back to article 'Shared databases are crap' Oracle reveals shared database management suite

Oracle, whose CEO Larry Ellison once slagged off multi-tenant clouds, has now released software to manage those very same multi-tenant databases. Ellison's database giant slipped out Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c this week, updated to administer multi-tenant instances on an Oracle 12c database. Oracle Multitenant is an option …

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  1. qwertyuiop
    Stop

    First multi-tenant database?

    Way back in 1986(ish) a project I worked on for the NHS used a multi-tenanted database that was built on ICL's (horrendous) IDMS dbms - and I certainly don't think we were the first. On that basis Oracle very definitely aren't the first.

  2. disgruntled yank

    Oh?

    Oracle has provided "row-level security" via policies since 8i, when they clearly implied that it was for diverse "tenants" in the same database.

    The problem with Oracle is not Larry Ellison's bombast, it is the license costs. For many years it has been difficult to put together a rig on which one might reasonably run Oracle and on which the hardware will cost more than the software.

    1. Ian Michael Gumby

      Re: Oh?

      Well...

      Both IBM and Oracle has had databases where you could have multi-tennancy ?sp?

      The issue that plagued them was that there was a shared common temp table structure.

      Informix's IDS lacked this problem...

  3. James 36

    so is Larry actually saying that they are crap but no reason not to make money out of them ?

    or will it be "shared databases are crap except ours"

    either way expect a labyrinthine licencing model that is open to interpretation that no-one has the minerals to test in court

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Another version of EM12c? I wonder if its any less bloated and bug ridden than the previous EM12c versions and if the upgrade path is easier. . For one of the EM12c upgrades the advice from Oracle was to give up and start again.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I dont get it...

    You can do this anyway, Just create the user and dont give them "Select any table", but give them privilages to play in their own schema. We do that all the time.....

    You can do something similar with mysql... and i assume almost every other RDBMS.....

    I suspect Oracle would prefer you didnt because you would only be paying for one oracle instance, rather than a number of them, but its perfectly ok to do it..

    1. Nate Amsden

      Re: I dont get it...

      yes you don't. I don't know what Oracle 12c offers but the multi tenant features I can think of all revolve around resource utilization. Sharing I/O, sharing CPU, sharing buffer cache, sharing DB connections etc. Don't want one user to be able to adversely affect another. With Oracle I think back to all of the outages I was a part of that were related to latch contention, that's a good way to kill all other tenants in a Oracle DB pretty quickly.

      IMO has nothing to do with basic level security.

      That doesn't stop most folks from running multi tenant databases and perhaps most of the times that strategy works fine (it has in my case for years on MySQL). But there are times when one app blows up and it causes issues with others on the DB.

      Virtualization would be a more ideal way to go about it, since things are more partitioned, but obviously much less efficient from a hardware utilization standpoint.

    2. tom dial Silver badge

      Re: I dont get it...

      The last time I looked at Oracle DBMS licensing, it was by the CPU, with a fudge variable that depended on the CPU archictecture. They didn't care how many instances you ran from the installed software, and where I was we commonly ran as many as the memory and CPU capacity of the machine would support.

      (There also were named user licenses, but those only made sense for special cases).

    3. Joe 35

      Re: I dont get it...

      I suspect Oracle would prefer you didnt because you would only be paying for one oracle instance, rather than a number of them, but its perfectly ok to do it..

      =======

      Oracle dont care how many instances you run, they charge on total cores or users.

      EDIT: And I see I'm a bit late saying that as soemone else said it a week or more ago. Oh well.

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