resizing Amazon RDS Oracle EE

Yesterday we looked at connecting to DBaaS with the Oracle platform as a service option. We wanted to extend the database table size because we expect to grow the tablespace beyond current storage capacity. We are going to do the same thing today for Amazon RDS running an Oracle Enterprise Edition 12c instance. To start our journey, we need to create a database instance in Amazon. This is done by going to the Amazon AWS Console and click on RDS to launch a database instance. We then click on the Launch DB Instance button and click on the Oracle tab. We select Enterprise Edition then the Dev/Test for our example. We accept the defaults, define our database with ORACLE_SID=pri, username of oracle, no multi-AZ replication, and select the processor and memory size.




While the database is creating we need to change the default network configuration. By default port 1521 is open but open to an ip address range. We need to open this up to everyone so that we can connect to the database from our desktop instance. We are using a Windows 2012 instance in the Oracle IaaS cloud so the default mapping back to the desktop we used to create the database does not work. Note that since we do not have permission to connect via ssh connecting with a tunnel is not an option. We must open up port 1521 to the world and can not use a tunnel to connect these two instances. The only security option that we have is ip white listing, vpn, opening up port 1521 to the world. This is done by going into the security groups definition on the detail page of the instance. We change the default inbound rule from an ip address to anywhere.



We could have alternatively defined a security group that links the ip address of our IaaS instance as well as our desktop prior to creation of this database to keep security a little tighter. Once the database is finished creating we can connect to it. We get the connection string (DNS address) and open up SQL Developer. We create a new database connection using the sid of pri, username of oracle, and port 1521. Once we connect we can define the DBA view to allow us to manage parts of the database since we do not have access using Enterprise Manager.




It looks like the table space will autoextend into the available space, all we should have to do is extend the /rdsdata partition. This is done by modifying the RDS instance from the console. We change the storage from the 20 that we created to 40, turn on advanced monitoring (not necessary for this exercise), and check the apply immediately button. This reconfigures the database and extends the storage. Note the resize command that happens for us. This is a sysdba level command that is executed on our behalf since we do not have sys rights outside the console.





We can look at the new instance and see that the size has grown and we have more space to expand into.



We can see the changes from the monitoring console


In summary, we are able to easily scale storage in an Amazon RDS instance even though we do not have sys access to the system. We do need to use the AWS Console to make this happen and can not do this through Enterprise Manager because we can’t add the agent to the instance. It is important to note that some of the options that are available from the console and some are available with altered command line options that give you elevated admin privileges without giving you system access. Look at the new command structures and decide if forking your admin tools just to run on RDS is something worth doing or too much effort. These changes effectively lock you into running your Oracle database on Amazon RDS. For example to change the tablespace definition in Oracle you would typically type

alter database default tablespace users2;

but with Amazon RDS you would need to type

exec rdsadmin.rdsadmin_util.alter_default_tablespace('users2');

Is this a show stopper? It could be or it might be trivial. It could stop some pre-packaged applications from working in Amazon RDS and you are forced to go with EC2 and S3. The upgrade storage example that we just went through would be a manual process with the involvement of an operating system administrator thus incurring additional cost and time. Again, this blog is not about A is better than B. This blog is about showing things that are hidden and helping you decide which is better for you. Our recommendation is to play with Amazon RDS and Oracle PaaS and see which fits your needs best.

resizing database as a service with Oracle

Historically, what happens to a database months after deployment has always been an issue and problem. If we go out and purchase a computer and disk storage then deploy a database onto the server. If we oversize the hardware and storage, we wasted budget. If we undersize the hardware and storage we had to purchase a new computer or new storage and get an operating system expert to reconfigure everything on the new server and get a database administrator to reconfigure the database installation to run on the new server or new storage. For example, if we purchased a 1 TB disk drive and allocated it all to /u02 the database had a ton of space to grow into. We put the DATA area there and put the RECO area into /u03. Our database service suddenly grows wildly and we have a record number of transactions and increase the offerings in our product catalog and our tablespace suddenly grows to over 800 GB. Disk performance starts to suffer and we want to grow our 1 TB to 2 TB. To do this we have to shut down our database, shut down the operating system, attach the new disk, format and mount it as /u05, copy the data from /u02 to /u05, remount /u05 as /u02, and reboot the system. We could have backed up the database from /u02 and reformatted /u02 and /u05 as a logical volume to allow us to dynamically grow the disk and allow us to purchase a 1 TB for our /u05 disk rather than a 2 TB disk and reduce our cost. We successfully grew our tablespace by purchasing more hardware, involving an operating system admin, and our database administrator. We were only down for a day or half day while we copied all of our data and modified the disk layout.

Disk vendors attacked this problem early by offering network or fiber attached storage rather that direct attached storage. They allow you to add disks dynamically keeping you from having to go out and purchase new disks. You can attach your disk as a logical unit number and add spindles as desired. This now requires you to get a storage admin involved to update your storage layout and grow your logical unit space from 1 TB to 2 TB. You then need to get your operating system admin to grow the file system that is on your /u02 logical unit mount to allow your database admin to grow the tablespace beyond the 1 TB boundary. Yes, this solves the problem of having to bring down the server, touch the hardware, add new cables and spindles to the computer. It allows data centers to be remote and configurations to be done dynamically with remote management tools. It also addresses the issue of disk failures much easier and quicker by pushing the problem to the storage admin to monitor and fix single disk issues. It solves a problem but there are better ways today to address this issue.

With infrastructure as a service we hide these issues by treating storage in the cloud as dynamic storage. With Amazon we can provision our database in EC2 and storage in S3. If we need to grow our S3, we allocate more storage to our bucket and grow the file system in EC2. The database admin then needs to go in and grow the tablespace to fill the new storage area. We got rid of the need for a storage admin, reduced our storage cost, and eliminated a step in our process. We still need an operating system admin to grow the file system and a database admin to grow the tablespace. The same is true if we use Azure compute or Oracle IaaS.

Let’s go through how to attach and grow storage to a generic compute instance. We have a CentOS image running in IaaS on the Oracle Cloud. We can see that the instance has 9 GB allocated to it as the root operating system. We would like to add a 20 GB disk then grow the disk to 40 GB as a second test. At first we notice that our instance is provisioned and we the 9 GB disk labeled CentOS7 allocated to our instance as /dev/xvdb. We then create a root partition /dev/xvdb1, provision an operating system onto it using the xfs file system, and mount it as the root filesystem.


To add a 20 GB disk, we go into the Compute management screen, and create a new storage volume. This is easy because we just create a new volume and allocate 20 GB to it.



Given that this disk is relatively small, we don’t have to wait long and can then attach it to our CentOS7 instance by clicking on the hamburger menu to the right of our new 20 GB disk and attaching it to our CentOS7 instance.



It is important to note that we did not need to reboot the instance but suddenly the disk appears as /dev/xvdc. We can then partition the disk with fdisk, create a file system with mkfs, and mount the disk by creating a new /u02 mount point and mounting /dev/xvdc1 on /u02.



The real exercise here is to grow this 20 GB mounted disk to 40 GB. We can go into the Volume storage and Update the storage to a larger size. This is simple and does not require a reboot or much work. We go to the Storage console, Update the disk, grow it to 40 GB, and go back to the operating system and notice that our 20 GB disk is now 40 GB. We can create a new partition /dev/xvdc2 and allocate it to our storage.




Note that we selected poorly when we made our file system selection. We selected to lay out an ext3 file system onto our /dev/xvdc1 partition. We can’t grow the ext3 filesystem. We should have selected ext4. We did this on purpose to prove a point. The file selection is critical and if you make the wrong choice there is no turning back. The only way to correct this is to get a backup of our /u02 mount and restore it onto the ext4 newly formatted partition. We also made a second wrong choice of laying the file system directly on the raw partition. We really should have created a logical partition from this one disk and put the file system on the logical partition. This would allow us to take our new /dev/xvdc2, create a new physical partition, add the physical partition to our logical partition, and grow the ext4 file system. Again, we did this on purpose to prove a point. You need to plan on expansion when you first lay out a system. To solve this problem we need to unmount the /u02 disk, delete the /dev/xvdc1 and /dev/xvdc2 partitions, create a physical partition with logical volume manager, create a logical partition, and lay an ext4 file system onto this new volume. We then restore our data from the backup and can simply grow the partition much easier in the future. We are not going to go through these steps because the exercise is to show you that it is much easier with platform as a service and not how to do it on infrastructure as a service.

