Oracle marketing improves productivity by migrating to Autonomous Database
Oracle marketing increased productivity by running its main B2B customer experience database on Oracle Autonomous Database.
“On-premises, we had a team of six people, just to keep the system running. Moving to OCI and Autonomous Database has meant that those people now spend their time modernizing the system and adding new functionality. We are more productive. And so are the business people using our system.”
Business challenges
Like many of our customers, Oracle recognizes the value of becoming a more data-driven business. No matter what part of the business, timely access to the right data improves decision-making. This is certainly true in marketing, where customers both expect and respond better to tailored data-driven interactions.
Recently Oracle migrated its main B2B Customer Experience database and associated stack (including a second database used to support business intelligence and analytics) from an on-premises data center to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This successful migration took about seven months, and was ultimately driven by the need to become more responsive to the business. The on-premises environment ran on 19 different servers, and was challenging to manage and expand, as well as slow to respond to changing business needs.
Why Oracle chose Autonomous Database
When selecting the correct database for the cloud implementation, Oracle Autonomous Database was the obvious choice. The primary requirement was to simplify management and administration of the two different databases, CX and BI. But this was not a cost-cutting exercise. Oracle leaders anticipated that reducing administration overhead would make possible the main goal of the migration: becoming more responsive to the business.
Results
Today the system uses two different database instances and supports about 300 users for both interactive query and complex scripting. Oracle’s Customer Experience Database (CXD) runs on a 128 OCPU instance of Autonomous Database for transaction processing and mixed workloads, currently growing at 5 TB to 6 TB per month and approaching 128 TB in size. It handles inputs from corporate and third-party sources, is used by data science teams, and supports both legacy- and microservices-based applications like Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation and Oracle Unity Customer Data Platform. It also acts as a primary data source for the BI Database, running on Autonomous Database for analytics and mixed workloads, currently approaching 30 TB.
Allocated storage to CXD has grown steadily over the most recent 12 months, from 60 TB to 128 TB. Increasing allocated storage takes just a single click or API call, with no database expertise, no waiting, and no downtime. On- premises, the operation would have been more complex, requiring additional staff and potentially new hardware.
Patching and updating used to happen on-premises every quarter, with downtime ranging from 21 hours to 36 hours. This now occurs autonomously when needed, again with no database expertise or downtime.
Autonomous Data Guard is being investigated for cross-region DR and testing has started. With just a single click it took only 8 hours to replicate CXD into a standby database. This will be fully implemented in the near future as part of the modernizing process.
Autonomous Database greatly simplified operation of the cloud-based B2B Customer Experience database. Sometimes organizations use this simplification to save costs, but in this case new functionality and modernization helped to increase productivity for both the support team and the 300 end users.