Stefan KnechtWell, personally I don't think there's much more to it than marketing noise
at this point.

Automatic upgrades - well, sounds fancy, but who actually wants that?
Upgrades needs to be tested, evaluated, tested again, etc etc... And well,
obviously there's the downtime involved, which needs to be scheduled, and
so on and so forth. Unless they have magically overcome the need to
actually do any of those things I don't see that happening. It's been a
long standing issue with "zero downtime upgrades" ever since Oracle started
announcing it, what, 10 years ago? I still haven't seen one to date (it is
somewhat possible using application technologies, but not database
technologies). If you were to present me a database with "automatic
upgrade"; my first question would be "how do I turn it off?".

Automatic patches / security updates is the same thing. And I kinda doubt
they can actually do that, particularly because as of today they still need
a full cluster outage to apply an OJVM PSU (maybe Larry forgot about those
since they are already getting rid of Java IIRC?).

The self-tuning they have already introduced in 12.1 with the adaptive
optimizer. And we've seen where that went. They've apparently now disabled
some of it again in 12.2 by default since it simply didn't work as expected
in live environments.

Automated backups, well, most of us would already have that won't we? We
schedule them and from that point on they are running automated. The one
thing that's needed is of course to validate the backups and do the
occasional test and I highly doubt anyone would blindly trust automation in
that area. At least not if you care about your business.

I think that at this point, nothing will change. The one thing to take away
from it for me personally is that it indicates the general direction Oracle
is heading, which sounds a bit like a "hands-free don't touch it" black
box.

At least that's my THB 0.02 :)

Stefan