If we look at a database as a service disk layout we notice that we have /dev/xvdc1 as /u01 which represents the ORACLE_HOME, /dev/mapper/dataVolGroup-lvol0 as /u02 which represents the tablespace area for the database, /dev/mapper/fraVolGroup-lvol0 which represents the fast recovery area (where RMAN dumps backups), and /dev/mapper/redoVolGroup-lvol0 which represents the redo log area (where DataGuard dumps the transactions logs). The file systems are logical volumes and created by default for us. The file systems are ext4 which can be seen by looking at the /etc/fstab file. If we need to grow the /u02 partition we can do this by using the scale up option for the database. We can add 20 GB and extend the data partition or the fra partition. We also have the option of attaching the storage as /u05 and manually growing partitions as desired. It is important to note that scaling up the database does require a reboot and restart of the database. When we try to scale up this database instance we get a warning that there is a Java service that depends upon the database and it must be stopped before we can add the storage desired.





In summary, we can use IaaS to host a database. It does get rid of the need for a storage administrator. It does not get rid of the need for an operating system administrator. We still have to know the file system and operating system commands. If we use PaaS to host a database, we can add storage as a database administrator and not need to mess with the logical volume or file system commands. We can grow the file system and add table extents quickly and easily. If we undersize our storage, correcting for this mistake is much easier than it was years ago. We don’t need to overpurchase storage anymore because we can allocate it on demand and pay for the storage as we use it. We can easily remove one of the headaches that has been an issue for years and no longer need to triple our storage estimates and go with realistic estimates and control budget better and easier.

SQL Developer connection to DBaaS

Today we are going to connect to our database using SQL Developer. We could connect using sqlplus with a remote command but instead we are going to use a graphical tool to connect to our database in the cloud. It is important to note that this is the same tool that is used to connect to our on premise database. We can execute sql commands, look at the status of the database, clone pluggable databases from one service to another, and generally manipulate and manage the database with command line features of wizards.

SQL Developer is a free integrated development environment that simplifies the development and management of Oracle Database in both traditional and Cloud deployments. SQL Developer offers complete end-to-end development of your PL/SQL applications, a worksheet for running queries and scripts, a DBA console for managing the database, a reports interface, a complete data modeling solution, and a migration platform for moving your 3rd party databases to Oracle. There are a few books that have been written about this product.

as well as blogs

I suggest looking at the following

We are not going to dive deep into SQL Developer but rather introduce a couple of concepts for monitoring our database in the cloud. We are running version 4.1.3 on a Windows desktop. We actually are cheating a little bit and running it on a Windows 2012 Server that is provisioned into IaaS in the Oracle Cloud. It makes a good scratch space for demos and development hands on labs. When we connect we can connect to the public ip address of our database on port 1521 or we can create an ssh tunnel and connect to localhost on port 1521. We will first connect via an ssh tunnel. To start, we need to log into our database service and figure out what the ip address is for the system we provisioned. For our system we notice that the ip address is 129.152.150.120.



We are going to first connect with ip tunneling through putty. We launch putty and enter the ip address, the ssh keys, and open up port 1521 as a tunnel. We open a connection and all connections to port 1521 on localhost will be connected to our cloud service at the ip address specified. Note that this solution works if we have one database that we are connecting to. If we have two database instances in the cloud we will need to map a different port number on localhost to port 1521 or open up the ports to the internet which we will talk about later. We need to keep this shell active and open but we can iconify the window.


In SQL Developer we can now create a new connection to our database. This is done by clicking on the green plus sign in the top right of the screen. This opens a dialog window to define the connection to the database. We will call this connection prs12cHP which is the name of our service in the cloud. We are going to connect as sys so we need to select the advanced connection to connect as sysdba. It is important to note that you can not do this with Amazon RDS if you provision an Oracle database in the Amazon PaaS. Amazon does not allow you to login as sys or system and does not give you sysdba privileges. If you want sysdba access you will need to deploy Oracle into Amazon EC2 to get access. Once we define our connection to localhost, port 1521, sys as sysdba, and an OID of ORCL we can test our interface and accept the connection once it is successful. Note that we can execute commands in the right window and look at things like what version of the database we are running. In this example we are running the High Performance Edition so we can use diag and tuning extensions from SQL Developer.




There is a new DBA feature in the latest release of SQL Developer. We can launch a navigation menu to add our cloud database by going to the View … DBA option at the top of the screen. This give us another green plus sign so that we can add the database and expose typical management views adn functions. Two things that are of note here are a simple exposure to pluggable database as well as a clone option associated with this exposure.




We can do other things like look at backup jobs, look at table space allocation and location, look at users that are authorized and active. This is not a replacement for Enterprise Manager because it is looking at immediate and not historic data.

Now that we have connected through a tunnel, let’s look at another option. We can open up port 1521 on the database service and connect straight to the ip address. This method is not recommended because it opens up your database to all ip addresses on the internet if you are using a demo or evaluation account. You can whitelist ip addresses, vpn, or subnet limit the systems that it answers. This is done through the compute service management interface under the networking tab. We need to enable the dblistener for our database service. Once we do this we can connect SQL Developer to the database using the ip address of the database service. We might need to do this if we are connecting to multiple cloud servers and don’t want to create a tunnel for each of them.





In summary, we have connected to our database service using SQL Developer. This is the same tool that we use to connect to databases in our data center. We can connect the same way that we normally do via an ip address or tunnel to keep the server in the cloud a little more secure. We noted the differences between the Amazon RDS and Oracle DBaaS options and provided a workaround with EC2 or Azure Compute as an alternative. It is important to remember the differences between PaaS features and IaaS features when it comes time to calculating the cost of services. PaaS gives you expanded features like automated backup and size up/down which we will look at next week.

Using Enterprise Manager to manage cloud services

Yesterday we talked about the virtues of Enterprise Manager. To honest the type of monitoring tool is not important but the fact that you have one is. One of the virtues that VMWare touts of VSphere is that you can manage instances on your server as well as instances in VCloud. This is something worthy of playing with. The same tool for your on premise instances also managing your instances in the cloud has power. Unfortunately, VCloud allows you to allocate virtual machines and storage associated with it so you only have a IaaS option of compute only. You can’t allocate just storage. You can’t deploy a database server unless you have a database deployed that you want to clone. You need to start with an operating system and build from there. There are benefits of PaaS and SaaS that you will never see in the VCloud implementation.

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides the same universal management interface for on premise and in cloud services. Amazon falls short on this. First, they don’t have on premise instances so the tools that they have don’t monitor anything in your data center, only in their cloud. Microsoft has tools for monitoring services plugins for looking at Azure services. It is important to note that you need a gateway server in the Azure cloud to aggregate the data and ship the telemetry data back and report it in the monitoring tool. There is a good Blog detailing the cost if IaaS monitoring in Azure. The blog points out that the outbound data transfer for monitoring can cost up to $17/month/server so this is not something that comes for free.

Today we are going to look at using Enterprise Manager as a management tool for on premise systems, the Oracle Public Cloud, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure. We are going to cheat a little and use a VirtualBox instance of Enterprise Manager 13c. We are not going to go through the installation process. The books and blogs that we referenced yesterday detail how to do this. Unfortunately, the VirtualBox instance is available from edelivery.oracle.com. We are not going to use this instance but are going to use an instance for demo purposes only available internal to Oracle. The key difference between the two systems is that the edelivery instance is 21 GB in size for download and expands to provide an OEM 13c instance for testing while the internal system (retriever.us.oracle.com) has a 12c and 11g database installed and is 39.5 GB (expanded to almost 90 GB when uncompressed). Given the size of the instance I really can’t provide external access to this instance. You can recreate this by downloading the edelivery system, installing an 11g database instance, installing a 12c database instance, and configuring OEM to include data from those instances to replicate the screen shots that we are including.



