In part1, I summarized the options available for DB deployment on OCI and described the Base Database Service. In this post I will talk about the second group i.e. Exadata platform based services in detail and explore the possible deployment scenarios. When it comes to Exadata based options, it get a little complex as there are multiple ways to do it. To reiterate, there are two ways the deployment can be done. One is in the public cloud and another one is the private cloud (Exadata Cloud@Customer aka ExaCC) where the hardware is deployed in the customer’s data center. Let’s now explore the different offerings.

Before getting into the details, let’s look at it from a different angle. In OCI, there are two flavours of Oracle Database that you can use. First one is your typical Oracle Database (in RAC & non-RAC configurations) as a PaaS service. Provisioning, deployment etc is of course automated and can be done from a nice console based UI. You can do it from command line/APIs as well, if you want to. Second is the Autonomous Database Service (which is more like SaaS). It doesn’t give you the OS access and most of the administration is automated and autonomous. Now let’s dive into the details of each one of these flavours and the possible deployment options.

User managed RAC/non-RAC VM Clusters

As I mentioned above, this is most similar to your on-premises Exadata deployment. You reserve an Exadata rack, create VM clusters and use it. It can be both RAC as well as non-RAC (single VM Cluster)

There are three ways to do it:

ExaDB-D - Oracle Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure

This is OCI’s public cloud offering. You reserve an Exadata rack for yourself. The lowest configuration is called a Base Rack. Next, you have the option of selecting the number of database nodes and storage nodes (with a minimum of 2 DB + 3 Storage nodes, which used to be called a quarter rack). It can be expanded by adding more database and/or storage nodes. It supports up to 8 clusters per rack (Base Rack is an exception which supports only one cluster).

ExaCC

This is the private cloud offering we talked about. The hardware is placed in customer’s data center. Rest of the steps are almost similar. Expansion process is going to be more involved as Oracle will need to ship the additional hardware to the customer location and configure it.

ExaScale

This is the new Exadata based architecture which decouples the compute and storage layers. That makes it extremely elastic and allows you to start really small. There is no need to reserve a full rack. You pick the compute cores you need and the storage (it can be as low as 300 GB) and you are done. You get all the Exadata features. The minimum database version supported at this moment is 23ai.

Autonomous Databases/Clusters

This one is an Oracle database based, fully autonomous database service offering which requires very minimal administration efforts as most of the admin activities like provisioning, backing up, patching and upgrading are automated. It is extremely easy for the developers to get started. They can provision the service with a few clicks and start using it. There are two ways to do it:

Autonomous Database Shared

This is the most popular Autonomous Database offering in the public cloud. It uses Exadata platform underneath. It is extremely easy to get started with this one. In the console, all your need to input is the type of Autonomous database you need (described below), the number of ECPUs, the amount of storage and the connectivity options and it can be provisioned in minutes. It supports features like auto-scaling ECPUs to 3x of the original capacity if your workload requires additional resources. It supports features like automatic patching, healing and performance tuning. There are four different flavours of it:

  • ADW (Autonomous Data Warehouse)- It is meant for all your Data Warehouse needs.
  • ATP (Autonomous Transaction Processing) - This is the flavour to be used with all the OLTP applications
  • AJD (Autonomous JSON Database) - It is meant to be used with JSON-centric applications.
  • Apex - It is meant to be used with Apex applications. It is somewhat limited in the functionality as compared to an ATP database (which also supports Apex). You can start with an Apex database and if there is a need of the additional functionality, it can be upgraded to a full ATP database.

Autonomous Database Dedicated

An offering very similar to Autonomous Database Shared with a difference that it runs in a dedicated rack (reserved by you either in the public cloud or ExaCC). It can coexist with your managed RAC/non-RAC clusters in the same rack. Some of the features may differ from the shared flavour.

So that was a quick overview of Exadata based database deployment options in OCI. In the next post, I will talk about the MySQL offerings in OCI.