You can run Oracle anywhere. It’s very flexible, which means anywhere you can get a VM, you can run it, including a virtual box on your laptop. There’s even have a free edition (XE) if you don’t have large data needs. In this episode, we’ll discuss why you would choose to host your Oracle Database anywhere other than its native cloud. We look at the feasibility of doing so, along with some of the benefits and drawbacks that you’ll likely encounter moving to a public cloud.
Simon Pane, a friend of the show and Principal Consultant at Pythian, is here to walk us through this topic. As usual, he provides excellent insights. We start by discussing Oracle’s cloud (OCI) and the reasons to stay with it, which include its flexibility and very good support. However, the platform is in its relative infancy which means that there will likely some problems.
We then move on to the big three: Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Moving to a public cloud provider might be part of an organizational “bigger picture” and other non-functional reasons. With Azure and AWS, clients are likely hoping to take advantage of the other features, such as Azure’s Office 365 and AWS’s RDS. Despite being licensed for Oracle, Azure is not optimized for it because there are no special shapes or options. AWS does have managed services, but still has drawbacks, which Simon explores in-depth.
We then move on to Google Cloud, the newest kid on the block. There are certainly great features (like BigQuery) that come along with it, but there is a major discrepancy: Licensing. The Oracle licensing policy does not include GC, so Simon offers some potential workarounds for this problem.
Ultimately, there is no slam-dunk solution for where to host Oracle databases. If you put your blinders on and focus on one area, it might seem that one cloud resolves all of your needs. However, it really comes down to making trade-offs and deciding which need is most important. Be sure to tune in today!