Oracle founder Larry Ellison claimed that Equifax's huge data breach would never have happened had the company used Oracle's upcoming self-patching database.

Equifax had been hacked through an unpatched Apache Struts flaw, exposing 143 million US customers' data records, and the details of 400,000 UK customers, to hackers.Though Apache Foundation had released a fix back in March, Equifax had simply failed to apply it.

Ellison suggested the Equifax breach was a result of unwillingness to bring the system offline to patch it efficiently.

While Oracle is still moving to a fully autonomous security system which Ellison promised more details, he did show off a fully automated database, Oracle 18c, coming in December, which he said includes the ability to automatically patch flaws.

He explained that the system relies on machine learning to identify anomalies in patterns of behavior, to allow companies to spot potential malicious behavior before they are impacted.