If we look at the details on the virtual box instance we notice that we need at least 2 cores and 10 GB of memory to run this instance. The system is unusable at 8 GB of RAM. We really should bump this up to 12 GB of RAM but given that it is for demo purposes and for training it is ok if it runs a little slow. If we were running this in production it is recommended to grow this to 4 cores and 16 GB of memory and also recommended that you not use a downloaded VirtualBox instance for production but install from scratch.

The key things that we are going to do are walk through what it takes to add a monitoring agent onto the service that we are trying to monitor and manage. If we look at the architecture of Enterprise Manager we notice that there are three key components; the Oracle Management Repository (OMR), the Oracle Management Service (OMS), and the Oracle Management Agent (OMA). The OMR is basically a database that keeps a history of all telemetry actions as well as reports and analytics for the systems being monitored. The OMS is the heart of Enterprise Manager and runs on a WebLogic server. The code is written in Java and presents the primary user interface to the administrators as well as being the gateway between the OMR and the agents or OMAs. The agents are installed on the target systems and collect operating system data, database data, weblogic data, and all other log data to ship back to the OMR for analysis by the users.

It is important to note at this point that most PaaS and SaaS providers do not allow you to install an Enterprise Manager Agent or any other management agent on their instances. They want to manage the services for you and force you to use their tools to manage their instance. SalesForce, for example, only gives you access to your customer relationship data. You can export your contact lists to an csv file to backup your data but you can’t correlate the contact list to the documents that you have shared with these users. Amazon RDS does not provide a file system access, system access to the database, or access to the operating system so that you can install the management agent. You must use their tools to monitor services provided on their sites. Unfortunately, this inhibits you from looking at important things like workload repository reports or sql tuning guides to see if something is running slow or waiting on a lock. Your only choice is to deploy the desired PaaS or SaaS as a manual or bundled install on IaaS forcing you to manually manage things like backups and patching on your own.

The first thing that we need to do in Enterprise Manager is to log in and click on the Setup button on the top right. We need to define named credentials since we are going to connect to the cloud service using public and private ssh keys. We need to follow the Security pull down to Named Credentials.

We click on the Create icon in the top left and add credentials with public and private keys. If we don’t have an ssh key to access the service we can generate an ssh key using ssh-keygen which generates a public and private key and upload the key using the SSH Access pull down in the hamburger menu. Once we upload the ssh key we can use ssh -i keyname.ppk opc@ip_address for our database server. We will use this keyname.ppk to connect with Enterprise Manager and have all telemetry traffic transferred via the ssh protocol.


Once we have the credentials valid in the cloud account we can create the ssh access through Enterprise Manager. To do this we to to Setup at the top right, Security, Named Credentials. We then click on the Create button in the middle left to start entering data about the credentials. The name in the the screen shot below failed because it begins with a number so we switched it to ssh2017 since 2017ssh failed the naming convention. We are trying to use host access via ssh which is done with pull down menu definitions. The system defaults to a host access but we need to change from host to global which does not tie our credentials to one ip address. We upload our public and private key as well as associate this with the opc user since that user has sudo rights. We can verify the credentials by looking at the bottom of the list. This should allow us to access our cloud host via ssh and deploy an agent to our cloud target.

Note that we created two credentials because we had a step fail later. We created credentials for the opc user and for the oracle user. The opc credentials are called ssh2017 as shown in the screen shots. The oracle credentials are called oracle2017 and are not shown. The same steps are used just the username is changed as well as the name of the credentials.






If we want to install the management agent onto our instance we need to know the ip address of the service that we are going to monitor as well as an account that can sudo to root or run elevated admin services. We go to the Enterprise Manager splash screen, login, select the Setup button in the top right and drill down to Add Target and Add Target Manually. This takes us to the Add Target screen where we can Install Agent on Host. To get rid of the warnings, we added our cloud target ip address to the /etc/hosts file and used a fully qualified and short name associated with the ip address. We probably did not add the right external dns name but it works with Enterprise Manager. When we add the host we use the fully qualified host name. We can find this by logging into the cloud target and looking at the /etc/hosts file on that server. This gives us the local ip address and a fully qualified host name. Once we have this we can enter a directory to upload the agent software to. We had to create an agent directory under the /u01/app/oracle directory. We select the oracle2017 credentials (the screen shots use ssh2017 but this generates an error later) we defined in the previous step and start uploading the agent software and configuring the host as a target.





Note that we could have entered the ip address rather than going through adding the ip address to /etc/hosts. We would have received a warning with the ip address.

When we first tried this we got an error during the initialization phase that opc did not own the /u01/app/oracle directory and had to create an agent directory and change ownership. Fortunately, we could easily resubmit and enter a new directory without having to reenter all of the other information. The deployment takes a while because Enterprise Manager needs to upload the agent binaries, extract, and install them. The process is updated with status so that you can see the progress and restart when errors happen. When we changed the ownership, the installation failed at a later step stating the opc did not have permission to add the agent to the inventory. We corrected this by installing as oracle and setting the /u01/app/oracle/agent directory to be owned by oracle.

When we commit the ip address or host name as well as the ssh credentials, we can track progress as the management server deploys the agent. We get to a point where we note that the oracle user does not have ssh capabilities and we will need to run some stuff manually from the opc account.



At this point we should have an enterprise manager connection to a cloud host. To get this working from my VirtualBox behind my AT&T Uverse wireless router I first had to configure a route on my broadband connection and set the ip address of the Enterprise Manager VirtualBox image to a static ip address. This allows the cloud instance to talk back to the OMS and store data in the OMR.



The next step is to discover the database instances. This is done by going through a guided discovery on the host that we just provisioned. It took a few minutes to sync up with the OMS but we could verify this with the emctl status agent command on the target host. We add the target manually using the guided discovery and select database services to look for on the target.




At this point we should have a database, listener, and host connected to our single pane of management glass. We should see a local database (em12c) and a cloud based database (prs12cHP). We can look at the host characteristics as well as dive into sql monitoring, database performance, and database management like backup and restore options or adding users to the repository. We could add a Java Cloud Service as well as link these two systems together and trace a web page request down to a sql read and look at what the longest latency component is. We can figure out if the network, java memory allocation, or databse disk is causing the slowest response. We can also look at sql tuning recommendations to get suggestions on changing our sql code or execution plans using the arw report and sql tuning utilities in Enterprise Manager.

In summary, we can connect to an on premise server as well as a cloud server. We can’t connect to an Amazon RDS instance because we don’t get file system level access to push a client to or a root user to change the agent permissions. We do get this with IaaS on Oracle, Compute servers on Azure, and EC2 on Amazon. We also get this with PaaS on Oracle and potentially event Force.com from SalesForce. No one give you this ability with SaaS. It is assumed that you will take the SaaS solution as is and not need to look under the covers. Having a single pane of glass for monitoring and provisioning services is important. The tool should do more than tell you how full a disk is or how much of a cpu is loaded or available. It should dive into the application and let you look at where bottlenecks are and help troubleshoot issues. We could spend weeks diving into Enterprise Manager and the different management packs but we are on a journey to look at PaaS options from Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Managing servers and instances in the cloud

Managing servers and instances has been an ongoing issue since the introduction of the first computer. Recently with the advent of virtualization the idea of a management console to control what processors are running what services and what storage is allocated to what operating system has gained popularity. Many people are familiar with VMWare VSphere where you get a view of processors. We get a view of a server and can see virtual images deployed on this server. We can see how well the resources (memory, cpu, and disk) are being utilized. We can allocate more or less resources since this is a dynamic allocation and make sure that we are not over allocating resources and wasting them or under allocating them and causing applications to run slower.

In this example we can see that we have two processors, 2 GB of memory, and just under 300 GB of disk on this computer. We have five virtual machines running on this computer and can dive into each operating system and look at what operating system is installed and how the limited resources are allocated and utilized. What we can’t see is what applications are installed and how the applications are running. For example, is the Windows Home Server 2011 running an Apache Web Server and how many hits did the web server get in the past four days? Monitoring tools beg the question of what are you monitoring. If you are managing limited resources and making sure that you have not over or under allocated services, tools like VSphere are excellent tools. Unfortunately, you will need other tools to dive into another tool. EMC, for example, has a storage manager that lets you look not only at a logical unit level but a controller and disk level. It understands VMWare and lets you look at how disks are related to virtualization engines and how they are consuming resources.

