Oracle Database Cloud

May 10, 2011 Ed Goad

I was sitting in the Storage Administrators Guide to Deploying and Managing Oracle DB Clounds on EMC Storage at EMCWorld, and the brought up an intersting idea – a database cloud.

I had previously heard about Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), a clustered, scalable, high-performance database solution. I had also thought about putting multiple Oracle databases into a RAC cluster (small, medium, and large DBs) to save on HW costs. But I had never thought about a database cloud before.

Microsoft has their Azure DB platform – a cloud based SQL db, but it is hosted in the public cloud and you have to customize programs to use it. What if we could do something similar in our private cloud to make DB hosting as easy as VM hosting is in VMware?

New application coming onboard? Just submit a webform and the DB is spun up.
Existing application needing more resources? Just click a button in the UI and more memory and disk is provisioned.
Need high performance at night to calculate reports, but low performace during the day? The cloud over-subscribes resources and moves them as needed.

The only problem I see in this is that some applications are tied lock-step to the DB release – especially Oracle products. This could be a problem with multi-tenancy