In my previous post, I covered the various Oracle Database options available within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). As promised, today I’m going to (bit) dive into what I believe the most fundamental and widely used cloud database option: the Oracle Base Database Service.

If you are migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud or building a new cloud-native application that requires full database control without the hardware management overhead, this is the starting point.

What is Oracle Base Database Service?

The Oracle Base Database Service allows you to deploy co-managed Oracle Databases on virtual machines (VMs) within OCI.

The term “co-managed” is the key here. Unlike the Autonomous Database, where Oracle handles tuning, patching, and backups fully automatically, the Base Database Service gives you full administrative control (including sysdba and root access to the underlying OS). However, Oracle still takes away the heavy lifting of physical infrastructure lifecycle management, offering automation for deployment, patching, scaling, and backup configurations.

Architecture and Flexibility

When designing an architecture using BaseDB, you get full flexibility to match your specific performance and availability requirements:

• Deployment Options: You can deploy it as a Single Instance for dev/test or smaller production environments, or leverage Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) across different Fault Domains for high availability.
• Storage Options: You can choose between Standard block volumes or higher-performance storage options depending on your IOPS and throughput demands.
• Database Editions: It supports Enterprise Edition (including High Performance and Extreme Performance packages) as well as Standard Edition 2, allowing you to easily match your existing on-premises software capabilities.

Licensing model flexibility: BYOL vs. License Included

One of the biggest financial and strategic decisions (and advantage) when moving to OCI BaseDB is the licensing model:

1. License Included: You pay a single, predictable hourly rate that covers both the OCI compute/storage infrastructure and the Oracle Database software license. This is ideal for new projects or temporary workloads.
2. Bring Your Own License (BYOL): If however you already own on-premises Oracle Database licenses, you can apply them to OCI, which may reduce the costs.

When should I choose BaseDB then?

You should choose Base Database Service over other OCI options if:

• You need full control: Your application requires specific database parameters, OS-level agents, third-party software installations, or more control over when database patches are applied.
• You are migrating legacy systems: If you are doing a “lift-and-shift” migration and your database relies on features, legacy code, or configurations not yet supported in fully managed/autonomous environments.
• You need cost-effective RAC: You require high availability with Oracle RAC but don’t have the workload size or budget that warrants an Exadata deployment.

Conclusion

The Oracle Base Database Service is between traditional on-premises control and cloud automation. It empowers DBAs to maintain their operational freedom while offloading physical hardware complexities to OCI.

In the next post, I’ll step into the engineering system! And explore the Oracle Exadata Database Service options.

For reference, here’s the documentation:

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/base-database/about/index.html

See you there!