Database as a Service (DBaaS) FAQ

Q – What is Database as a Service? 

DBaaS is a cloud model that enables users to request database environments by choosing from a predefined service catalog using a self-service provisioning framework. The key benefits of these database clouds are agility and faster deployment of database services. As databases are provisioned and de-provisioned, the associated computing resources are consumed and then released. Database resources can be consumed for the duration of a project, and then be automatically de-provisioned and returned to the resource pool. Computing costs can be tracked and charged back to the consumer.

Q – What drives organizations to deploy DBaaS environments? 

Organizations are drawn to DBaaS because it can simplify IT infrastructures, making it easy to deliver database functionality to many users and multiple divisions from the same hardware and software infrastructure, while automating manual provisioning processes. Provisioning new databases in traditional environments can take days or weeks. DBaaS can compress that down to minutes. A simpler IT infrastructure ensures greater agility for the business with less risk and lower costs, as shown in the figure below.
“Agility is a key motivator here. With DBaaS we can deliver better, faster, more effective IT services to agencies and the citizens that they serve.” -- Todd Kimbriel, Director of E-Government, State of Texas “A DBaaS environment empowers our DBAs to innovate. They not only are responsible for keeping the systems up and running but for bringing improvements to the business.” -- Eric Zonneveld, Oracle Architect, KPN3

Q – What are some popular use cases for the DBaaS model? 

DBaaS architectures are quickly gaining traction with Dev/Test organizations since they permit developers to set up and tear down databases on an as-needed basis. They can create new instances quickly without IT assistance, avoiding the usual process of procuring and initializing servers. This level of independence and flexibility lets developers and QA experts provision new databases on demand. If they are using a storage environment that has snapshot storage, such as Oracle ZFS, then users can clone an existing pluggable database instantly.

 Q – What are the financial motivations for DBaaS? 

One of the most appealing aspects of DBaaS is that consolidation results in a smaller hardware footprint, which lowers costs. In addition, many users and departments share the infrastructure while paying for individual database services, which drives down the unit price of those services. According to Todd Kimbriel, Director of E-Government for the State of Texas, this payment model also makes it easier for customers to obtain database capacity on demand. Smaller agencies and departments can obtain a level of service that they previously could not have afforded. Planning horizons are easier and more predictable, which resonates well with the line of business owners. The State of Texas created a planning tool that lets state agencies compare what it costs to run their current database applications in a traditional technology stack versus a DBaaS environment. They also demonstrated how a simplified pricing structure would be better for each participating organization. For example, each agency could pay a set amount per month for database services, versus the traditional model of paying independently for servers, storage devices, networking gear, software, and support contracts.

Q – How do you sell the concept of DBaaS to the IT department?

 IT is continually asked to do more with less. IT leaders are looking for ways to increase agility while reducing cost and risk. To illustrate these business dynamics, KPN created an “Exademo” to demonstrate the performance and resource requirements associated with running various application loads—both in a traditional database environment and in a DBaaS environment based on Oracle Exadata. They emulated users logging in and putting the system through its paces, and also demonstrated how Oracle Exadata could minimize the number of databases, versions and operating platforms. Finally, they simulated disaster recovery scenarios by switching the load between two data centers—first using traditional systems and then using Oracle Exadata systems. KPN performed“We looked at the products our customers were already using. Oracle was far and away the largest footprint from a database perspective. Staying with Oracle accelerated DBaaS adoption since our users were already familiar with it.” -- Todd Kimbriel, Director of E-Government, State of Texas “We have more than 400 databases and 60 totally distinct applications on six Exadata systems including batch, OLTP, and data warehouse. We have room for many more before we need additional capacity. - Eric Zonneveld, Oracle Architect, KPN4 rigorous testing and demonstrations before going live with a DBaaS environment to ensure that everybody would receive the requisite levels of security and performance. The State of Texas promoted its new DBaaS environment by offering deep-dive indoctrination sessions to acquaint DBAs with the basic concepts of Exadata and DBaaS. Many DBAs who were skeptical when they arrived became evangelists for this new model.

Q – How do you sell DBaaS to management? 

Capital Expenditures (CapEx) are incurred to create future benefit i.e. acquisition of assets that will have a useful life beyond the tax year. Operational expenditures (OpEx) are those expenditures required for the day-to-day functioning of the business. DBaaS generally follows the OpEx model, enabling consumers to avoid large upfront investments in hardware, software and services. This cost structure especially resonates with line of business managers. Not only does the DBaaS model enable more agile database services, it also helps the business to allocate costs. User organizations pay to the degree that they consume each service, incenting those organizations to be more efficient. They can commission databases for particular purposes, then decommission them and return them back to a resource pool that all organizations share. Charging back for database services can transform the IT environment from a cost center to a revenue generator.

