Connect to Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse

You can create a connection to Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse and use the connection to access data.

Before you start, ask your Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse administrator to allow access from Oracle Analytics Cloud. The configuration steps that administrators follow are different for public and private types of connection:
You can connect to Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse using security certificates downloaded from Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse to a wallet (known as mTLS, or Mutual Transport Layer Security), or without a wallet (known as TLS, or Transport Layer Security). See About TLS Authentication. The credentials wallet file secures communication between Oracle Analytics and Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse. The wallet file (for example, wallet_ALKC1.zip) that you upload must contain SSL trusted certificates, to enable SSL on your Oracle Database Cloud connections.
  1. To connect using a credentials wallet file, (known as Mutual TLS connection), download the SSL certificates from Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse.

    See Download Client Credentials (Wallets) in Using Oracle Autonomous Database Serverless.

    The credentials wallet file secures communication between Oracle Analytics and Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse. The wallet file (for example, wallet_ALKC1.zip) that you upload must contain SSL certificates.

    To connect without using a credentials wallet file (known as TLS connection), skip Step 1 and go straight to the Step 2.

  2. On your home page, click Create then click Connection.
  3. Click Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse.
  4. For Connect Using, select Basic or Resource Principal.
    For information about using Resource Principal, see topic "Use Resource Principal to Access Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Resources" on Oracle Autonomous AI Database Serverless or Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure.
  5. Enter a user-friendly Connection Name and Description.
  6. For Encryption Type:
    • To connect without a credentials wallet file, select TLS as the Encryption Type, enter a Connection String, then enter a Username and Password of a user in Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse.
    • To connect using a credentials wallet file, select Mutual TLS as the Encryption Type, then click Select and browse for and select the Client Credentials wallet file that you downloaded from Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse (for example, wallet_ALKC1.zip), then enter a Service Name. The Client Credentials field displays the cwallet.sso file. See Selecting a Service Name for Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse.

      Tip: If you define the Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse connection using an instance wallet, the high service name is selected by default. Change the name to low or medium to avoid limiting the number of concurrent connections.

  7. In Client Credentials, then click Select to navigate to and select your client credentials ZIP file.
  8. If you're connecting to a remote database, click Use Remote Data Connectivity.
    Check with your administrator that you can access the remote database.
  9. If you want data modelers to be able to use these connection details. click System connection. See Database Connection Options.
  10. Under Authentication, specify how you'd like to authenticate the connection:
    • Always use these credentials - Oracle Analytics always uses the login name and password you provide for the connection. Users aren’t prompted to log in.
    • Require users to enter their own credentials - Oracle Analytics prompts users to enter their own user name and password for the data source. Users can only access the data for which they have the permissions, privileges, and role assignments.
  11. Click Save.
You can now create datasets from the connection.

Selecting a Service Name for Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse

Selecting the correct prebuilt database service name is key to connecting to Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse (Oracle ALK). Learn about the different prebuilt database service names and which one you should choose.

What are the prebuilt database service names?

Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse provides three database service names for connections in the following format:
  • databasename_high - Highest resources, lowest concurrency. Queries run in parallel.
  • databasename_medium - Fewer resources, higher concurrency. Queries run in parallel.
  • databasename_low - Least resources, highest concurrency. Queries run serially.

These names are contained in the tnsnames.ora file in the Oracle wallet. Click Database Connections in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console to see the strings.
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About Consumer Groups in Oracle Resource Manager

The database service names are mapped to consumer groups in the Resource Manager that limit the number of simultaneous connections and queries that can run in Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse at the same time (concurrency) and the maximum number of parallel processes that are allowed per query (parallel_degree_limit). These limits are based on the number of ECPUs or OCPUs licensed and whether auto-scaling is enabled.

The following table shows sample concurrent connection values for a database with 32 ECPUs with ECPU auto-scaling disabled and enabled.

Database Service Name Number of Concurrent Queries with ECPU Auto Scaling Disabled Number of Concurrent Queries with ECPU Auto Scaling Enabled
high 3 9
medium 20 (.63 × number of ECPUs) 60 (1.89 × number of ECPUs)
low Up to 4800 (150 x number of ECPUs) Up to 4800 (150 x number of ECPUs)

Choosing the Optimal Database Service Name for Oracle Analytics

The largest number of simultaneous queries that can run for the high database service is three without auto-scaling and nine with auto-scaling enabled. This limit can be reached by three users connected to the high database service name running one query each or three reports in one Oracle Analytics dashboard for a single user.

The low service name works well for most Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse workloads with Oracle Analytics, but to utilize parallel queries, select the medium service name. The parallel degree limit for the low service name is one, meaning no parallelism. If you're connected to the low service name, even if the parallel degree is specified at the table or index level, the degree of parallelism is reduced to one and the query doesn't run in parallel. The parallel degree limit (per query) for medium and high equals two times the number of licensed CPUs.

Note: Connecting to a database that's part of Oracle Fusion Analytics Warehouse (Fusion Analytics) requires using the low service name to allow for the maximum number of concurrent queries.

Monitoring queued statements

If the maximum number of concurrent queries limit is reached, the excess queries are queued. Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse provides a metric to check for queued statements.

Select Database Actions and Database Dashboard in the Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse page of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console.


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Select Performance Hub, and select SQL Monitor Tab to see the queued statement status, which is displayed as a grey clock. In this example, three queries are running with the high service name, one is queued, and one query is running with the medium service name. The queued statement executes when one of the three queries running with the high service name completes.


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Monitoring parallelism

If the parallel degree limit is exceeded, you see the degree of parallelism (DOP) downgrade in the SQL monitor report. The degree of parallelism downgrade reason of 353 means that the Resource Manager downgraded the statement due to the maximum degree of parallelism limit.


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For Oracle Database version 18 and higher, the downgrade reason codes are described in the following table:

Resource Manager CPU Wait Event

A session waiting to be allocated CPU by the Resource Manager increments the resmgr:cpu quantum wait event. To reduce the occurrence of this wait event, verify that the low or medium service name is being used for the OAC connection or increase the number of CPUs allocated to Oracle ALK.

To see the number of waits and the average wait time, review Foreground Wait Events in the Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) report for the resmgr:cpu quantum wait event.

In this example, there were a total of 272 waits, waiting on average 588.91 milliseconds each for a total wait time of 160 seconds. It was determined that the reason was that the high database service name was being used for the OAC connection. These wait periods disappeared once the customer switched to the medium service, and the periodic slowness of their dashboard was resolved.


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Tip When Creating a Connection to Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse in Oracle Analytics

In Oracle Analytics, when you define the Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse connection using the instance wallet, the high service name is selected by default. Change the name to low or medium to avoid limiting the number of concurrent connections.


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