In a 2014 VoucherCloud.net (a coupon website) survey of the non-technical U.S. general public:
- 11% believed HTML wss a sexually-transmitted disease
- 51% believed a stormy weather condition would affect their access to the Cloud
- 27% thought a gigabyte was a common insect in South America
- 18% thought Blu-ray was a marine animal
- 23% thought an MP3 was a Star Wars robot
- 12% thought USB is the acronym for a European country
- 42% said they believed a motherboard was “the deck of a cruise ship”
- 77% could not identify what SEO means
- 15% say software is comffortable clothing
However, 61% of the 2,392 respondents (18 and older) all thought it was important to have a good knowledge of technology.
That explains why in ZDNet’s Oracle’s Next Chapter: The Autonomous Database and the DBA (https://www.zdnet.com/article/oracles-next-chapter-the-autonomous-database-and-the-dba/) takes a bit of chewing to understand that when a vendor says “you’ll save $250K by moving to the Cloud,” that’s akin to someone saying, “You’ll save $40,000 by not buying a car, but renting it at $40/day from Hertz/Avis/Thrifty/Dollar.”
Well, yes, but not quite. Rental agencies have those add-ons such as a Collision Damage Waiver, which can be thought of as the same as that 15% mandatory support fee needed on top of the core/sizing/machine-size fee, providing coverage in case something goes awry (or buggy, or BSOD’s for no known reason.)
And simply, if you stop paying, you don’t have a car/database/middleware/website. If you do decide to opt for the rent-to-own option, just like the ubiquitous furniture rentals used by many seasoned relocation workers, doing so does cost much more than buying the furniture outright (but you don’t have to move it, and you get to turn it in, and trade-up or down when you wish, subject to the terms of your rental agreement.)
[Terms are important, as you will notice in the new Cloud On-Premise agreement, it does have a 4-year minimum term – similar to a limited term car lease. And it comes with an early termination cost. And similarly it has “limited mileage” conditions, which if you go over your CPU/sizing/feature limits, you’ll simply be billed extra for that. Convenience has costs.]
An autonomous database at this stage is similar to self-driving cars – given super-precise limitations, on a controlled environment, with well-defined conditions, yes, the Optimizer stays within the lanes and keeps the database engine humming along. Whence the odd situation is encountered, back to the driver/DBA to figure out what to-do and what went wrong.
The LA TImes article:
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-1-10-americans-html-std-study-finds-20140304-story.html
The full VoucherCloud.net survey results:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9HJeR-F9NIeczNDb2hVb2p6UTQ/edit
In closing, in case you missed it, Japan created a banana with edible peels: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/edible-peel-bananas-created-japan-food-spd/
Thoughts from James H. Lui 
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