Again, this is a very good tool to look at how well a disk is performing, how well data is laid out across spindles, and how well your data network is being transmitted between disk and server. We can see hot spots. We can see disks that are over and under utilized. We can manage a scarce resource and make sure that it is properly utilized.

When we talk about monitoring we need to shift our thought process. Yes, it is important to manage compute, memory, and storage resources but it is also important to realize that these resources are commodities. If we run low, we get more. If we use too much we are wasting resources. We should be able to automate allocation of resources and size up or size down resources without manual monitoring. What we are really interested in is how well is our company running. If we are a university we might be interested in the latency of delivering online video classes. We might be interested in how many classes are being added to a student schedule during registration. If we are a ticket retailer we might be interested in how many tickets were requested and paid for on a minute by minute basis. Note that we are not talking about how well a disk drive is allocated or if we have enough processors allocated to a virtual machine, we are talking in term of business terms. We are looking at tying revenue generating services back to computer resources and trying to figure out what is causing a problem. In the online video classroom example, we might have our processors allocated properly, storage tuned to the last IOP, and memory allocated to buffer data and reduce disk reads. If we are on the same network as the athletic department and our basketball team made it to the elite eight during March madness and the athletic department live streams the game on the same network as our classroom servers our classes will be offline due to demand to watch the basketball game. Tools from EMC and VMware will show that everything is working fine and life is good. Meanwhile the help desk is getting calls from students off campus that can’t access their assignments during midterms and their Thursday class is not available. What we need is a monitoring system that can look at systems and incorporate more than just processor and disk. What we need is a tool that can look at systems and services and not just resources. We would like to look at the video distribution system and be able to dive into the disk, network, or processor and see what the bottleneck is and fix it quickly.

Oracle released a tool years ago called Enterprise Manager. The tool started out as a database monitoring tool that allowed you to dive into sql calls and figure out why it was taking longer than necessary. With acquisitions of companies like BEA and Sun Microsystems the tool expanded to look at how Java was performing inside a WebLogic server and how disk drives were performing that were serving up requests for the database and WebLogic server. Acquisitions of companies like JD Edwards and PeopleSoft drove the monitoring tools in the opposite direction and screens showing how many purchase orders were being processed on an hourly basis were suddenly available. You could look at what was the bottleneck in closing your books for the end of month reconciliation. Was it a manual process waiting on a report to drop into a directory or was it a sql statement that was taking minutes rather than seconds to complete? You could start looking at a process like purchase orders and dive into a database to see if a table was reaching storage limits as well as figure out that someone recently patched the database which caused an index to not look at a new column that was created and searches are now going against this column so select statements are doing a full table scan rather than using an index to report answers quicker. Adding more storage in this case will be a waste of time. Yes, we are running out of storage on a table but the real issue is we need to re-index the database or execute a new sql execution plan. Below is a screen shot of how well a database is performing with links to look at all the sub-components of the database.

Books have been written on Enterprise Manager. We are not going to cover everything in this blog to make you an expert on the subject.

There are also a number of blogs related to Enterprise Manager

This is a partial list of blogs returned by a Google search. I am sure I missed a few. Note that the list of books and blogs is not a short list. There are classes offered by Oracle University that you can take virtually or in a classroom (both cost money).

The way that Oracle Enterprise Manager is paid for is simple. The base system is free and you pay for the options that you want to use. Unfortunately, the Technology Price Guide is not very clear as to what is and is not Enterprise Manager and what is an option on the database. For example, on page 7, most of the management packs are listed. If you want diagnostics for the database you will need to license your database at $7,500 per processor and not Enterprise Manager. You can license at $150 per named user but the licensing metrics for your database need to match the licensing for you management pack. You could have a two processor license for production and a 25 named user license for development and testing so you will need to blend these licenses into Enterprise Manager with the management packs. Diagnostics is specifically confusing because you enable or disable this feature in Enterprise Manager and not in the database. The telemetry data is being collected for the database but the reporting on the results of the analysis is not being done in the database. You could turn on the reporting in Enterprise Manager without involving the DBA thus incurring an additional license fee that you had not paid for. There is no license key or email that is sent to Oracle saying that you enabled the license it is a simple checkbox in Enterprise Manager that says turn on diagnostic reporting. In recent versions a warning screen pops up telling you that this is not a free feature. In OEM 10g the feature was turned on by default and you had to turn it off. This has changed in recent releases. If you try to turn this feature on when connecting to an Enterprise Edition in the Oracle Public Cloud you will get a feature not available message. You need to go with High Performance or Extreme Performance edition of the database to get the diagnostics enabled.

There are also management packs for Oracle Applications and the pricing for these products can be found in the Oracle Applications Price List. You need to search for the word “packs” to find the price of the management packs in this list. You can get a list of all the management packs from the Oracle Tech Network page for Enterprise Manager

It is important to note that the Enterprise Manager that runs in your data center monitoring your servers and Oracle hardware and software products is the same tool that you can use to monitor and manage PaaS and IaaS resources in the Oracle Public Cloud. You can connect to the instance in the cloud using ssh and read the telemetry from the cloud instance as if it were installed on one of your servers. You can use extensions to the latest version of Enterprise Manager, 13c, to clone a pluggable database instance from your on site installation to a cloud instance.

You can also setup reporting and self service requests to have end users ask for a new service to be provisioned either on site or in the cloud. Below is a screen shot of how to do this for a database. We could do something similar for a WebLogic server, an Apache Web server, a PeopleSoft instance for dev/test, or any layer of the Oracle stack.

In summary, selection of a management tool is important. Tools are good to understand and properly use. At some point you need to step back and ask what is the questions that I need answers to. Am I diving too deep on trying to optimize something that is not that worth deep analysis? Could I automate this and not have to monitor it at all? If I run out of processing power does it make sense to automatically scale up the number of processors? Should I scale out by spinning up more web servers? Do I need to re-architect my network topology to isolate disk traffic from client traffic? If I generate a report who will consume the results? Is the report for someone in IT? Purchasing? The process owner? Is it a technology or financial report? Products like Enterprise Manager allow you to generate all of these reports using different management extensions. My suggestion is to look at some of the introductory videos on the Oracle Tech Network to get an introduction to the problem that you are trying to solve then figure out how much it will cost to measure what is important to you.

database alternatives

One of the key questions that I get asked on a regular basis is to justify the cost of some product. Why not use freeware? Why not put things together and use free stuff? When I worked at Texas A&M and Rice University we first looked at public domain software. We heavily used the Apache web server, Tomcat, MySQL, Postgress, Linux, and BSD. These applications worked up to a point. Yes, you can spin up one Apache web server on one server. Yes, you can have one Apache web server listen on multiple IP addresses and host multiple web servers. The issue typically is not how many web servers can you handle but how many clients can you answer. Easily 90% of the web servers could handle the load that it saw on a regular basis. We spent 80% of our time on the 10% that could not handle the load. Not all of the web servers could handle the functionality. For example, a student registration system needs to keep a shopping cart of classes selected and you need to level up to an Apache Tomcat server to persistently keep this data and database connections live. If you use a web server you need to store all transactions in the database, all of the classes selected, and all of the fees associated with the class. Every interaction with the web server causes multiple connections with the database server. Doing this drives the number of processors needed by the database thus driving up the cost of the hardware and software license.

If we use an application server that can handle caching of data, we can keep a list of available classes on the application server and not only have to go back to the database server for transactions. When a student selects a class, it takes it out of inventory and puts it in their class schedule for the next year. The same is true for on-line shopping, purchasing tickets to a play or airline, drafting for a fantasy football team. Years ago ESPN ran a March Madness contest on-line. They presented your selections with an Apache web server and every team selection required an interaction with their database on the back end. The system operated miserably and it took hours to select all rounds to fill out your bracket. They updated the server with Javascript and a Tomcat server and allowed you to fill out all of round one in your browser. Once you finished the first round you submitted your selections and were presented with a round two based on your first round selections. They later put this on WebLogic and put all of the round selections in Java code on the WebLogic server. The single interaction with the database became submission of your complete bracket. They went from thousands of interactions with a database to a single interaction per submission.

