Oracle LiveLabs - Hands On Education

Hello everyone!

I wanted to bring to your awareness this capability offered by Oracle LiveLabs Home (oracle.com)

Oracle LiveLabs gives you access to Oracle's tools and technologies to run a wide variety of labs and workshops using an Oracle tenancy. There’s extremely good content for Developers, DevOps, Data Engineers, Architects and Data Scientists (including content around data lakes, data warehouses, analytics, ML, AI, etc.), particularly in, but not limited to, the OCI space.

Checkout the full blog on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oracle-livelabs-hands-education-julio-lois-flwze

Oracle OCI Gen AI Services and Enhancing Developer Productivity

Let’s talk about Oracle’s OCI Gen AI Service, Generative AI Service | Oracle [oracle.com], in the context of the developer productivity opportunities that exist because of it which can transform development shops to be more efficient all-around!

I am currently exploring the OCI service for areas such as the below, and will write a follow-up entry relative to my findings:

• Code generation and auto-completion: With generative AI, the potential to write code using AI to greatly speed up building extensions and integrations will be a game changer, much like how data scientists can now write R & Python code exponentially faster using ChatGPT like services, so can writing extensions and integrations become far less manual for you.
• More time could be spent on design, unit testing and other aspects versus manual development.
• Code refactoring & bug fixing: Asking the AI to code review, improve, make suggestions around implementation for custom code is something already available for high code programming languages like C#, Python, PLSQL and Java in tools like ChatGPT, and this can increase quality and reduce bugs.
• You can embed AI reviews to your peer review process, as well as during the build process to optimize performance and reduce logic errors.
• To help with KT’s when flexing with staff or when a developer is touching a code base they did not previously own, the developer can ask the AI service to explain logic, speeding up the learning process exponentially.
• Automated Test Generation: having the ability for the AI to generate test scenarios and test cases, in supported frameworks, based on the implementation and logic would save time and reduce defects.
• We can ask the AI to interpret code and suggest unit test scenarios and even build them (depending on the framework).
• Code comparisons: rather than using tools like Beyond Compare, to manually inspect differences in code bases, you can ask the AI to inspect it for you and produce a comparison report with intelligence built in (meaning, really explain what is different, not just highlight text differences).
• Code notation & summarization: imagine uploading code to the AI service and asking for a detailed implementation report with steps and explanations, and even a technical design and graphical support such as sequence diagrams.
• This would be very helpful for custom code where technical designs were not clearly documented or not documented at all (more prevalent now due to the Agile methodology putting less emphasis on documentation) and useful for onboarding new developers and support staff, for product delivery to hand off artifacts to operations, etc.
• The time savings from not having to write detailed technical designs would be fantastic, and in general to speed up any developer working on a case by asking the AI to summarize and explain sections of the code.

I can produce many other scenarios, but I think I’ve made my point.

So, why Oracle since there’s similar services in the industry? I believe the Oracle services can have a competitive advantage because Oracle AI data models should yield higher accuracy with frameworks such as Oracle JET, Java, PLSQL, Fast Formulas, etc. since Oracle owns those frameworks and uses the AI service internally as part of their own DevOps processes, and the AI model could learn overtime as your developers utilize the service, and it would learn from usage, on top of Oracle’s tuning of the service over time. Lastly, it would be within your secure VCN and OCI environment, so privacy and security should not be a concern if you already have an OCI tenancy, and this is a major factor for many wishing to adopt Gen AI safely.

I think the usage of this, for the moment, is limited to high code frameworks such as Java, PLSQL, C#, Oracle JET (JavaScript), Python etc. but we would be very interested in extending the usability and benefits to middleware technology such as Oracle Integration, for the same reasons listed in this blog.

To that end, I have raised an Idea in Customer connect for the integration of the OCI Gen AI Service to Oracle Integration Gen 3 (OIC) going back to September of last year, so please support this idea over in Cloud Customer Connect by voting and commenting on it (Idea Number: 713448): Generative AI for OIC — Cloud Customer Connect (oracle.com) [community.oracle.com]

Stay tuned for my findings over the next few weeks, as I explore the Gen AI service for these use cases!

Oracle Generative AI Strategy and Options

The software industry continues to innovate and iterate upon AI capabilities, and Oracle is clearly investing heavily in this space as well, with very exciting developments being announced recently.

Below are highly informative strategy updates that you may want to review relative to Oracle’s AI strategy and recent developments.

• Oracle Generative AI Strategy Update - Oracle Generative AI Strategy Update (youtube.com)
• From Greg Pavlik (SVP, Oracle AI) - Posted 2 weeks ago
• Highly recommended to watch, includes an interview with Deloitte's global head of Oracle and AI, also includes a brief conversation with Miranda Nash (GVP App Dev and Fusion AI at Oracle)
• First Principles: Exploring the Depths of OCI Generative AI Service: https://youtu.be/TOPaqzM7u5s?si=rUJIF5Toq7h0XCVG [youtu.be]
• From Pradeep Vincent, SVP Chief Technical Architect, OCI
• Cohere and Oracle Partnership Brings Generative AI Solutions to Customers | Oracle Cloud World 2023 (youtube.com)

The below graphic shows Oracle's AI Technical Stack and where recent investments have been made:

Click on the image to maximize it

These AI services are the same used by Oracle internally to develop AI capabilities in the Fusion applications and Fusion analytics, etc. now exposed for customers to utilize as well.

Something that Greg mentions in the first video, is the GenAI Agents beta recently launched, that is a service that allows you to have a conversation with your data within your autonomous database. Also, there's a new feature now called "Autonomous database select AI", also seen above, here's a GREAT blog about it: Introducing Select AI - Natural Language to SQL Generation on Autonomous Database (oracle.com)

I think that both the GenAI Agents and the Select AI feature should be considered as part of any modern Data Strategy, particularly when the data sources are Oracle applications (such as ERP & HCM), once your Autonomous Datawarehouse (ADW) has the Fusion data in it via BICC, you can use these features there without moving the data to a third-party tool to do similar operations (which can increase your cost of ownership and decrease technology technical stack harmony (meaning using too many vendor products unnecessarily)).

Imagine transforming part of your workforce from writing reports to being able to have conversations with the data without A) Having to move it elsewhere B) Having to spend a lot of time writing complex queries and designing intricate reports. Their workload could shift from designing and building reports, to tuning the data model and talking with the data, and this could then be expanded to end users over time, where internal teams would then focus on data model tuning, and everyone else is just talking with the data.

Additionally, this would all be happening within the secure boundaries of your OCI tenancy, reducing concerns around privacy and security that often worries the mind!

Real life examples for those using ERP and HCM that could be made possible in the near future:

%sql

SELECT AI how many invoices are past due

SELECT AI how many suppliers do we consistently not pay on time, and what are the reasons

SELECT AI how many expenses will be past due by next week

SELECT AI how many people under my organization may retire over the next 5 years

SELECT AI how many people under my organization will lose vacation by end of year

No more reports, just conversations with the data..!