So, you are looking to run a database on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), right ? Great ! But then you login, and suddenly you are faced with a whole range of services that can feel a bit…overwhelming. It’s not always obvious which one’s the right fit, especially for someone new to the OCI database landscape. That’s why I wanted to start this series of posts where we will walk through all the options that OCI throws at us for deploying databases.
One simple option that you could pick for running your database workloads in OCI is going the IaaS route where you spin a compute instance, attach some storage and install the binaries similar to what we are used to do on-premises. But that is not where the real value of OCI is. PaaS services bring that real value where it takes away the provisioning & management complexity. You are provided a nice looking console where you select your options, click create and done ! The same thing and the future management can also be done via APIs and the IaC options like Terraform.
OCI offers the widest range of options in its public cloud offering but there is a private cloud offering as well which is called Exadata Cloud@Customer (ExaCC). The hardware in this case is deployed in the customer’s data center behind the firewall. I will add additional notes if a deployment option is available with ExaCC as well.
We could group the different services in many ways but I will keep it simple. First group is where the service is not based on the Exadata platform. What that means is that it doesn’t use the Exadata hardware underneath. There is only one offering in this space which is called Base Database Service. We will discuss this service in this post. The Second group is where the services are based on the Exadata platform. This is the one which offers the widest range of choices. That will the topic for the next post. In this one, let’s talk about the Base Database Service:
- Oracle Base Database Services makes use of OCI compute VMs. The CPUs types supported are Intel, AMD & Ampere.
- It uses OCI Block Storage for providing the persistent storage. The maximum storage capacity (for the database, recovery area is separate) is capped at 80 TB.
- The storage management is done by ASM in RAC configurations but there is an option (called Fast Provisioning) for single node configurations which can make use of LVM for the storage management. Note that it may come with some limitations.
- It supports both single node as well as RAC systems (max nodes limited to 2). In a single node scenario, you can have a shape as small as 1 OCPU but RAC ones need a minimum of 2 OCPUs per node. It allows you to increase/decrease OCPUs (via a change shape operation).
- The supported Database Editions range from Standard Edition to Enterprise Edition - Extreme Performance.
- Supported Database Versions range from 19c to 23ai.
- It supports both BYOL (Bring Your Own License) and Paid (paying for both the infra and the license) options.
The typical use cases of this one would be the not so demanding Oracle Database workloads. It is a great service and provides very good performance but it is not Exadata. So there may be limits to the compute power and IOPS it can provide. It may work well for most of the small to somewhat medium size workloads.
Here are some more details about the characteristics, which may help you decide if it could be a good fit for the workload you are looking at:
- For AMD based shapes, the max number of OCPUs is 64 (per node). There is a 16 GB of memory per core, so the maximum memory per node can be 1024 GB.
- For Intel based shapes, the max number of OCPUs is 32 (per node). There is a 16 GB of memory per core, so the maximum memory per node can be 512 GB.
- Network bandwidth in both these options is 1 Gbps per OCPU with maximum being capped at 40 Gbps.
- Theoretical maximum IOPS for AMD based shapes is 640K and for Intel based shapes it is 512K.
So, that’s some basic information about the Base Database Service in OCI. This of course is limited information and true at the time of writing this post. In the Cloud world, things change rapidly. Refer these links to see more details and up to date information about this service:
About Oracle Base Database Service