Last week, EDB hosted a webinar discussing the new options that enterprises have at their fingertips as they look to move from Oracle to the cloud, as well as why so many are considering making the jump. Hosted by our Director of Product Management, Cloud Aislinn Wright and CTO, Cloud Benjamin Anderson, this discussion dove into the challenges that many companies face as they leave Oracle in their rearview, and the expanded choices businesses can now take advantage of.
What are your options for Oracle in the Cloud?
When it comes to moving your Oracle databases to the cloud, organizations don’t have many options for a fully managed service.
The most obvious choice is Oracle’s own cloud service, also known as OCI. This platform offers a number of fully managed database services, including Exadata. More notably, OCI makes it easy to handle Real Application Clusters (RACs), which is a major positive for those concerned with business continuity. Clustered databases are a familiar reality for many massive enterprises, and ensuring that you don’t lose control of the applications that rely on your cluster is critical. As such, OCI positions itself as the natural transition for those Oracle users who want to step foot into the cloud.
The other prominent options are Amazon Web Services (AWS)--which offers a range of fully managed services, including Amazon RDS for Oracle and the more granular, recently released Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle--and Microsoft--which tethers Azure and OCI via what Oracle terms Interconnect. In this situation, your data will still live in an Oracle cloud database but you’ll be connected to Azure for additional functionality.
However, while these options exist, companies should be aware of the significant limitations that they present.
Avoid dropped workloads, rigid contracts, and hamstrung innovation
The first, and most quickly apparent problem that the latter two options create is the total lack of support for RAC workloads on non-Oracle cloud providers. Given how vital RAC workloads are for many businesses, this gap can cause major issues, especially for your most vital applications. In short, after locking into a cloud vendor license, you’ll find yourself unable to migrate those most sophisticated workloads to the cloud. Think of it like booking a charter flight to the Caribbean, only to be told by the pilot that you can’t bring your bathing suit and sunscreen onboard.
This leads into the second major issue that businesses who take these aforementioned routes face. Given the paltry options that many believe they’re stuck with, it’s easy to accidentally limit your enterprise, and lock yourself into an unfavorable or inflexible contract. The fully managed database services for Oracle that might makeup much of your infrastructure aren’t available on many public cloud platforms, and if you choose to stick with OCI, you might be backed into a corner: Oracle can change pricing and license stipulations on a dime, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
The final, and perhaps most important problem that these options pose is hamstringing your ability to innovate. We’ve witnessed massive investment in Postgres over the years, staying on Oracle could limit your ability to take advantage of newer innovative offering models we see with Postgres, like serverless . Open source solutions grow with you and with the market, while major cloud providers are often playing catch-up with the trends and demands of innovative businesses.
You deserve a cloud experience that molds to your enterprise, rather than one that forces you to contort your workloads to its own parameters.
What’s the path forward?
Even a quick glance at 2021’s Stack Overflow Survey makes one thing clear: open source solutions are all the rage. Not only is PostgreSQL the Most Loved RDBMS all five years that that question has been asked, but it’s actually increased in popularity since 2020-—from 36% to 44%.
Why is this?
First and foremost, open source technologies in general prove to be more flexible and more agile, supported by a massive community of users and developers who are able to improve these solutions as they encounter issues. No longer are you beholden to the update schedule of an enterprise provider, nor shackled by a license that might make what should be obvious innovations into overpriced luxuries. PostgreSQL, specifically, is renowned for its extensibility. It’s also become a gold standard among other cloud providers, seeing major investments from the likes of AWS Babelfish and more.
When you look at PostgreSQL in comparison to Oracle, you also swiftly notice the expansive compatibility with other services that the former offers.
- EDB’s Big Animal
- AWS
- Microsoft
- Google Cloud
- Aiven
- CrunchyData
Whereas Oracle offers a small menu of deep integrations, PostgreSQL allows you to seize on everything the cloud has to offer.
Getting to PostgreSQL
While all of this makes it seem like migrating directly to PostgreSQL is a no-brainer, we don’t want to kid ourselves. Migrating workloads is hard. Migrating workloads takes time. Migrating workloads is expensive. Figuring out where you want to go is the easy part. It’s the getting there that makes you break a sweat.
EDB is a firm believer in both the power of PostgreSQL, and the benefit of undertaking your migration to Postgres with the help of an expert. That’s why we’ve committed ourselves to helping businesses across industries make the move with as little stress as possible.
Following conversations we had with a number of companies, it became clear that the biggest worry that businesses have when considering a migration is making sure all their data is effectively moved. Luckily, our EDB Advanced Postgres Server is compatible with Oracle database data types, PL/SQL support, packages, data dictionary views and drivers. Additionally, migration tooling makes it easy to run schema assessments and validate your data throughout the course of a migration. As such, EDB can help you migrate not only your schema and data, but your code, your interface, and all of your operational tools.
But perhaps our biggest strength is our people. Our team has fifteen years of expertise in helping companies migrate their Oracle workloads. This is why EDB is so trusted by enterprises looking to leave Oracle behind: great tools, in good hands.
If you’re looking to migrate from Oracle to the cloud, you deserve the best options possible. We’re here to show them to you. Learn more by visiting biganimal.com.