We can have similar architecture discussions at the database layer as well. If I am looking at a simple table lookup, why pay for a robust database like Oracle 12c? Why not use something like Azure Table Storage Services and do a simple select statement from a file store. Why not put this in a free version of Oracle in Apex on the web and define a REST api to pull the data based on a simple or potentially more complex select statement. Again, 90% of the problems can be solved with simple solutions. Simple table lookups like translating a simple part name to a price can be done with Excel, MySQL, APEX, JSON processing, or REST apis. The difficulty comes up with the remaining 10%. How do I correlate multiple tables together to figure out the price of an item based on cost of inventory, cost of shipping, electrical costs, compensation costs for contractors and sales people, and other factors that determine profitability and pricing. How do I do a shortest routing algorithm for a trucking system based on traffic, customer orders, inventory in a warehouse, the size of a truck, and the salary of the driver and loading dock personnel. For things like this you need a more complex database that can handle multiple table joins, spatial data, and pulling in road conditions and traffic patterns from external sources. Products like IBM DB2, Oracle Database, and Microsoft SQL Server can address some of these issues.

We also need to look at recovery and restoration time. When a Postgress server crashes, how long does it take to recover the database and get it back online? Can I fail over to a secondary parallel server because downtime is lost revenue or lost sales. If you go to HomeDepot to order plumbing parts and their site goes down, how long does it take to go to the Ace or Lowes web site and order the same part and have it delivered by the same delivery truck to your home or office? Keeping inventory, order entry, and web services up becomes more than just answering a query. It becomes a mission critical service that can not go down for more than a few seconds. Services like Data Guard, Golden Gate, and Real Application Clustering are required to keep services up and active. MySQL, MongoDB, Amazon Aurora, and other new entry level database technologies can handle simple requests but take minutes/hours to recover information for a database. Failing over through storage to another site is typically not an answer in this case. It takes minutes/hours to recover and restart a moderate database of 20 TB or larger. First the data replication needs to finish then the database needs to be booted at a secondary site and it needs to maintain consistency in the data as it comes back up. The application server then needs to connect to the new service and recommit requests that came in during and since the system failure. As this is happening, customers are opening a new browser tab and going to your competition to find the same part on another site.

In summary, it takes more than just getting a bigger and faster application server or database. Moving the services to the cloud isn’t necessarily the answer. You need to make sure that you move the two components together the majority of the time. Look at your application and ask where do you spend more of your time? It is tuning sql statements? Is it writing new queries to answer business questions? Is it optimizing your disk layout to get tables to the database faster? Take a step back and ask why is the database pounding the disk so hard. Can I cache this data in the database by adding a little more memory to the disk controller or database server? Can I cache the data at the application server by adding more memory there and keep from asking the database for the same information over and over again? In the next few days we are going to look at database options and database monitoring. We are going to look at some of these tools and refer back to the bigger picture. Yes, we can tune the storage to deliver all of the bits at the highest rate possible. Our question will not be how to do this but should we be doing this. Would something like an Exadata or an in-memory option allow us to transfer less data across the storage network and get us answers faster? Would adding memory somewhere allow us to buffer more data and reduce the database requests which reduces the amount of data needed from the disk.

database management

Today we are going to look at managing an Oracle database. We are going to start with a 12c database that we created in the Oracle Public Cloud. We selected database as a service (as opposed to virtual image), monthly billing, 12c, and enterprise edition high performance edition. We accepted the defaults for the table size so that we can figure out how to extend the table size and selected no backups rather than starting RMAN for daily incrementals or cloud object storage for weekly full backups.

We basically have four options for managing a database. If we have a small number of databases we might look at using the sqlplus sysdba command line access and grind through administration. We also have a database monitor that is installed by default with the database cloud service. We can dive into this database through the monitor and look at log running queries, tablespace sizes, and generic utilization. We can also connect with sql developer and look at the new DBA interfaces that were added in the latest release in early 2016. The fourth and final way of administering is to look at commercial management tools like Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) or other tools that aggregate multiple systems and servers and give you exposure beyond just the database. These commercial tools allow you to look at they layer that you are most interested in. You can get a PeopleSoft Management Pack for OEM that allows you to look at purchase order flow, or payroll requests. You can get diagnostics and tuning packs for the application server and database that allows you to look at what part of the PeopleSoft implementation is taking the longest. Is it the network connection? It is a poorly tuned Java Virtual Machine that is memory thrashing? It is a sql statement that is waiting on a lock? Is it a storage spindle that is getting hammered from another application? Is it a run away process on your database server that is consuming all of the resources? All of these questions can be answered with a monitoring tool if you not only know how to use it but what is available for free and what you need to purchase to get the richer and more valuable information.

To get to the database monitor we go to the cloud services console (which changed over the weekend so it looks a little different), click on database, click on Service Console, and click on the database name.



If we click on the dbaas_monitor menu item in the hamburger menu system to the right of the service name it might fail to connect the first time. It will take the ip address of the database and try to open https://ip address/dbaas_monitor. We first need to open up port 443 to be able to communicate to this service.

To get to the network connection we need to go to the Compute Service Monitor, click on the Network tab, and change the proper port number for our server prs12cHP. If we hover over the labels on the left we see what ports we are looking for. We are specifically interested in the https protocol. If we click on the hamburger menu next to this line item we can Update the security list which pops up a new window.





To enable this protocol we enable the service and click the Update button. Once we do this we can retry the dbaas_monitor web page. We should expect a security exception the first time and need to add an exception. We login as dbaas_monitor and the password that we entered in the bottom left of the screen for the system passwords when we created the database.




At this point we can look at cpu utilization, table space usage, if the database is running, and all other monitoring capabilities. Below are the screen shots for the listener and the table sizes and storage by pluggable database.




We can look a little deeper at things like alerts, wait times, and real time sql monitoring. These are all available through command line but providing a service like this allows junior database administrators to look at stuff quickly and easily.



The biggest drawback to this system is that you get a short snapshot and not a long term historic archive of this data. If we use Enterprise Manager, which we will look at in a later blog, from a central site we collect the data in a local repository we can look back at months old data rather than live or data from the past few hours.

In summary, if we use platform as a service, we get tooling and reporting tools integrated into services rather than having to spin these up or look at everything from the command line as is done with infrastructure as a service. We get other features but we are diving into database monitoring this week. We briefly touched on database monitoring through what was historically called dbmonitor and is moving towards dbaas_monitor or a central enterprise manager pane of glass for database services in our data center and in the cloud. One of the key differentials from Oracle Database as a Service and Amazon RDS is database monitoring. We will look at database monitoring for Amazon RDS later this week and notice there are significant differences.

Database in Microsoft Azure

Today we are going to look at what it takes to install Oracle Database Enterprise Edition 12c in Microsoft Azure. We had previously looked at deploying Application Express in Azure. The steps to deploy Enterprise Edition are almost the same. We start with the same process by logging into the portal, click on New, search for Oracle and look for the enterprise edition of the database.



In this example we are going to select Enterprise Edition 12c.

The two links at the bottom link you to the licensing and privacy statements from the Oracle website. Note that the license is not included for this edition of the database and you need to adhere to the licensing restrictions of a perpetual license for a cloud deployment. If we refer back to our calculations for perpetual license in AWS we amortize the database license over four years brings this cost to $3,720/month for a four core server as recommended by Microsoft. Note that we can go with a smaller core count and smaller memory count unlike with Amazon. AWS restricts us to a minimum core count for the Oracle database but Azure allows you to go below the suggested minimums to a system that is unusable. It is impossible to run the database on a single core 1 GB of RAM but the option is presented to you. From the previous screen, we click Create to start the deployment. We can only deploy into a Classic Virtual Machine instance.

The first things that we need to define are the server name, username to log in as, and password or ssh keys for the username. We can also define a new storage group or pull from an existing storage group. For our test either works.

