Something was different this year at Oracle Cloud World 2024: There was a buzz this time that just wasn’t there in the last two OCWs I’d attended. It may have been the ubiquitous presence of Generative AI in just about every event I attended, or acceptance that it’s not the flash in the pan some prognosticators are predicting.
Keynote: One Cloud, One World, Zero Humans
It wouldn’t be OCW without Larry Ellison’s keynote, and he didn’t disappoint us with some surprises. For starters, Ellison announced that AWS and Oracle are partnering to build Exascale technology directly within AWS data centers. This will alleviate some sticking points for folks who want to run Oracle database technology and services within AWS environments. (I didn’t have that one on my OCW24 bingo card!)
The total number of private and public Oracle Cloud sites will top 160+ near the end of this year, with the largest one projected to exceed 1 Gigawatt for power requirements. Ellison has mentioned that he’s even considering using small modular reactor (SMR) technology to power the largest of those planned.
Ellison also talked about the need to dramatically increase the security of any public/private cloud, as Oracle has done within Autonomous Database (ADB). In fact, he said, Oracle will be moving all Oracle Applications within their Cloud environments into ADB to insure the security of autonomous systems.
Passwords are a terrible idea – too easy to steal or compromise! – and are the key infiltration points for any cyberattack. The solution, Ellison said, is to use biometrically authenticated logins for all access to the Oracle Cloud.
Finally, I was thrilled to hear him give a shout-out for Application Express (APEX) as the premier low-code application generation environment, given its capability to build applications from schema to screen without only minimal DBA or developer involvement.
Keynote: Oracle 23ai, APEX, and GenDev
Juan Loaiza, Oracle EVP for Mission Critical Database Technologies, dived in quite a bit deeper during his keynote into what generative AI portends for the future of intelligent application development, which he called Generative Development (GenDev for short).
Juan showed us how APEX – Oracle’s premier low-code application environment – can right now generate a complete application, including the database schema, application pages, and user interfaces with just a few natural language prompts to generative AI. I was glad to see that JSON Relational Duality is one of the cornerstones for removing an inexperienced data engineer or under-qualified Oracle DBA from the schema design process.
Later that day at our Oracle ACE dinner, I had a chance to chat with Juan about his keynote to let him know I really appreciated his perspective on GenDev, and also thank him for all his support for the Oracle ACE Program over the past several years. Juan, ever the humblest C-level executive I’ve met, told me he thought his session was a bit boring. I explained that to the contrary, it was one of the most informative sessions I’d seen recently, as it foretold a future of much simpler application development on the near horizon.
My Sessions: RAG, APEX, AIM, RAS
Turnout for every single one of my three sessions was surprisingly high at OCW24. I led off with a talk on how I’d built a prototype RAG solution for a stalled social media campaign, including all the steps to complete the APEX app, from gathering a corpus to my test results revealing some surprising hallucinations. (You can check out that session’s demo video here.)
I also teamed up with Andy Rivenes, the PM for Database In-Memory technology, to show off the latest features of 23ai Database in that realm. And my colleague and fellow ACE Director Karen Cannell teamed up at the last theatre session of the conference to show off the tricks we’d learned over the past few months when we deployed Real Application Security within a complex government agency’s environment.
All Right, Mr. DeMille, I’m Ready for My Closeup
Since I’m an Oracle ACE Director, I spent a lot of time on the exhibition floor: At the Oracle ACE Lounge, the Database Swag + Sweets booth, and (my personal favorite!) the Generative AI hologram station that Paul Parkinson from Oracle had built (video on that here.)
I’m working on making my events reporting much more dynamic, so this year I brought along a new steady-cam camera rig and remote Bluetooth microphone that let me record videos while walking around the floor and interacting with my fellow ACEs and Oracle staffers. My YouTube OCW24 playlist has a few other impressions too – please have a look, and I’d appreciate some feedback!
OCW25: Predictions
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t hang out over my skis a bit and make some predictions for Oracle Cloud World 2025 next year:
- Generative AI will become more focused into generating full-blown applications with even more limited involvement from DBAs, data engineers, and DevOps … which means we all should consider improving our prompt engineering skillsets to stay relevant.
- LLMs will improve to the point where worrying about things like the proper chunk size for corpus documents will be unnecessary.
- Security will still be a major focus; the only real unknowns will be how seriously huge the next breach will be and how many millions (or billions!) of people it will affect.
