Oracle Cloud Fundamentals

In the past, data was stored in a local server room with limited expansion opportunities. Each server had a specific hardware capability. Upgrades were often costly and technically demanding, resulting in the need to buy new equipment. Later, distributed architectures were created to ensure robustness and resilience, but one way or another, the solution was not so complex and robust. Scalability can partially be achieved by dynamically reacting to the current and expected workload; however, cloud storage and databases provide the technical foundation needed for easy scalability. In terms of Oracle Cloud databases, autonomous management and technologies are a significant milestone.

Automation is now present almost everywhere, whether in smart devices and smartphones, modern cars full of sensors that are partially operated autonomously, or smart homes and cities, including advanced functions associated with Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), or the Internet of Things (IoT). Autonomous Databases (ADBs) go even further by providing a complex environment for your data handling, apps, and services to produce effective outcomes, reducing the costs and time required to set parameters, optimize the configuration, and so on.

As a business expands, the amount of data to be handled grows exponentially. It will no longer be sufficient to only cover current valid data. Historical data needs to be stored, manipulated, and evaluated, either in an original form or analytically aggregated in data warehouses, marts, or other analytical structures. As the data quantity grows, it cannot be managed manually by one local machine. It is necessary to ensure availability in an error-prone environment. Thus, additional servers must be employed to serve as backups, standby, and so on. The whole environment needs to be secured and properly interconnected over networks.

Managers and administrators have also realized that putting whole structures in one building is neither suitable nor secure, resulting in the need to rent other server rooms, usually geographically distributed rooms. That’s exactly where the cloud comes into play. The entire administration, securing, distribution, and backup strategies are moved to the cloud environment, so we arrive at the concept of autonomous processing here again.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Oracle Cloud core concepts and the Always Free option
• Defining Oracle ADBs and their types and principles
• Deployment models and database architectures
• Process of database provisioning and connecting
• Database system architecture overview – database and instance levels

Note that the source code can be found in the GitHub repository accessible via this web address: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Developing-Robust-Date-and-Time-Oriented-Applications-in-Oracle-Cloud/tree/main/chapter%2001.

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