When we look at the shapes suggested by Microsoft, a D12 Standard shape (4 cores and 28 GB) is the smallest configuration. This comes in at $290/month or roughly $10/day. This is a little more than we want to pay for a simple test system. We can get by with 2 cores and 3.75 GB for a simple experiment. We can do this at $89/month or roughly $3/day with an A2 Standard shape. We select the shape and click Select.


On the next screen we select the storage profile. The first option is Standard or Premium disk. If we select Premium SSD our shape gets resized to D2 Standard at a much higher per month charge. This gives us a higher IOP to storage which might or might not be required for our deployment. If we default back to Standard to get the lower shape cost, we have the option or locally replicated data, replication between data centers, and read access in a second geo the price goes from $2.40/100 GB/month to $4.80 to $6.10. We will go for the locally replicated data to minimize cost. We can define a new domain name for this account or accept the default. We can also define a virtual network for this instance as well. We can select the subnet routine as well as dynamic or static ip address assignment. We are going to accept the defaults for the network.


We do need to open port 1521 by adding an endpoint to this instance. If we scroll down on the network screen we can add a port by adding an endpoint. We might or might not want to open up this port. When we do this it opens up the port to the world. We can tunnel through ssh to access port 1521 but for demonstration purposes we are going to open up this port to the world and potentially look at white listing or ip address restricting access to this instance. We might also want to open port 1158 to see the enterprise manager console, port 80 for application express which is also available in enterprise edition of the database.

We do have the option of monitoring extensions to look at how things are performing. We are going to skip this option for our experiment but it is interesting to note that you do have additional options for monitoring.

We are not going to explore the diagnostics storage or availability sets because they really don’t apply to the database. They are more concerned with operating system and do not extend into the database. At this point we are ready to launch the instance so we click Ok. We do get one final review before we provision the instance with the database installed.

When we click Ok we get a message that the instance is deploying. We can look at more detail by clicking on the bell icon at the top and drilling down into the deployment detail.


It is important to note that the database binaries are installed by the database is not configured. There is no listener running. The ORACLE_SID has not been set. We need to run the odbca to create a database instance.

Other tutorials on installing an Oracle Database on Azure can be found at

To create a database at this point we need to run the dbca command. When I first tried to execute this command I got a strange error in that the system asked for a password then cleared the screen. This is a known issue relating to line wrap and XTERM configurations. It can be fixed by going into the putty settings and turning off line wrap.

If we look at the command line needed to create a database with dbca we notice that we first need -silent to disable the system from using a default X-Window screen to walk you through the installation. We do not have the X-Window system enabled or the ports configured so we need to install the database from the command line. This is done with the -silent option. The second option is -createDatabase. This tells dbca to create a new database. We also need to define a template to use as the foundation. Fortunately we have pre-defined templates in the /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/assistants/dbca/templates directory. We will be usign the General_Purpose.dbc template. We could use the Data_Warehouse.dbc or create a new one with the New_Database.dbt template. We also need to define the ORACLE_SID and characterset with the -gdbName, -sid, and -characterSet parameters. We finally wrap up the command options with -responseFile set to NO_VALUE. The entire command looks like

dbca -silent -createDatabase -templateName General_Purpose.dbc -gdbname orcl -sid orcl -responseFile NO_VALUE -characterSet AL32UTF8 -memoryPercentage 30 -emConfiguration LOCAL

This will create a database with ORACLE_SID set to orcl. We add a couple of other paramters to configure enterprise manager to be local rather than a central enterprise manager agent and limit the memory that we will use to 30% of the memory on the system.





The database creation agent will configure the database. This step will take 10-15 minutes to get to 100%. Some tutorials on how to use dbca in the silent mode can be found at

There are really no videos on youtube showing an install. In our example we should have include the -pdbName option to create an initial pluggable database as part of our database installation. Once we see the 100%, the database is complete. We then need to set our ORACLE_SID, ORACLE_HOME, PATH, and start the listener so that we can connect to the database. This is done with the commands


oraenv
export ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/12.0.1/db_home
export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin
lsnrctl start


https://blogs.oracle.com/pshuff/resource/azure_db_12c_dbca_lsnrctl.png” width=”90%”>

From here we can look at the header information to verify that we installed a 12c Enterprise Edition and look at the location of the data files with the following commands


select * from v$version;
select con_id, name from v$datafile order by 1;



We can connect with SQL Developer because we opened up port 1521.


In summary, we can deploy Oracle Database 12c into the Microsoft Azure cloud. We get a partial install when we provision the database from the Marketplace. We still need to go through the dbca configuration as well as spinning up the listener and opening up the right ports for the database. The solution is not PaaS but database on IaaS. We can not size up the database with a single command. We do not get patching or automated backup, in fact we have not event setup backup at this point. This is similar to the Amazon AWS installation in EC2 but falls short of the database as a service delivered as PaaS in the Oracle Public Cloud. Pricing has the same considerations as the Database on AWS EC2 discussion we had yesterday with the only difference being the price for the compute and storage instance. We did not need to look at the online calculator because Microsoft does a very good job of presenting pricing options when you are configuring the instance. Again, we are not trying to say that once implementation is better or worse than the other but provide information so that you can decide your tradeoffs when selecting one cloud vendor over another.

Database in Amazon EC2

Today we are going to look at what it takes to get a 12c database instance up and running in Amazon EC2. Note that this is different than our previous posts on getting Standard Edition running on Amazon and running Enterprise Edition running on Amazon RDS. We are going to take the traditional approach as if we were installing the database on a virtual image like VMWare, HyperV, or OracleVM. The approach is to take IaaS and layer the database upon it.

There are a few options on how to create the database instance. We can load everything from scratch, we can load a pre-defined AMI, we can create a golden image and clone it, we can do a physical to virtual then import the instance into the cloud, or we can create a Chef recipe and automate everything. In this blog we are going to skip the load everything because it is very cumbersome and time consuming. You basically would have to load the operating system, patch the operating system, create users and groups, download the binaries, unpack the binaries, manage the firewall, and manage the cloud port access rights. Each of these steps takes 5-30 minutes so the total time to get the install done would be 2-3 hours. Note that this is much better than purchasing hardware, putting it in a data center, loading the operating system and following all the same steps. We are also going to skip the golden image and cloning option since this is basically loading everything from scratch then cloning an instance. We will look at cloning a physical and importing into the cloud in a later blog. In this blog we are going to look at selecting a pre-defined AMI and loading it.

One of the benefits of the Marketplace model is that you get a pre-defined and pre-configured installation of a software package. Oracle provides the bundle for Amazon in the form of an AMI. For these instances you need to own your own perpetual license. It is important to understand the licensing implications and how Oracle defines licensing for AWS. Authorized Cloud Environment instances with 4 or fewer virtual cores are counted as 1 socket, which is considered equivalent to a processor license. For Authorized Cloud Environment instances with more than 4 virtual cores, every 4 virtual cores used (rounded up to the closest multiple of
4) equate to a licensing requirement of 1 socket. This is true for the Standard Edition license. For the Enterprise Edition license the assumption is that the cloud processor is an x86 chip set to a processor license is required for every 2 virtual cores. All of the other software like partitioning, diagnostics, tuning, compression, advanced security, etc also need to be licensed with the same metric.

If we look at the options for AMIs available we go to the console, click on EC2, and click on Launch Instance.



When we search for Oracle we get a wide variety of products like Linux, SOA, and database. If we search for Oracle database we refine the search a little more but get other supplementary products that are not the database but products that relate to the database. If we search for Oracle database 12c we get six return values.



We find two AMIs that look the same but the key difference is that one limits you to 16 cores and the other does not. We can select either one for our tests. If we search the Community AMIs we get back a variety of 11g and 10g installation options but no 12c options. (Note that the first screen shot is the Standard Edition description, it should be the Enterprise Edition since two are listed).

We are going to use the Commercial Marketplace and select the first 12c database instance. This takes us to a screen that lets us select the processing shape. Note that the smaller instances are not allowed because you need a little memory and a single core does not run the database very well. This is one of the advantages over selecting an operating system ourselves and finding out that we selected too few cores or not enough memory. Our selections are broken down into general purpose, compute optimized, or storage optimized. The key difference is how many cores, how much memory, and dedicated vs generic IOPs to the disk.

