Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
your Oracle database in a PaaS offering; that software is in the cloud and inaccessible
to you. The upside of this characteristic is that you do not have to manage any
software in the cloud, which reduces the overhead of your development and de‐
ployment environment.
Based on these two characteristics, you can understand that comparing products from
different levels of the stack is inappropriate. If you want administrative control over the
underlying database, for any reason, you cannot use a PaaS solution—you must go with
either a DBaaS product or use an IaaS product as the foundation and build a database
on top of it.
Similarly, if you want to create new cloud-based solutions and are interested in doing
this as productively as possible, you would select a PaaS product, rather than a DBaaS
solution—assuming that you would not need configuration options that were not avail‐
able in a PaaS product.
You would not compare a list of features to see whether you wanted to use an Oracle
database running on EC2 or the Oracle Database Cloud Service. Rather, you would
examine your requirements and goals for your cloud project, which would lead you to
the proper service level as the essential starting point for an evaluation. The different
service levels give you a range of options, based on the particular requirements of your
situation.
Is the Cloud New?
There is certainly excitement around the cloud, but is the overall class of cloud solutions
really anything new, or is the C-word just the latest marketing phrase meant to revitalize
existing products with just a name change?
The answer to this question is both yes and no, and the specifics have to do with which
portion of cloud solutions you focus on. On one hand, the lower end cloud levels, such
as IaaS and DBaaS, are similar to hosting, which has been around for a long time. Replace
physical machines with virtual machines and these two categories are pretty much like
that old war horse, and will provide the same benefits. At the end of the day, someone
else is running your software and hardware. They had to pay for it, as well as pay for
people to manage it, the same as you would, and they need to make their own margins.
In addition, the lower down you go in the software stack, the more of the installation,
maintenance, and license costs you are responsible for, so the lower the benefits to you.
Of course, these options still have the advantage of no additional capital outlay and rapid
provisioning, but these could also be realized with efficient hosting companies.
Multitenancy
Once you start dealing with PaaS and SaaS solutions, an additional technical factor
comes into play, which goes by the name of
multitenancy
. As the name implies, multi‐
tenancy supports multiple tenants sharing a pool of resources. That simple definition
