Oracle Technology Roundtable for Digital Natives – Let’s have a look at AI, Cloud and HeatWave

Yesterday I participated to the Oracle Technology Roundtable for Digital Natives in Zurich.

It was a good opportunity to learn more about AI, Cloud and HeatWave with the focus on very trendy features of this product: generative AI, machine learning, vector processing, analytics and transaction processing across data in Data Lake and MySQL databases.

It was also great to share moments with the Oracle and MySQL teams and meet customers which gave feedback and tips about their solutions already in place in this area.

I’ll try to summarize below some key take-away of each session.

Unlocking Innovation: How Oracle AI is Shaping the Future of Business (by Jürgen Wirtgen)

AI is not a new topic. But how do we use it today and where are we in the process, early or advanced?

To answer this question, you can have a look to the stages of adoption:

1. Consume (AI embedded in your applications) -> SaaS applications
2. Extend (models via Data Retrieval, RAG) -> AI services
3. Fine tune -> Data
4. Build models from scratch -> Infrastructure

AI is not AI. The best AI starts with the best data, securely managed. Which can be translated back into a simple equation: Best Data + Best Technology = Best AI.

Innovations in HeatWave & MySQL – The Present and the Future (by Cagri Balkesen)

HeatWave is an in-memory query processing accelerator for data in MySQL transactional RDBMS or data in Object Store in different format.

Normally you need to put in place and maintain ETL processes to produce data that can be used effectively by analytics. This brings several drawbacks:

• Complexity
• You have to maintain different systems, on which you’ll have security issues to handle and costs to assume.

Using HeatWave, you don’t need that anymore, because it’s a single platform which allows you to manage together all your OLTP, OLAP, Machine Learning and GenAI workloads.

Which are the advantages of using HeatWave?

• You current SQL syntax doesn’t need to change
• Changes to data are automatically propagated to HeatWave
• Best performances for your queries
• Efficient processing for Data Lake
• Best platform for MySQL workloads
• Built-in GenAI & Vector Store
• Available in multi cloud (natively on OCI, it can run inside AWS, you can setup a private interconnection for Microsoft Azure, and there are works in progress for Google Cloud).

HeatWave is based on a massively parallel architecture which uses partitioning of data: each CPU core within a node processes the partitioned data in parallel.

Driven by Machine Learning algorithms, HeatWave Autopilot offers several features such as:

• Improvements in terms of performance and scalability
• Provisioning, data loading, query execution and fault management automation, to reduce human errors.

Finally, according to Oracle, with HeatWave you will have best performances and lowest costs rather than competitors: Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and Databricks.

Building Next-Gen Applications with Generative AI & Vector Store (by Adi Hochmann)

As we said, Oracle HeatWave allows you to manage together all your OLTP, OLAP, Machine Learning and GenAI workloads.

Steps to build a GenAI application are the following ones:

1. Create a vector store
2. Use vector store with LLMs

And this is performed using the following routines:

call sys.HEATWAVE_LOAD (…);

call sys.ML_RAG(@query,@output,@options);

But how to train data for Machine Learning? The process and tasks done by a data analyst could be complex and this is replaced here by the AutoML:

CALL sys.ML_TRAIN(‘data_source’, ‘model_type’, JSON_OBJECT(‘task’, ‘classification’), @result_model);

This is useful for some use-cases such as classification, anomalies detection, recommendations, predictive maintenance, …

Additional tip: Adi used MySQL Shell for VS Code to run his demo. This extension enables interactive editing and execution of SQL for MySQL databases and MySQL Database Service. It integrates the MySQL shell directly into VS Code development workflows and it’s pretty nice!

Oracle Cloud for Digital Natives: Supporting Innovation and Growth (by Claire Binder)

Which are the 5 reasons why Digital Natives picked OCI?

1. Developer-First openness and flexibility, to speed acquisition
2. Advanced Data & AI Services, to achieve innovation and agility
3. Technical and global reach, to achieve scalability
4. Security, compliance and resilience, to control risks
5. Cost efficiency and TCO, to achieve optimized spending.

Linked to the point 4, there are several services in OCI to avoid data breaches in terms of prevention, monitoring, mitigation, protection, encryption and access.  

To select a Cloud provider, the recommendation would be to choose a solution which allows you to run converged open SQL databases, instead of single-use proprietary databases.

And finally, Oracle brings AI to your data with his new 23ai release and some of its features, such as Property Graphs and AI Vector Search.

Analytics at the speed of thoughts with HeatWave Lakehouse (by Nitin Kunal)

What is a Data Lake? It’s a cost efficient, scalable, online storage of data as file (for instance, Object Store). Data are not structured and non-transactional and can be sourced from Big Data frameworks.

Again, you could have 4 different platforms to maintain:

•  Your RDBMS
• A DWH system for analytics processing
• A Data Lake
• A ML & Gen-AI system.

Instead of that, your can merge everything in only one platform: HeatWave. And you can query near real time data with HeatWave Lakehouse because new data is available in seconds: that’s great!

Conclusion

1. If you have mixed workloads, if you start to work with AI and if you want to improve your performances, it is really worth taking a look at Oracle HeatWave. You can try it here for free.
2. We all know that AI is the future. These next years, we’ll be more and more challenged on GenAI, ML, vector processing and so on. With all this innovation, we must not lose sight of topics that remain crucial (and perhaps become even more important) such as security, reliability, availability, and best practices. With dbi services and Sequotech we can for sure help you with this transition.