Oracle’s Juan Loaiza gave developers a bracing shot of perspective at a recent virtual event: If you want to work at a competitive company, the apps you create must get more value from data. That’s because data-driven companies know their customers and employees better, see opportunities faster, and make keener decisions based on having better information than their competitors.

That means in order to use more techniques and technologies like machine learning, real-time analytics, graph analysis, documents, spatial processing, Internet of Things, and blockchain—developers need simpler ways to bring them into the apps they’re building.

“Data-driven applications create value from data in new ways,” says Loaiza, executive vice president of mission-critical database technology, speaking at the recent Oracle Developers Live event. They use algorithms that, “add tremendous amounts of value that was never possible before.” But these also can create more complexity than developers have had to deal with in the past, since they can come with a collection of new products, specialized databases, and development paradigms to implement them.

Luckily, the day’s Oracle Developer Live agenda left little mystery about simpler ways to build these capabilities into data-driven apps. To start, Loaiza unpacked ways Oracle engineers have paired each of these development paradigms with a synergistic data paradigm. The result is cloud services that make it simpler than ever for developers to tap these techniques.

“What we want to do is make these new kinds of apps much simpler to build and manage,” Loaiza says. “We want data and dev not fighting each other, but working together.”

Oracle’s approach embraces a converged database rather than a collection of specialty databases and an autonomous database to relieve developers of most of the data management burden that takes time away from writing code. Loaiza also announced a new Autonomous JSON Cloud Database for app developers.

To set the stage for a day full of developer-led online sessions and hands-on labs, Loaiza laid out some of Oracle’s technology advances that greatly simplify application development, such as pluggable databases, native sharding, event-based architecture, and the hugely popular, fully featured, low code service called Oracle Application Express (APEX).

Here's a quick summary of the technologies Loaiza discussed and some resources for each. Each of them can help you get more value from your data. If you want to hear what he had to say, I’ve provided the time stamps for each section of his talk.

Machine learning: (minute 12:25) Oracle Database lets you run machine learning directly on business data inside the database, with more than 30 in-database, parallel machine learning algorithms so you can do tasks, such as real-time recommendations, fraud detection, and sentiment analysis. It also lets you easily augment the built-in database algorithms with Python or R algorithms that you can load yourself.

Here’s a good place to learn more about machine learning in the Oracle Database.

Juan Loaiza lays out the opportunities and roadblocks when creating value from data in applications.

Real-time analytics: (minute 14:23) Oracle Database gives you in-memory columnar formats and automatic parallel processing that enable analytics to run transparently—more than 100 times faster—with no app changes needed.

Here’s a good place to learn more about real-time analytics in the Oracle Database.

Graph analysis: (minute 14:57) “Oracle makes it simpler for applications to use graph analytics to discover things like, influencers, dependencies, communities, ranking, and customer 360,” says Loaiza.

To learn more about graph analytics, here’s the recorded presentation from Developer Live: Database.

Documents: (minute 16:33) Documents are key to modern programming. And Oracle makes it simpler to use JSON and XML documents in the database. Loaiza also discusses text search (minute 18:35) and how Oracle makes it easier to index, search, and analyze text documents.

Learn more about Autonomous JSON Database.

Spatial processing: (minute 20:20) Oracle helps developers build applications that use and analyze locations and networks. With this capability, you can develop sophisticated apps that use geospatial data to improve utility services, build smart cities, and plan efficient delivery routes.

Learn more about spatial and graph features in Oracle Database.

Internet of Things: (minute 24:10) Oracle makes it simpler to develop applications that stream IoT data into the database. For example, Oracle Database can quickly deposit the IoT data into in-memory buffers and then uses a background process that bulk loads the database, so you can insert more than 25 million elements of IoT data on a two-socket server and then analyze the IoT data using the analytics built into Oracle Database. Build apps with Oracle IoT Cloud Service.

Blockchain: (minute 22:02) With Oracle Database 20c, blockchain tables are easy to integrate into applications because they look like standard database tables, and you use the same declarative SQL against them for analytics and transactions on blockchain data. Learn about Blockchain tables in Oracle Database.

Microservices: (minute 3:14) Oracle makes API-driven data architectures much simpler, with a wide choice of technologies, including pluggable databases, database queues, and Golden Gate replication, which allow you to treat data as a microservice.

Watch the dev live session: Building a Simpler, Reliable Persistence Layer for Microservices.

See all the Developer Live: Database presentations on how a converged, autonomous database can make it simpler to get value from different types of data into your apps.

• Maria Colgan’s blog post: The future is data driven
• Try Oracle Autonomous Database for free