MineSense drives efficient, sustainable mining on Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse
Mining tech company uses Oracle Object Storage, Autonomous AI Lakehouse and APEX, Select AI, and generative AI to improve productivity and service.
Canada | Mining, Oil and Gas
“With a powerful platform in Oracle Autonomous AI Database, combined with our advanced sensors and machine learning algorithms, we can produce data that helps miners to better distinguish high-grade ore from low-grade waste in real time. This leads to process optimizations that dramatically improve mine profitability and sustainability.”
MineSense Technologies provides real-time, sensor-based sorting solutions that help some of the world’s largest mines improve recovery of ore, reduce waste, and operate more sustainably. Its technology uses rugged, high-speed X-ray fluorescence sensors installed on mining equipment to scan material at the extraction face and estimate ore grade in every shovel bucket.
By generating high-resolution mineral data at the earliest stage of the mining process, MineSense gives operators timely visibility into ore and waste before material reaches the processing plant. Combined with advanced machine learning models, this data helps mines make smarter routing decisions, improve metal recovery, reduce dilution, and lower the downstream energy, water, and processing resources spent on waste.
To support this data-intensive workflow at scale, MineSense needed a powerful, flexible cloud data platform. This platform had to be able to integrate large volumes of diverse industrial IoT data from mining operations, support analytics and machine learning, and help teams deliver secure, near real-time insights to customers.
Why MineSense chose Oracle
MineSense chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse to support its modern lakehouse architecture and automate data integration across multiple platforms and formats. The platform enables MineSense to analyze industrial IoT data in real time while providing the performance, scalability, and automation required by a growing data-driven mining technology business.
Oracle Autonomous AI Database provides a high performance, self-managing foundation for MineSense’s data platform. Built-in capabilities such as Oracle APEX Data Studio, Select AI, MCP Server, and help the company accelerate application development, simplify data loading and transformation, support natural language data interactions, and enable more automated AI-driven workflows.
The use of OCI generative AI agents to combine large language models with retrieval-augmented generation helps automate searches across the company’s knowledge base.
Results
Using OCI Object Storage and Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse as part of its lakehouse architecture, MineSense has scaled its data platform while reducing operational complexity. The company’s small IT team lowered DBA workloads by 65% while supporting rapid growth in both customers and data volumes, scaling to more than 55 TB data sets in four years. Oracle Interconnect for Azure enables MineSense to continue using Azure-based machine learning tools used by its data science team while keeping data securely in Oracle Autonomous AI Database.
MineSense also uses the Delta Share open protocol to share data with global customers across cloud environments, helping reduce compute usage and costs. This complements the company’s existing Oracle REST Data Services APIs, which customers use to access near real-time data collected from mining operations. With Oracle Select AI, MineSense staff can simplify sensor support requests and assist with database monitoring and performance tuning.
In addition, OCI generative AI agents automate searches for equipment issues across the company’s knowledgebase, improving MineSense field engineering productivity by 5X and saving hundreds of hours per year in development and maintenance time.
Oracle APEX allowed staff to rapidly build and deliver low-code apps in only one week instead of six. Together with Oracle Data Studio and OCI Functions, the platform reduces the complexity of data workflows, supports automated application development, and allows developers to spend more time delivering business functionality rather than managing infrastructure and repetitive ETL processes.
About the customer
MineSense provides technology and data solutions that help mines increase output, efficiencies, and profitability while minimizing environmental footprints across land, water, and energy use.