 Q - What are some of the primary planning considerations for DBaaS? 

When planning and designing a DBaaS architecture, Carl Olofson, a research director at IDC, says there are a couple of key things to focus on: 1 – Thorough capacity planning to ensure that you can meet user needs and uphold the service level agreements that you establish, especially as more databases are deployed and the environment gets more popular. Olofson says to be overly generous with capacity. “Instead of doing planning and analysis from the inside out, and then trying to fit everything within those choices, ask yourself: What do users need? What are their performance requirements? Then figure out what kinds of technology you need to meet their future requirements. Once you have DBaaS capabilities and people can request databases, the demand may be higher than you initially expect.” 2 - Selecting the right technology. Many customers rely on engineered systems for DBaaS environments. These integrated hardware and software solutions are designed to work together to facilitate extreme performance and availability, while simplifying deployment and maintenance issues. “You also need a database management system that simplifies virtualization and consolidation of IT resources and an integrated set of
“DBaaS environments can be complicated, with lots of moving parts. You need database management software that makes it easy to establish the services that you envision. And you need robust management tools that enable you to maintain those databases.” – Carl Olofson, IDC “Oracle Multitenant helped us to see the value of offering a DBaaS platform to customers. This has enabled us to avoid what we call the “race to the bottom”—we no longer differentiate ourselves just on price but rather on the value of the capabilities we can offer. We can respond more quickly to customer needs.” -- James Anthony, Technology Director, e-DBA5 management tools to streamline provisioning, monitoring, and chargeback,” Olofson adds.

 Q – How does DBaaS simplify activities for DBAs?

 DBaaS represents a paradigm shift in IT, from merely “keeping the lights on” to higher value tuning and development work. “The capabilities we bring through DBaaS allow all DBAs and administrators to move away from managing backups and cloning systems and other routine tasks,” explains James Anthony at e-DBA. “They can work with customers to help move the business forward. It’s more interesting work.” When a user, department, or line of business needs a database in a traditional database environment, they must make a formal request to the IT department, wait for that request to be approved, and then wait for IT to procure the equipment, install the necessary software, and provision the database resources. This cycle involves management approvals, purchasing, and a series of discrete tasks for DBAs, system administrators, and storage administrators. A DBaaS environment speeds up this entire cycle by empowering users to provision their own database resources. IT defines different “tiers” or classes of database service based on standard templates. An online catalog defines varying sizes, service levels and appropriate levels of chargeback for each tier. Authorized users can select the databases they need from this catalog, consume those services for the duration of a project, and then automatically de-provision the databases and return them to the resource pool. According to Kimbriel, DBaaS deployments “polarize” the day-to-day activities of those who are consuming those services and those who are operationalizing those services. “The daily housekeeping chores are handled automatically as part of the basic service,” he explains. “DBAs have a new focus on handling value-added tasks.”

Q – How do traditional database provisioning processes differ under the DBaaS model? 

In a traditional database environment, each database typically resides on a dedicated server. Procuring, implementing, and provisioning these hardware/software environments requires careful coordination among the groups of people who use and maintain the software. In addition, many different IT specialties arise to deal with the equipment, operating systems, databases, security, applications, and compliance policies. Different administrators may approach common tasks in different ways, so there may be little consistency or standardization in IT processes. With DBaaS, business users are pre-authorized to select the database services they need from an online catalog. They can create new database services and dispose of
“When we started off with DBaaS we had many, many databases and many, many versions. We needed a new platform to drive us forward into the future. By consolidating on to fewer servers we can offer more cost-effective services with higher availability.” -- Eric Zonneveld, Oracle Architect, KPN6 resources when they no longer need them—without relying on the IT department for assistance.

Q – How do you track costs and charge them back to consumers of database services?

 System management software such as Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c provides visibility into actual usage so that people only pay for what they use—instead of paying up-front for more capacity than they might otherwise need. This proven cloud management solution includes tools for integrated chargeback and capacity planning. A key component of this solution is Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Management Pack for Oracle Database, which lets DBaaS administrators identify pooled resources, configure role-based access, and define service catalogs and chargeback plans. It keeps both users and administrators apprised of the costs of the services delivered, and establishes accountability for consumption of resources. A graphical user interface makes it easy to provision database services.

