Oracle is the world’s leading database company and designed Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for critical enterprise workloads, especially databases. In OCI, databases can be provisioned on bare metal and virtual machines or on Exadata machines. Whatever your enterprise database needs are OCI has a solution. More information about OCI’s database offerings can be found here, but listed below is a quick summary of the four (4) primary options:
Database on Compute
Database on Compute operates similarly to running a database on-premises but is instead run in the Cloud via OCI. This option does not include Cloud tooling (such as patching, backup, restoring, and cloning). OCI Compute offers flexible virtual machine (VM) and bare metal options while balancing price-to-performance ratios.
Oracle Database Cloud Service (DBCS)
DBCS includes Cloud tooling that you don’t get with DB on Compute. Like Compute, DBCS can be provisioned on bare metal (a single bare metal server with remote block volumes) or on virtual machines (VMs). The deployment option you choose affects capabilities. For example, the bare metal option provides high performance and very good scalability, while the VM option provides good performance and good scalability. Bare metal comes at a higher cost versus VM but is less expensive than Exadata Cloud Service.
Oracle Exadata Cloud Service (ExaCS)
This service is hosted on Oracle Exadata Database machines. These machines deliver high performance and high availability in a cost-effective package, delivered over cloud-enabled architecture. It is designed for modern database workloads including data warehousing, online transaction processing (OTP), internet of things (IoT), to name only a few. It’s also ideal for mixed workload types. ExaCS offers the highest performance among Oracle database options, better management features, and the best scaling options. The costs are higher, but its price-to-performance ratio shows its value. It’s a smart choice when high performance and high capacity are required.
Oracle Autonomous Database
Autonomous Database combines Exadata with database and infrastructure automation running on OCI. As its name implies, this cloud database uses machine learning to automate database backups, updates, tuning, security, and additional routine management tasks, helping ease the load on your DBA teams. The automated features deliver maximum database uptime and performance, while also ensuring security through automatic patches and fixes. The machine learning aspect of the database helps eliminate the manual errors often associated with management tasks. Its automation features help reduce costs and raise productivity. There are two types of autonomous databases: Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) and Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP).
Why OCI?
If your workloads are currently on premises, perhaps you are starting to ask why migrate to OCI. Many businesses are finding that OCI offers the right mix of functionality, flexibility, and cost savings to make data migrations worthwhile. It offers a complete cloud infrastructure platform that can accommodate every workload and provide the services needed to migrate, build, and run all your existing enterprise workloads on cloud native applications and data platforms.