Cloud DBMS Critical Capabilities

When technology is discussed, it’s typically driven by solutions, interoperability and flexibility. I don’t think I’ve had a conversation purely around a pillar of a capability hence I thought it could be interesting to look at the technology in this way.

This blog will look at individual cloud DBMS capabilities based on a problem definition which may in turn help individuals qualify the cloud platform. This will then be done in conjunction with providing some links to more information. One of the biggest challenges in technology, generally, is finding answers to what you think are obvious questions, these problems are based on my interpretation.

Let’s start with Financial Governance, my interpretation is around how easy is to manage, predict and estimate the cost of the platform.

Financial Governance

Problem Definition:

How can we understand the costs of Oracle Autonomous Database both now and for future growth; i.e. I don’t want to start small and then it ends up costing a fortune…

Solution:

Simplified consumption model. Autonomous Database is based around per second billing, there is no minimum commitment and you can start from 1 OCPU and 1 TB. The next thing you need to qualify is how much CPU and Storage. Now the critical thing here is there are NO skews for the ‘type’ of CPU or Storage you need, i.e. it is very simple to understand and cost. You don’t need to think about if you need a specific tier of storage, or how much data you process, those are nebulous questions that can be very difficult to quantify. More importantly, the storage technology which includes Hybrid Columnar Compression enables data to be compressed thus saving you previous GBs.

A great innovative example is to Schedule Start and Stop Times for an Autonomous Database Instance.

With cloud, you pay for what you use, so you want to squeeze every last drop out and never have idle resources, if you’re not using it switch it off and, for example, only use it during business hours. This is for the non-production environments critically, of course, but people don’t tend to think about switching systems off. I guess that’s a mindset thing, you would never turn your data centre servers off when you left the office but really it’s something you should consider (please note I’m not recommending you turn off your prod servers this evening!).

Outside of the simplified consumption model, there are a few other areas that can help give visibility of costs within Oracle Cloud, information for these is below. Also, let’s not forget about the 10TB free data egress per month, which is probably quite important for large mission-critical data warehouses.

Recommended Reading

OCI Compartments 
OCI Budgets
OCI Cost Analysis

If you would like to find out more about Oracle Cloud capabilities, you can speak to one of our expert Oracle Cloud Consultants today. Alternatively, email us at enquiries@dsp.co.uk.