 Q - What is the ideal Oracle private DBaaS configuration? 

For much of the Oracle customer base, the desired future state environment includes the following technologies: Oracle Database 12c has been designed to enable DBaaS as part of a comprehensive cloud strategy. It uses a multitenant architecture in which a single “container” database can handle many “pluggable” databases. Collections of pluggable databases can be easily managed as a single entity, which maximizes consolidation density and simplifies administration. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is a complete DBaaS management solution. It allows administrators to manage the entire lifecycle of a database cloud, from planning, testing and deployment to monitoring performance. It includes tools for integrated chargeback and capacity planning, with visibility into both the physical and virtual IT environment. Oracle Exadata is an engineered system that provides an exceptional deployment platform for DBaaS. It supports multiple deployment models, multiple workloads, and multiple service levels from one integrated platform. Optimizations in storage, storage-compute interconnects, and I/O resource management allow for flexible tiered server and storage resource configurations.

Q - What software do you need to manage a DBaaS environment?

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is a complete cloud lifecycle management solution. It includes tools for self-service provisioning and monitoring with integrated chargeback and capacity planning. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c offers complete visibility into both the physical and virtual DBaaS environments, from applications to disk. Oracle Enterprise Manager empowers administrators to plan, monitor, and manage DBaaS resource capacity—all from within a single management console.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Management Pack for Oracle Database lets DBaaS administrators create zones, identify pooled resources, configure role-based access to those resources, and define service catalogs and chargeback plans. Oracle Cloud Management Pack empowers DBaaS users to request database services and scale them up and down in response to changes in the workload. It keeps both users and administrators apprised of the costs of the services delivered and establishes accountability for consumption of resources. A graphical user interface shows the entire topology of the database services being offered, so administrators can monitor the performance and quickly address any issues before they impact business users.

Q - How do you set up a self-service portal for cloud users and administrators?

Oracle Cloud Management Pack for Oracle Database includes a Self Service Portal that enables administrators to configure a database cloud and define policies for how it is
“There are often situations in which you need to spin up a new database. But in a traditional data center this is a nontrivial task. Being able to do this on demand through an online service in moments is an amazing transformation of that situation.”
– Carl Olofson, Research Director, IDC
“DBaaS raises the level of DBA involvement, so they focus more on the business and less on the mechanics.”
-- James Anthony, Technology Director, e-DBA
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used. These policies determine the total amount of resources people can reserve for personal and departmental use. Users can login to the Self Service Portal and provision the database assets they need, without knowing anything about the inner working of the database management system. They can even define the time when the database will be retired, and then it will happen automatically.
Once the Self Service Portal is online, authorized users can request a database service through a simple selection process. As users create databases they can specify a retirement schedule or keep the provisioned database indefinitely. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c will automatically retire a database once it reaches its expiration date. Throughout this process they can monitor resource consumption through a graphical user interface.

Q – How do you create service catalogs and establish tiers of service?

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c lets you specify how you wish to set up instances of databases and applications and then configure the environment according to the business need. For example, a bronze tier might include basic database services using pluggable databases within Oracle Database 12c. A silver tier might also include Oracle Real Application Clusters for instantaneous failover to another server in the case of an outage, and a platinum tier uses Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture to enable automatic failover among clusters in two data centers. Other parameters that may come into play when defining service tiers include geography, disaster recovery levels, and security. Most organizations create simple service catalogs with a few basic tiers, as shown in the figure below:
“We are cloning large databases in moments using the snapshot capabilities. We never could have done that before. Once people log into the help desk it’s all automated. Our customers love it. It happens as a service. We cut the operator out of the equation.”
-- James Anthony, Technology Director, e-DBA
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When requesting the service, users specify a service tier and storage size. The service catalog might also be set up to identify a specific purpose for the service, such as, application development or testing. For example, the requirements of a developer are very different from those of a DBA. And the requirements of a DBA are different from those of a quality assurance engineer. Using this approach the State of Texas, established four different sizes and four different classes of database service, with differentiated levels of availability, disaster recovery, and backup options.

Q – How do you meter and chargeback for database usage?

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c lets you manage cloud resources as business services rather than as a collection of technical components. You can control not only the database resources, but also the associated network and CPU resources as well. Collecting usage metrics provides hard data that charts usage patterns, enabling better planning and budgeting while identifying underutilized assets. Users and departments can be charged for usage (chargeback) or simply apprised of that usage (showback). Read a white paper on metering and chargeback to learn more.

Q - How does DBaaS facilitate consolidation?