We could select an m3.xlarge or c3.xlarge and the only difference would be the amount of memory allocated. Network appears to be a little different with the c3.xlarge having less network throughput. We are going to select the m3.xlarge. Looking at pricing we should be charged $0.351/hour for the Ec2 instance, $0.125 per GB-month provisioned or $5/month for our 40 GB of disk, and $0.065 per provisioned IOP-month or $32.50/month. Our total cost of running this x3.xlarge instance will be $395.52/month or $13.18/day. We can compare this to a similarly configured Amazon RDS at $274.29/month. We need to take into account that we will need to purchase two processor licenses of the Enterprise Edition license at $47,500 per processor license. The cost of this license over four years will be $95,000 for the initial license plus 22% or $20,900 per year for support. Our four year cost of ownership will be $178,600. Amortizing this over four years brings this cost to $3,720/month. Our all in cost for the basic Enterprise Edition will cost us $4,116.35/month. If we want to compare this to the DBaaS cost that we covered earlier we also need to add the cost of the Transparent Data Encryption so that we can encrypt data in the cloud. This module is included in the Advanced Security Module which is priced at $15,000 per processor license. The four year cost of ownership for this package is $56,400 bringing the additional cost to $1,175/month. We will be spending $5,291.35 for this service with Amazon.

If we want to compare this with PaaS we have the option or purchasing the same instance at $1,500/OCPU/month or $3,000/month or $2.52/OCPUhour for the Enterprise Edition on a Virtual Image. We only need two OCPUs because this provides us with two threads per virtual core where Amazon provides you with one thread per core. We are really looking for thread count and not virtual core count. Four virtual processors in Amazon is equivalent to two OCPUs so our cost for a virtual image will be $1.5K/OCPU * 2 OCPUs. If we go with the Database as a Service we are looking at $3,000/OCPU/month or $6,000/month or $5.04/OCPU/hour for the Enterprise Edition as a service. What we need to rationalize is the extra $708/month for the PaaS service. Do we get enough benefit from having this as a service or do we spend more time and energy up front to pay less each month?

If we are going to compare the High Performance edition against the Amazon EC2 edition we have to add in the options that we get with High Performance. There are 13 features that need to be licensed to make the comparison the same. Each of these options cost anywhere from $11,500 per processor to $23,000 per processor. We saw earlier that each option will add $1,175/month so adding the three most popular options, partitioning, diagnostics, and tuning, will cost $3,525/month more. The High Performance edition will cost us $2,000/OCPU/month or $4K/month for the virtual image and $4,000/OCPU/month or $8K/month. Again we get ten more options bundled on with the High Performance option at $8K/month compared to $8,816.35 with the AWS EC2 option. We also get all of the benefits of PaaS vs IaaS for this feature set.

Once we select our AMI, instance type, we have to configure the options. We can request a spot instance but this is highly discouraged for a database. If you get terminated because your instance is needed you could easily loose data unless you have DataGuard configured and setup for synchronous data commit. We can provision this instance into a virtual private network which is different from the way it is done in the Oracle cloud. In the Oracle cloud you provision the service then configure the virtual instance. In Amazon EC2 it is done at the same time. You do have the option of provisioning the instance into one of five instance zones but all are located in US East. You can define the administration access roles with the IAM role option. You have to define these prior to provisioning the database. You can also define operating of this instance from the console. You can stop or terminate the instance when it is shut down as well as prohibit someone from terminating the instance unless they have rights to do so. You can enable CloudWatch (at an additional charge of $7.50/month) to monitor this service and restart it if it fails. We can also add elastic block attachment so that our data can migrate from one instance to another at an additional cost.


We now have to consider the reserved IOPs for our instance when we look at the storage. By default we get 8 GB for the operating system, 50 GB for the data area with 500 provisioned IOPS, and 8 GB for log space. The cost of the reserved IOPS adds $38.75/month. If we were looking at every penny we would also have to look at outbound traffic from the database. If we read all of our 50 GB back it would increase the price of the service by a little over $3/month. Given that this is relatively insignificant we can ignore it but it was worthy of looking at with the simple monthly calculator.


Our next screen is the tags which we will not use but could be used to search if we have a large number of instances. The screen after that defines the open ports for this service. We want to add other ports like 1521 for the database, and 443 and 80 for application express. Port 1158 and 22 were predefined for us to allow for enterprise manager and ssh access.


At this point we are ready to launch our instance. We will have 50 GB of table space available and the database will be provisioned and ready for us upon completion.

Some things to note in the provisioning of this instance. We were never asked for an OID for the database. We were never asked for a password associated with the sys, system, or sysdba user account. We were never asked for a password to access the operating system instance. When we click on launch we are asked for an ssh key to access the instance once it is created.

When you launch the instance you see a splash screen then a detail screen as the instance is created. You also get an email confirming that you are provisioning an instance from the marketplace. At this point I notice that I provisioned Standard Edition and not Enterprise Edition. The experience is the same and nothing should change up to this point so we can continue with the SE AMI.



Once the instance is created we can look at the instance information and attach to the service via putty or ssh. The ip address that we were assigned was 54.242.14.146. We load the private key and ip address into putty and connect. We first failed with oracle then got an error message with root. Once we connect with ec2-user we are asked if we want to create a database, enter the OID, and enter the sys, system, and dbsnmp passwords.





The database creation takes a while (15-30 minutes according to the create script) and you get a percent complete notification as it progresses. At this point we have a database provisioned, the network configured, security through ssh keys to access the instance, and should be ready to connect to our database with sql developer. In our example it took over an hour to create the database after taking only five minutes to provision the operating system instance. The process stalled at 50% complete and sat there for a very long time. I also had to copy the /home/ec2-user/.ssh/authorized_keys into the /home/oracle/.ssh directory (after I created it) to allow the oracle user to login. The ec2-user account has rights to execute as root so you can create this directory, copy the file, and change ownership of the .ssh directory and contents to oracle. After you do this you can login as oracle and manage the database who owns the processes and directories in the /u01 directory.

It is important to note that the database in EC2 provides more features and functions than the Amazon RDS version of the database. Yes, you get automated backup with RDS but it is basically a snapshot to another storage cloud instance. With the EC2 instance you get features like spatial, multi-tenant, and sys access to the database. You also get the option to use RMAN for backups to directories that you can read offsite. You can setup DataGuard and Enterprise Manager. The EC2 feature set is significantly more robust but requires more work to setup and operate.

In summary, we looked at what it takes to provision a database onto Amazon EC2 using a pre-defined AMI. We also looked at the cost of doing this and found out that we can minimally do this at roughly $5.3K/month. When we add features that are typically desired this price grows to $8.8K/month. We first compared this to running DBaaS in a virtual instance in the Oracle Public Cloud at $6K/month (with a $3K/month smaller footprint available) and DBaaS as a service at $8K/month (with a $4K/month smaller footprint available). We talked about the optional packs and packages that are added with the High Performance option and talked about the benefits of PaaS vs IaaS. We did not get into patching, backups, and restart features provided with PaaS but did touch on them briefly when we went through our instance launch. We also compared this to the Amazon RDS instance in features and functions at about a hundred of dollars per month cheaper. The bulk of the cost is the database license and not the compute or storage configuration. It is important to note that the cost of the database perpetual license is still being paid for if you are running the service or not. With PaaS you do get the option of keeping the data active in cloud storage attached to a compute engine that is running but you can turn off the database license on an hourly or monthly basis to save money if this fits your usage model of a database service.

What’s New in the Cloud

One thing that the last year has taught me is that things change quickly. One of the biggest challenges is to keep up with this change and figure out what is new and what is not. We are going to take a diversion today and look at changes in the Oracle Public Cloud then get back to provisioning database into different cloud platforms tomorrow. This is important because it helps us define how to differentiate platform as a service from infrastructure as a service with software installed on it. Entries like scale up and scale down of services, DataGuard between two data centers for DBaaS, temporary bursting services to larger instances, various connectors and plug ins for integration and SOA services are examples of PaaS advantages. Many of these features automatically happen or reduce hundreds of commands that needs to be executed to configure a service or integration. Provisioning a database into an IaaS service comes with tradeoffs and sacrifices. It is important to know what added services you are getting when you select PaaS over IaaS. The list of new features helps us understand the added value of PaaS and how we can leverage them.

