Get Started With Oracle Applications Now With Our New Test Drive Program

AWS has just launched Oracle Test Drive Labs.

The purpose of the Oracle Test Drive program is to provide customers with the ability to quickly and easily explore the benefits of using Oracle software on AWSserver infrastructure.

These labs have been developed by Oracle and AWS partners and are provided free of charge for educational and demonstration purposes.

Each Test Drive lab includes up to 5 hours of complimentary AWS server time to complete the lab, and you can return here and to try any or all of the Test drive Labs at any time, so feel free to experiment and explore!

Please note that there may be some pre-requisitesfor few labs. Kindly understand them, acquire the required accounts or softwares before proceeding with the labs.

For example, Oracle Secure Backup to S3 requires Oracle Technet (OTN) account.

The products vary from Oracle products for Database and Infrastructure, Oracle Applications and Oracle Fusion Middleware.

We can select from nearly a dozen labs which include but are not limited to: 

• Oracle Data Guard Disaster Recovery
• Oracle Secure Backup to S3
• Siebel on AWS

Read below post by Jeff for sample demo of back up Oracle database to AWS using the Oracle Secure Backup product.

One of the key advantages that customers and partners are telling us they really appreciate about AWS is its unique ability to cut down the time required to evaluate new software stacks. These "solution appliances" can now be easily deployed on AWS and evaluated by customers in hours or days, rather than in weeks or months, as is the norm with the previous generation of IT infrastructure.
With this in mind, AWS has teamed up with leading Oracle ecosystem partners on a new initiative called the Oracle Test Drive program.

AWS Announcement : High Performance Provisioned IOPS Storage For Amazon RDS

 

After announcing EBS Provisioned IOPS offering lately which allows you to specify both volume size and volume performance in term of number of I/O operations per second (IOPS),  AWS has now announced High Performance Provisioned IOPS Storage for Amazon RDS.

 

You can now create an RDS database instance and specify your desired level of IOPS in order to get more consistent throughput and performance.

Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS is immediately available for new database instances in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), and EU West (Ireland) Regions and AWS plan to launch in other AWS Regions in the coming months.

 

AWs is rolling this out in two phases. Read on more the extract from the announcement on AWS Blog by Jeff.

 

 

    

                   We are rolling this out in two stages. Here's the plan:

 

• Effective immediately, you can provision new RDS database instances with 1,000 to 10,000 IOPS, and with 100GB to 1 TB of storage for MySQL and Oracle databases. If you are using SQL Server, the maximum IOPS you can provision is 7,000 IOPS. All other RDS features including Multi-AZ, Read Replicas, and the Virtual Private Cloud, are also supported.
  
  
 
• In the near future, we plan to provide you with an automated way to migrate existing database instances to Provisioned IOPS storage for the MySQL and Oracle database engines. If you want to migrate an existing database instance to Provisioned IOPS storage immediately, you can export your data and re-import it into a new database instance equipped with Provisioned IOPS storage.

We expect database instances with RDS Provisioned IOPS to be used in demanding situations. For example, they are a perfect host for I/O-intensive transactional (OLTP) workloads.

We recommend that customers running production database workloads use Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS for the best possible performance. (By the way, for mission critical OLTP workloads, you should also consider adding the Amazon RDS Multi-AZ option to improve availability.)

Check out the video with Rahul Pathak of the Amazon RDS team to learn more about this new feature and how some of AWS customers were using it:

Responses from AWS customers :

• AWS customer Flipboard uses RDS to deliver billions of page flips each month to millions of mobile phone and tablet users. Sang Chi, Data Infrastructure Architect at Flipboard told us:

"We want to provide the best possible reading and content delivery experience for a rapidly growing base of users and publishers. This requires us not only to use a high performance database today but also to continue to improve our performance in the future. Throughput consistency is critical for our workloads. Based on results from our early testing, we are very excited about Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS and the impact it will have on our ability to scale. We’re looking forward to scaling our database applications to tens of thousands of IOPS and achieving consistent throughput to improve the experience for our users."

• AWS customer Shine Technologies uses RDS for Oracle to build complex solutions for enterprise customers. Adam Kierce, their Director said:

"Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS provided a turbo-boost to our enterprise class database-backed applications. In the past, we have invested hundreds of days in time consuming and costly code based performance tuning, but with Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS we were able to exceed those performance gains in a single day. We have demanding clients in the Energy, Telecommunication, Finance and Retail industries, and we fully expect to move all our Oracle backed products onto AWS using Amazon RDS for Oracle over the next 12 months. The increased performance of Amazon's RDS for Oracle with Provision IOPS is an absolute game changer, because it delivers more (performance) for less (cost)."

 

SOURCE 

Amazon RDS News - Oracle Data Pump

The Amazon RDS team is rolling out new features at a very rapid clip.

The most awaited feature - Oracle Data Pump is finally here.

Extract from blog post by Jeff:
Customers have asked us to make it easier to import their existing databases into Amazon RDS. We are making it easy for you to move data on and off of the DB Instances by using Oracle Data Pump. A number of scenarios are supported including:

• Transfer between an on-premises Oracle database and an RDS DB Instance.
• Transfer between an Oracle database running on an EC2 instance and an RDS DB Instance.
• Transfer between two RDS DB Instances.

These transfers can be run in either direction. We currently support the network mode of Data Pump where the job source is an Oracle database. Transfers using Data Pump should be considerably faster than those using the original Import and Export utilities. Oracle Data Pump is available on all new DB Instances running Oracle Database 11.2.0.2.v5. To use Data Pump with your existing v3 and v4 instances, please upgrade to v5 by following the directions in the RDS User Guide. To learn more about importing and exporting data from your Oracle databases, check out our new import/export guide.

For those who are not aware what Oracle Data Pump is -

Oracle Data Pump is a feature of Oracle Database 11g Release 2 that enables very fast bulk data and metadata movement between Oracle databases. Oracle Data Pump provides new high-speed, parallel Export and Import utilities (expdp and impdp) as well as a Web-based Oracle Enterprise Manager interface.

• Data Pump Export and Import utilities are typically much faster than the original Export and Import Utilities. A single thread of Data Pump Export is about twice as fast as original Export, while Data Pump Import is 15-45 times fast than original Import.
• Data Pump jobs can be restarted without loss of data, whether or not the stoppage was voluntary or involuntary.
• Data Pump jobs support fine-grained object selection. Virtually any type of object can be included or excluded in a Data Pump job.
• Data Pump supports the ability to load one instance directly from another (network import) and unload a remote instance (network export).