The traditional approach to reducing unused capacity is to migrate the database environment into virtual machines—logical partitions of each physical server. Alternately, you can reduce the number of virtual and physical environments by consolidating databases into a shared database infrastructure. This can be an important component of DBaaS. Combining database assets into one consolidated platform makes the overall IT environment easier to manage and lowers IT operational costs.
Oracle Exadata supports many types of consolidation scenarios including running multiple application schemas in one single database, hosting multiple databases on a single platform, or a hybrid of the two configurations. These converged environments enable a uniform set of IT services that can be deployed quickly and managed easily, reducing operating costs. Individual databases are consolidated on physical servers and clustered together into cloud pools for maximum density. Any server in the pool can host one or multiple database instances.
“Consolidation allows us to pass on performance and manageability benefits to our customers. We have seen an increase in performance and availability even as we reduce the cost of managing and provisioning databases.”
-- James Anthony, Technology Director, e-DBA
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Oracle Multitenant, an option of Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition, offers all the benefits of managing many databases as one, yet retains the isolation and resource control of separate databases. The multitenant container architecture enables organizations to set up one cloud environment with dozens or even hundreds of pluggable databases in each container database. Each pluggable database in a multitenant container database appears to applications as a single database. This high-density architecture enables servers, operating systems, and databases to be shared and lets system administrators manage many databases as one database.

Q - How do you monitor usage once database instances have been provisioned?

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c helps you manage the entire DBaaS lifecycle including performance, consolidation and capacity planning, patching, self-service provisioning, monitoring, and metering/chargeback. It includes tools for efficient, end-to-end monitoring and management of the entire hardware and software stack, with a discrete level of control over DBaaS environments based on common metrics such as CPU consumption and storage consumption. You can easily allocate CPU and I/O bandwidth to different workloads or databases, which simplifies administration of a consolidated database environment. The primary capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Manager for DBaaS environments are summarized in the following figure.
“User expectations change when everything is virtualized. You end up creating a more demanding customer base, along with customer-focused DBAs who can act as advocates and work together to solve problems.”
-- Carl Olofson, Research Advisor, IDC
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Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c makes it easy to allocate CPU resources between database containers, providing fine-grained control over the processing workload. For example, you can shift resources to accommodate customer-facing applications during the day and large reporting jobs at night. Oracle Enterprise Manager can also monitor and charge for the types of technologies being utilized, such as Oracle RAC. Click here to read more.

Q – How can Enterprise Architecture (EA) help with DBaaS Deployments?

For successful adoption and sustainable execution, it is important to understand how DBaaS fits into the overall environment. You will achieve the greatest value when the DBaaS strategy is considered along with your organization’s overall enterprise architecture and IT strategy. Enterprise architecture helps to structure DBaaS projects through a series of overlapping steps, or iterations. A systematic process determines how these environments should be created, with attention to the business, technical, and operational implications.
For example, if the HR department wants to implement a new payroll service and share it with other departments, the EA team begins by creating use-cases that reflect the needs of each department. They consider the profiles of the various departments and develop a service catalog that lists the functions these agencies need. Then each department can provision as little or as much of each service as is needed and also specify the degree of availability, disaster recovery, and uptime requirements.
Oracle has developed a complete Database as a Service Reference Architecture that consists of artifacts, tools and samples to help you understand how to operationalize DBaaS with attention to the correct strategy, people, processes, and technology. Click here to read more.
“The sheer labor involved in maintaining many different databases and servers can become overwhelming. Once you standardize on a single environment you can take it to the next level and make it easier to spin up databases when users need them. Then you are well on your way to a DBaaS scenario. Simplicity is the operative word.”
-- Carl Olofson, IDC
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Q - How does the DBaaS model save time or simplify activities for DBAs?

Creating database configurations based on standard templates enables a self-service model that relieves IT professionals and DBAs from having to manually configure and tear down databases in response to each individual request. Once the DBaaS environment is established, users can perform simple provisioning activities without engaging a DBA to allocate the resources, set access restrictions, and handle other common tasks.
In Oracle Exadata environments, instead of the usual division of labor between storage people and networking people and OS people, there is the opportunity to cultivate a new type of administrator that knows about all of these things. This integrated level of knowledge not only diversifies their work but also makes these IT professionals responsible for end-to-end management of the entire environment. For example, they no longer have to consult with many different people to troubleshoot issues. “One person understands how to resolve issues,” remarks James Anthony at e-DBA. “This enables them to be more in control of their own destiny. DBAs can turn away from the technology and face the customer.”