Amazon adds Oracle 11g database to cloud relational service

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will add the Oracle 11g database to its on-demand web hosting services this year, allowing licence holders and non-licence holders to perform relational tasks and development work on an on-demand hourly basis.

AWS has committed only to a launch in the second quarter of 2011, but has published an introductory Amazon Relational Database Services running Oracle Database web page which should help interested parties learn more about the service. Potential users can also sign up to be notified when the service goes live.

The company is touting time and money savings as key drivers, and said that Amazon RDS could cut the time needed to provision such a system from days to minutes.

AWS will manage ongoing maintenance, such as updating and backing up databases, and will provide a dashboard view of operations allowing businesses to scale up computing and storage capacities with ease, the firm said.

AWS already offers the MySQL database to customers, but explained that the introduction of Oracle 11g will let IT teams streamline database administration, and give developers more time to spend on applications, as opposed to maintaining and scaling systems.

"Customers were really excited when we launched Amazon RDS for MySQL because it allowed them to run familiar MySQL databases while offloading the operational responsibilities and capital costs associated with physical servers and datacentres," said Raju Gulabani, vice president of database services at AWS.

"Enterprises asked when we will offer the same functionality for Oracle databases. We are pleased to share that we are not only releasing it soon, but are ready to have conversations with interested customers so they can plan for future deployments."

AWS will offer developers a range of licensing options, including Bring Your Own Licence, which lets them perform database tasks on Amazon RDS with no additional licensing costs.

Those without licences can take the services on a pay-by-the-hour basis, and AWS explained that costs depend on the database edition and instance size.

Companies looking for a better hold on costs could take a reserved database instance which lets them make a one-time payment and reserve slots for when they need them. AWS said that this will be offered at a significant discount to its other hourly tariffs.