This was first published on https://blog.dbi-services.com/oracle-database-12-2-pdbaas (2016-09-19)
Republishing here for new followers. The content is related to the the versions available at the publication date
It’s official, Larry Ellison made the annoucement at first keynote and the database product team at oracle has released the version and the documentation publicly. Oracle Database Exadata Express Cloud Service is the ‘Cloud First’ environment for 12.2
Documentation is there: Cloud > Platform > Data Management > Exadata Express The 12.2 new features available in that ‘Cloud First’ are documented here
We knew it, 12.2 comes ‘Cloud First’ which means that you cannot download it but you can use it on a Cloud Service. This is in my opinion a very good idea. We will not upgrade all our databases to 12.2 so it’s beter to test it and cloud services are good for that. However the way it is released is quite limited:
This Oracle Database Exadata Express Cloud Service is a fully managed service, wich means that you are not the database administrator. Oracle manages the system, creates and administrate the database. You are a user. Actually, when you create a service, a Pluggable Database is provisioned for you and you access only this PDB. It addition to that, for security reason, all features that may interact with the other PDBs or the system, are locked down. For example, you cannot use Data Pump because it writes files on the server. All limitations are documented here. If you wonder how those limitations are implemented, it’s a new 12.2 multitenant feature called lockdown profiles, and resource manager that can isolate PDB memory. I presented that yesterday at Oracle Open World and there is more information about it in new book to come.
Features are limited but you have most of options available: In-Memory, Data Mining, Advanced Compression and Hybrid Columnar Compression, Data Redaction, etc. And it’s an Exadata behind so you have SmartScan.
You can think of it as the ‘Schema as a Service’, but with a PDB instead of a schema.
You access to it only through SQL*Net (encrypted) and can move data to and from using SQLDeveloper.
When you see ‘Exadata’, ‘In-Memory’, and all those options, you probably think about a service for very big database and high CPU resources. But it is not. This service is for evaluation of the 12.2, testing, developement, training on very small databases (few hundred of GB). And only one OCPU (which is an intel core with two threads). It’s hard to imagine more than one user on this. Maximum memory being 5GB it’s also hard to imagine In-Memory here.
So the goal is clearly to test feature, not to run workloads. You can go live with it only if your production is not critical at all (database is backed up daily).
The ‘Express’ part is the simplicity. Prices are easy to calculate:
It is a non-metered service: whether you use it or not you pay per month. But don’t think you can do whatever you want within that month as the transfer of data is limited. You can transfer the volume of the database only a few times per month.
The utilization is simple: you don’t need a DBA. This is the main point: automation and fast provisioning. Developers will love that. Giving them full options is a good marketing idea. Once the application is designed to use In-Memory, Compression, etc. theses options will be required for production as well.
Today, developers need more agility and are often slowed down by the operations. And that’s a major reason why they go to other products that they can install and use themselves easily: Postgres, Cassandra, MongoDB, etc. Oracle Database is to fat for that: look at the time you need to create a database, catalog, catproc, etc. A first answer was the Oracle XE edition which is easy to install anywhere. Now with this Express Cloud Service Oracle gives to possibility to provision a small database in minutes which requires no further administration. Actually, this is the whole idea behind the multitenant architecture: consolidate all those system objects created by catalog/catprocg into a common location (CDB$ROOT) and have light PDBs with only user data.
Final remark. Currently 12.2 is available on on that service but there are no doubts that a full 12.2 will come within the next months.
Hi,
Unfortunately, smart scan is not supported as it says in the feature restrictions:
“Exadata Smart Scan is not supported in this initial release”
Quite incredible really.
Thanks a lot Jason. I fixed the mistake. I didn’t even imagine that you can call a service ‘exadata’ without having SmartScan, probably.
Hi Franck,
Congratulations on providing so much 12.2 info so fast.
Do you confirm that lockdown profiles can be used to prevent the use of extra cost options? Does that include fully integrated options like INMEMORY?
Do you have any information whatsoever about how this may impact licensing costs? Currently we are deploying different option mixes in separate OVMs, which adds lots of overhead and admin headaches.
Hi Stew, Yes, it seems that you can disable any option that you can find in V$OPTION so you can disable ‘In-Memory Column Store’ . The ‘it seems’ is because there’s no public version yet of 12.2 where you can alter lockdown profiles. Cheers, Franck.
Hi Franck,
great article by the way. Does this look like Oracle is pushing(brute forcing) more customers to the cloud by any means possible? It looks like in the near future the not-extinct Oracle DBA’s will work only in Oracle Cloud.:)