Amazon To Offer Oracle Database 11g on RDS

Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), said it plans to make Oracle Database 11g available through Amazon Relational Database Service during the second quarter of 2011.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS for Oracle will include flexible pricing options for customers.

Customers with existing Oracle licenses will be able to run Oracle Databases on Amazon RDS with no additional software licensing or support charges. Those without existing Oracle licenses can take an on-demand hourly licensing with no upfront fees or long-term commitments.

Amazon RDS is expected to streamline database administration for multiple editions of Oracle Database 11g Release 2, freeing up developers to spend more time on the differentiating parts of their applications rather than the manure of maintaining and scaling their database infrastructure.

Amazon said Amazon RDS, which already supports MySQL, helps reducing the amount of time required to provision a relational database, as well as the underlying infrastructure hardware and software, from days to just minutes.

Amazon RDS also manages ongoing maintenance tasks such as updating database software, taking continuous database backups for point-in-time recovery, and exposing key operational metrics via a web dashboard.

Amazon continues to be a pioneer in cloud computing, and we've worked closely together to make sure that the power of the Oracle portfolio is available to customers who want to run them in the AWS cloud. With more and more Oracle Database users interested in running on AWS, we are working with AWS to make sure the ease of fulfillment and platform agility of Amazon RDS is available for the Oracle Database, said Mark Townsend, vice president, Oracle Database Server Technologies.

AWS plans to offer several licensing options for running the Oracle Database on Amazon RDS, including:

* Bring Your Own License - (BYOL) - Customers with existing Oracle Database licenses can apply them to run Oracle Databases on Amazon RDS with no additional software licensing or support charges.

* On-Demand Database Instances (DB Instances) - This pay-by-the-hour licensing option requires no pre-existing licenses, up-front fees, or long-term commitments to run Oracle Databases on Amazon RDS. Customers pay a simple, hourly rate per RDS Database Instance running Oracle Database 11g. The hourly rate depends upon the Oracle Database edition and DB Instance size option selected.

* Reserved DB Instances - Reserved DB Instances allow customers to make a low, one-time payment for each DB Instance and in turn receive the option to run that DB Instance at a significant discount on the ongoing hourly usage charge. Both one-year and three-year reservation terms will be available.

Customers will get the technical support for Oracle Database from Oracle for BYOL DB Instances, and from AWS with backline support from Oracle for On-Demand and Reserved DB Instances.

Developers can find additional information about Amazon RDS at http://aws.amazon.com/rds

In December, Amazon said several applications of Oracle are now available in its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, a commercial web service that allows customers to rent computers on which to run their own computer applications.