Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
The pricing for a Database Cloud Service is also straightforward. There is essentially
one metric—storage—and three options for that metric.
At this time, the pricing for the Database Cloud Service is:
• A 5 GB Oracle Database Cloud Service for $175 a month.
• A 20 GB Oracle Database Cloud Service for $900 a month.
• A 50 GB Oracle Database Cloud Service for $2,000 a month.
In addition, you can get a 30-day free trial of the Database Cloud Service with a limit
of 1 GB of storage.
Why Mention Pricing?
This topic is focused on the concepts behind Oracle technology, so why mention pricing
here, for the first time in this topic? The only reason is to provide an illustration of the
general level of cloud pricing, which most readers will immediately see is significantly
different from Oracle's license policy. The pricing cited is current, as of this writing, for
purchasers in the United States, although similar pricing is in place throughout the
world.
Subscriptions can be either month-by-month or for a term of one or more years, and
discounts are available for term licenses.
There is another metric associated with a Database Cloud Service—data transfer—
which refers to the data requested by Database Cloud application users. The monthly
transfer amount is six times the storage allocation. At the time of this writing, Oracle is
tracking the data transfer amounts but is not charging for any overages. Oracle's expe‐
allowance should be enough for legitimate uses of the Database Cloud Service.
You may wonder why there are no metrics associated with the type of resources that
typically have an impact on performance, such as CPU cycles or memory. Remember
that the Oracle Database Cloud Service is a PaaS, so you, as a tenant, would not get
access to resources used by underlying software. Further, remember that one of the main
functions of the Oracle Database is to share resources between many, many users. Much
of what has been discussed in this topic previously centered on how Oracle efficiently
shares resources between users, from the SGA to pushing CPU processing to storage in
Exadata machines. Since tenants in the Oracle Database Cloud are isolated on the basis
of schemas, the Oracle database uses all the standard resource sharing between tenants
that is used for normal database users, who are also associated with schemas. And the
Oracle database is very good at this type of sharing.
