To the Extreme - Exadata Oracle Database in the Cloud

The cloud was always a low cost option - spin up a quick dev / test , run a Hadoop cluster to crunch some numbers but enterprise performance in the cloud not so much.

What with unpredictable I/O, "Noisy Neighbors" and cutthroat competition nobody was positioning to deliver a deluxe offering. Not any more. Oracle have taken there biggest database servers and provided them exclusively to customers. Yes the Top of the line Exadata Cloud offering - Not to be confused with the rinkydink Exadata Express offering - is a full blown quarter half or full rack with all the equivalent performance memory and Storage bandwidth of the on premise setup.

Because it is exclusively for your use the initial rack provisioning is not automated you have to get it set up but once the rack is in place it takes just minutes to spin up a new instance in its own Oracle home with Full RAC capability and Backup configuration right from the Cloud front end.I will quickly talk you through this procedure and you can see that it is very similar to the other DBCS offerings from Oracle down to the menu options.

The first choice you get when you log into you identity domain is whether you want a normal DBCS database or an Exadata database. Naturally we want the Rolls Royce treatment . Select the Oracle Database Exadata Cloud service and this is the screen we see.

No Surprise here - Exadata supports both 11G R2 and 12c R1. This being a virtualized Exadata Machine we get exactly the same options. Since I am thinking of moving one of my Legacy databases I go for an 11g Database. Note that the Grid on the Exadata is 12c but that's fine as instances can be either of the two versions since Grid version must be equal or greater than the db version.

11.2.0.4 is the terminal release of 11g and is already in Extended support which continues till 2020. If this were an on premise install I would be wondering about support Uplift Fees due in May 2017 but on the cloud its all taken care of for me - so in the immortal words of Bobby Mc Ferrin "Don't Worry be Happy"

This is a very important screen Not only do we choose which Exadata rack to use we also chose the Service name , Sid, Admin Password ,Character set and national character set and also the backup configuration. We were told by Oracle support to create our backup containers before hand and we used the excellent Cloudberry explorer to do the same

After entering the backup container information and choosing to keep backups either only in Oracle Cloud Storage or in Both the Virtual Rack RECO diskgroup and cloud storage we then move on to the summary screen.

Click on Create and then wait a bit as the magic happens in the background. Pretty soon you will find you need Oracle home and Instances are created and you can connect to the Rack and access the instance. Please note that the only material differences between this an an on premise offering is that the number of storage cells has been rationalized so a quarter has 3 a half double that at 6 and a full has 12 cells.

Also since this is a dedicated machine you can setup a site to site VPN if you like . However inorder to setup additional Ports because it is a Paas offering you need to raise an SR you can' directly open any ports you require. I would assume that if you select a quarter rack you are probably getting one quarter of a full rack but through the wonders of infiniband partitioning there is no way to determine this becuase all traffic is isolated at the hardware level.

As a longtime user of Exadata on Premise I find this is a great offering and couples with the Express offering for (say Dev or test ) it easily allows any company to shift their High Performance Databases to the cloud. I also see a good use case for the Exadata Express offering even when production stays on premise because as a DBA I have often heard developers bellyaching that they can't figure out why things work differently on Exadata and they want a test instance on Exadata. well with the Express option I can easily give them one.

Oracle is also set to launch Exadata Cloud services on premise which is good for corporations who want the ease of a service model but the security of their own firewall.

All in all this is as good as it gets in the cloud.