Let’s start with infrastructure and see how things have changed. If you go to the Oracle Public Cloud Documentation you see tabs listing all of the services. For infrastructure this corresponds to compute, storage, and networking. If we click on infrastructure then compute, it takes us to the Compute Documentation. Note that there is a What’s New page. At the time of writing this blog, the newest entry is April 2016. The key announcements in this entry include

  • April 2016
    • Oracle Compute Cloud Service — Generally Available (GA)- it was controlled availability
    • 1 OCPU subscription – previous min was 500 OCPUs
    • Bursting – non-metered services can short term double the cores allocated an additional services billed like a metered service
    • Oracle-provided Windows images – Windows 2012 R2
    • Oracle-provided Solaris images – Solaris x86 11.3
    • Cloning storage volumes using snapshots
    • Cloning instances using snapshots
    • Resizing storage volumes – storage can be resized while attached to active instance
    • Private Images page moved to a new tab on the web console
    • Instance IP addresses now shown on the Instances page
    • Improved image upload tool
  • March 2016
    • Changes in the web console for creating storage volumes
    • opc-init documentation – startup initialization scripts when a new image is booted
  • February 2016
    • Oracle Network Cloud Service – VPN for Dedicated Compute
    • Security IP list as the destination in a security rule created using the web console
    • SSH key management actions moved to the Network tab of the web console
    • Summary information displayed for each resource in the web console
    • Simplified navigation and improved performance in the web console – Orchestration tab changed

There isn’t a what’s new for storage and networking because it is folded into the compute page. Note that there were a few storage entries (resize to an active instance and cloning storage volumes) and network entries (VPN, Security list, SSH key management) in the compute page.

For platform as a service, there is a What’s new for DBaaS that details changes to the database as a service and schema as a service options.

  • May 2016
    • Oracle Data Guard available – database creation and replication between data centers
    • Backup and recovery available through the console – previously required ssh access
    • Updated version of Oracle REST Data Services
    • Oracle GlassFish Server removed – services now available through REST services
  • April 2016
    • Configure a service instance’s database as the replication database for Golden Gate
  • March 2016
    • Add an SSH public key to a service instance – allows for multiple ssh keys to an instance
    • Jan 2016 PSU integrated into base image for single-instance databases
    • Jan 2016 bundle patch integrated into base image for Oracle RAC databases
  • February 2016
    • Selectable database character set and national character set during instance creation
    • Jan 2016 PSU available for patching
  • January 2016
    • 2 TB (terabyte) storage volumes now supported
    • Ability to create “temporary” storage volumes using Oracle Compute Cloud Service – storage can be short term added and removed as needed.

In the Application Development area there is a What’s New for

  • Application Container Service
    • May 2016
      • New Command-Line Interface
      • New utilities for JavaScript and Node packaging and dependency management
      • New deployment configurations for Java-based applications target Oracle Application Container Cloud Service
      • A new Oracle Developer Cloud Service sample project
    • April 2016
      • Node.js 0.10.x, 0.12.x
      • Oracle Linux 6.6
      • Oracle Java SE 7, 8
  • Developer Cloud Service
    • May 2016
      • Deploy to Oracle Application Container Cloud Service instances
      • Snippets support
      • New Member dialog
      • Home tab remembers your last opened child tab
      • Upload artifacts to the project’s Maven repository from the Code tab
      • View the dependency information for Gradle builds
      • The Code button in the Commits view displays files of the current path
      • More pre-defined standard search queries added in the Merge Request tab
      • Audit Log in the Job Details page
      • Build is triggered on push to Git repository
      • Deploy to Oracle Java Cloud Service using Oracle WebLogic REST APIs
      • Lock a Git repository branch
      • Restrict push and merge actions on a protected branch
      • HipChat Webhook support
  • Java Cloud Service
    • May 2016
      • Manage Oracle platform services from a command line interface (CLI)
      • Create and manage access rules
      • Create service instances that use database deployments with cloud-only backups
      • Flexible usage changes to Oracle Java Cloud Service non-metered subscriptions – additional processors can be short term allocated and billed on a metered basis
    • April 2016
      • Create WebLogic Server 12.2.1 service instances
      • Provision service instances with a domain partition
      • Create service instances that use Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) databases
      • New patches are available, WebLogic server, Java Developer Kit
    • March 2016
      • Manage SSH access for service instances
      • Add a second load balancer to a service instance
  • Mobile Cloud Service
    • May 2016
      • Location Platform API
      • Microsoft Azure Active Directory authentication
      • export and import artifacts across MCS instances
      • OAuth and JWT token policies for REST connectors
    • April 2016
      • Facebook credentials or their corporate single-sign on credentials
      • JavaScript SDK has been re-tooled to specifically support browser-based mobile apps
      • Cordova SDK supports hybrid development on the Cordova framework

For Content and Collaboration Services

  • Process Cloud Services
    • April 2016
      • New Process Editor
      • New Data Association editor
      • Transformation editor
      • Business Indicator metrics
      • Business Analytics dashboards
      • Outbound REST Connector editor
      • Document-Initiated Process
      • Web Service Message Protection
      • Security Certificates
      • New REST APIs
      • Workspace Enhancements
      • SSO and Authentication
      • Web Form Snapshots
      • Business Objects from JSON instance

For the Integration Cloud Service

  • Integration Cloud Service
    • April 2016
      • Orchestration support – BPEL Process integration
      • Oracle Sales Cloud Adapter – REST APIs and interface catalog
      • REST Adapter enhancements
      • SAP Adapter – inbound integration support
      • Microsoft SQL Server Adapter – inbound integration support
      • File Adapter – inbound integration support
      • Java Messaging Server Adapter – outbound integration support
      • DocuSign Adapter – outbound integration support
      • SuccessFactors Adapter – outbound integration support
      • ServiceNow Adapter – outbound integration support
      • Oracle Field Service Adapter – inbound and outbound integration support
      • Adapter Portal
      • Search improvements
      • Mapper visual enhancements
      • Execution Agent (on-premises Oracle Integration Cloud Service)
    • March 2016
      • Adobe eSign Adapter – outbound integration support
      • File Adapter – outbound integration support (support for 5 MB)
      • Microsoft SQL Server Adapter – outbound integration support
      • FTP Adapter – secure FTP server support
      • SAP Adapter – TRFC, QRFC, and error document support
      • Oracle Database adapter – inbound integration support
      • Oracle Siebel Adapter – inbound integration support
      • Salesforce Adapter – custom WSDL support
      • REST Adapter – multidimensional, nested array support in JSON documents
      • Scheduler – Delete files upon successful retrieval after an error
      • Large payload support – 10 MB
  • SOA Cloud Service
    • May 2016
      • Oracle Enterprise Scheduler is now available as part of Oracle SOA Cloud Service
      • Three new tutorials
    • March 2016
      • Scale Oracle SOA Cloud Service Nodes
      • Non-Metered Subscriptions
      • Oracle Managed File Service
      • Oracle B2B

For Business Analytics the changes are

  • March 2016
    • File size limit increased to 50MB
    • Visualize data in Oracle Applications
    • Update data sources after upload
    • New ways to present data visualizations; Donut charts, Tile views, Text boxes
    • Enhancements to visualizations; Trends, Color management, Thumbnails, Sort data elements, Filter data
    • Quickly copy report columns with “Save Column As…”
    • Build multiple data models
    • Upload data from Excel spreadsheets and OTBI (Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence) data sources
    • Data Loader deprecated
    • Integrate with multiple data sources
    • Whitelist safe domains
    • Index content and schedule crawls
    • Download the public key for remote data connectivity
    • Updates to the REST API

In summary, it is important to look at the new services and new announcements. Some of the changes are relatively small and of low impact. Other changes provide new features and functions that might change the way that you can leverage cloud services. These pages are updated monthly while the cloud services are typically updated every other week. It is recommended that you get into a routine schedule of checking the What’s New links in the documentation. Unfortunately, there is not a single location to look at all of these updates. This blog is an attempt to aggregate the new features for Iaas and PaaS.