Oracle as a service

In the cloud computing space, there is a growing demand for a database as a service. The industry has moved from the Application Service Provider (ASP) to a multi-faceted cloud model including, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). With the growing trend for private clouds, we have seen an increase in demand for the Oracle database to be delivered as a PaaS model. There are several cloud providers, including the Amazon Cloud that provides Oracle as a database on demand.

Oracle as a Service (OaaS) allows large enterprises to consolidate disparate data sources and leverage underutilized cycles. We see this implemented on every type of hardware infrastructure from commodity-based services, Linux on Z to Exadata (more on Exadata later in the chapter). In each of these situations, database owners would consolidate heterogeneous data sources such as DB2, Sybase, and SQL Server to an Oracle platform. In some situations...