often a busy technical expert using a complex ecosystem of products and tools.

Oracle’s next-generation Autonomous Data Warehouse changes the equation by giving data analysts and business users a point-and-click, drag-and-drop experience for prepping data for analysis. Oracle Database and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure do the complex work behind the scenes. But it does not stop there.

Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse also delivers features that foster deeper analytics based on machine learning, visualization, and tighter data lake and multicloud integration, says George Lumpkin, Oracle’s vice president of product management for Autonomous Data Warehouse. “We’re empowering the next-generation data analysts with a next-generation cloud data warehouse,” Lumpkin says, “We’re giving them a suite of built-in, self-service tools designed not for the SQL user, but for the business user, citizen data scientist, and citizen developer.” Get the details in his new blog post.

News of the new capabilities—years in the making and built on Oracle’s industry-leading converged database engine and Autonomous Database—are proving popular with customers, the technical press, and industry analysts. “We’re giving [business users] more ability to serve themselves,” said Oracle EVP of database server technologies, Andrew Mendelsohn, in SiliconANGLE. “We’re talking about enabling a new kind of agile application that anyone should be able to build.”

Customers and industry influencers agree

“Taking a look at the Oracle technology stack, it’s almost like a parfait. You start to say ‘where’s my data stored?’ It’s the Autonomous Data Warehouse, ADW. On top of that sits OAC, Oracle Analytics Cloud. What kind of insights we got were just absolutely amazing,” said Jay Weiland, director of financial solutions at Lyft.

“Having innovative capabilities for loading data that’s built right into Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse should save us a tremendous amount of time,” said Derek Hayden, SVP of data strategy and analytics, OUTFRONT Media. “The declarative extract, load, and transform with its drag-and-drop functionality will enable us to quickly load and transform multiple data types, and see the relationships within the data through the auto-insights capability.”

In a recent article in Forbes, the top-ranked industry analyst in the world according to ARInsights, Patrick Moorhead, stated “Oracle is taking a different approach and using automation to deliver a point-and-click, drag-and-drop experience that’s so intuitive it’s like the iOS of the enterprise cloud data warehouse space…if I want an autonomous car, I would invest in a Tesla. I wouldn’t visit Pep Boys and attempt to cobble one together. There are cloud native companies that do and I get that. If I want a cloud data warehouse, I don’t see why I would try to cobble dozens of different databases, tools, and services together like Snowflake and hope to achieve the same result as Oracle has made available in Autonomous Data Warehouse.”

Mark Peters, senior analyst and practice director at ESG said “Business users are now directly connected to the data rather than one step removed from it…this can be viewed as democratizing organizational data warehouses, making it easy for pretty-much-anyone to get data in and value out.” Read Peters’ post, Democratizing simplicity.

Dig deeper

Illustration: Oracle