Day: May 13, 2016

DBaaS for real this time

We have danced around creating a database in the Oracle Public Cloud for almost a week now. We have talked about Schema as a Service, Exadata as a Service, licensing, and the different versions of DBaaS. Today, let’s tackle what it takes to actually create a database. It is important to note that the accounts that we are using are metered services accounts. We don’t have the option to run as a non-metered service and have to provision the services on an hourly or monthly basis. Unfortunately, we are not going to go through the step by step process of creating a database. There are plenty of other sites that do this well

And my personal favorite

I personally like the Oracle by Example links. Most of the screen shots are out of date and look slightly different if you go through the steps now. For example, the Configure Backup and Recovery screen shots from the first link above shows local backup as an options. This option has been removed from the menu. My guess is a few months from now all of this will be removed and you will be asked for a container that will be automatically created for you rather than having to enter a container that was previously created as is done now. The critical steps that are needed to follow these examples are

  1. Get a trial cloud account – instructions on how to do this
  2. Log into your cloud account – Account documentation
  3. Navigate to the Database Cloud Service console
  4. Click the Create Instance button
  5. Define the Subscription type, billing type, software release, software edition
  6. Configure your instance with name, description, ssh public key, compute shape, backup mechanism and location, storage size, sys password, SID and PID, and optional configurations (like potentially DataGuard, RAC, and GoldenGate).
  7. Wait for instance to be provisioned
  8. Connect to the database via ssh using ssh private key and putty/ssh
  9. Optionally open up ports (port 1521 for client connect, port 80 for apex)
  10. Do something productive

The tutorials go through screen shots for all of these services. You can also watch this on youtube

Things to watch out for when you create a database instance in the Oracle Public Cloud

  1. If you configure a backup service on a demo system and increase the database size to anything of size, you will overflow the 500 GB of storage in about three weeks. Things will stop working when you try to create a service
  2. All ports are locked down with the exception of ssh. You can use an ssh tunnel to securely connect to localhost:1521 if you tunnel this port. If you are using a demo account you can only open port 1521 to the world. White listing and ip address lists are not supported in the demo accounts
  3. Play with SQL Developer connections across the internet. It works just like it does on-premise. The DBA tool has good management interfaces that allows you to do simple administration services from the tool
  4. Play with Enterprise Manager 13c. It is easy to connect to your database via ssh and add your cloud instance to the OEM console. You can manage it just like an on-premise database. Cloning a PDB to the cloud is trivial. Database backup to the cloud is trivial
  5. Play with unplugging and replugging a PDB in 12c. You can clone and unplug from your on-premise system, copy the xml files to the cloud, and plug in the PDB to create a clone in the cloud.
  6. The longer you let a database run, the smaller your credit will get. If you are playing with a sandbox you can stop a database. This will stop charging for the database (at $3-$5/hour) and you will only get charged for the compute and storage (at $0.10/hour). If you leave a database running for 24 hours you burn through $72-$120 based on your edition selection. You will burn through $3 in 24 hours if you turn off the database and restart it when you want to jump back into your sandbox. Your data will still be there. That is what you are paying $3 a day for.
  7. If you are using a demo system, you can extend your evaluation once or twice. There is a button at the top right allowing you to extend you evaluation period. Make sure you do this before time runs out. Once time runs out you need to request another account from another email address.
  8. If you are playing with an application, make sure that you spin up WebLogic or Tomcat in a Java or Compute instance in the same account. Running a application server on-premise and a database in the cloud will suffer from latency. You are shipping MB/GB across with select statement returns. You are shipping KB/MB to paint part of a screen. It is better to put the latency between the browser and the app server than the app server and the database server
  9. Request an account in Amazon and Azure. The more you play with DBaaS in the Oracle environment the more you will appreciate it. Things like creating a RAC cluster is simple. Linking a Java Service to a Database Service is simple. Running a load balancer in front of a Java Service is easy. Play with the differences between Iaas with a database and Paas DBaaS. There is a world of difference.
  10. If you run your demo long enough, look at the patch administration. It is worth looking at since this is a major differential between Oracle, Amazon, and Azure.

In summary, we didn’t go through a tutorial on how to create a database as a service. At this point all of you should have looked at one or two tutorials, one or two videos, and one or two documentation pages. You should have a sample database to move forward with. It does not matter if it is Standard Edition, or Enterprise Edition, High Performance, or Extreme Performance. You should have a simple database that we can start to play with. The whole exercise should have taken you about an hour to learn and play and an hour to wait for the service to run to completion. Connect via ssh and run sqlplus as the oracle user. Open up port 1521 and download SQL Developer and connect to your cloud instance. Explore, play, and have fun experimenting. That is the primary reason why we give you a full database account and not a quarter of an account that you can’t really do much with.