Amazon will soon offer Oracle Database 11g Release 2 as well as MySQL from its sky-high relational database service. The company plans to lob the Oracle database onto its so-called cloud sometime in the second quarter, as it announced with a blog post. In October 2009, the etailer cum virtual infrastructure maven launched its …

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Thursday 3rd February 2011 04:56 GMT Anonymous Coward

Yawn...

I'm sorry but I do have to flame El Reg on this story.

Just a quick Google of the search terms Amazon EC2 IBM

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2009/04/22/amazon-ec2-running-ibm-now-available/

Where DB2 and Informix have been on the cloud since 2009, what's really new with Oracle joining the fray?

Here's the complete list of relational databases:

http://aws.amazon.com/running_databases/#relational

and still here's a PR piece from 2008 about Oracle on EC2

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/server-farm/oracle-licensing-products-for-amazon-ec2-cloud-environments/

So I have to ask... what's really new?

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1. Thursday 3rd February 2011 10:07 GMT Thom Brown
  
  Re: Yawn...
  
  You're referring to standard installations of a relational database on EC2, which there have been many for a while.
  
  Read up on: http://aws.amazon.com/rds/
  
  What the article is about is Amazon's Relational Database Service, which currently only provides MySQL, and will shortly be providing Oracle. It takes a lot of the administrative overhead away (in theory) and auto-patches the database, and various other things. Standard installations, however, are still entirely managed by their EC2-instance user.
  
  But it still sucks. Amazon only have 2 offerings for RDS, and both are from Oracle. Not exactly freedom of choice.
  
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  1. Thursday 3rd February 2011 17:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    @Thom Brown
    
    Thanks for the update.
    
    Yes, I was wondering about that, however... I still don't see any real advantage. After a couple of days training, even a pet monkey can set up and maintain an IDS installation. Yes, its really that simple.
    
    Unfortunately I just outed all of my Informix DBA friends who are used to only doing at most an hour of work a day and spending the rest of the time surfing the web... ;-)
    
    If you setup IDS properly, you don't need to spend much time in maintenance mode.
    
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2. Thursday 3rd February 2011 10:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Yawn more...
  
  Perhaps what's new is that this is a full-fat Enterprise grade database; note that in your link DB2 and IDS are only supplied with Express and Workgroup editions (not Enterprise)?
  
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  1. Thursday 3rd February 2011 16:55 GMT Ian Michael Gumby
    
    @AC
    
    I guess the fact that Amazon is going to do the maintenance is the big news.
    
    With respect to IBM's Express/Workgroup offerings, Enterprise offers a couple of features that aren't really going to be of much use in a cloud world. ( Replication comes to mind.)
    
    If I were to look at a 'real' enterprise class RDBMs in the cloud, I'd look at Informix XPS (still a product sold by IBM but not really marketed or enhanced.)
    
    XPS in its day offered near linear scale. Of course back in the 90's we're talking about databases measured in TB not PBs
    
    There's more too it, but I'll let an IIUG type expand on it. ;-)
    
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Thursday 3rd February 2011 16:17 GMT Mike VandeVelde

ec2

There are the AMIs:

http://aws.amazon.com/amis/

IBM does a lot with these:

http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/global-solution-providers/ibm/

A free Domino server for testing with the now free Designer client is compelling, for anyone looking to dip their toes:

http://aws.amazon.com/amis/3687?_encoding=UTF8&jiveRedirect=1

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