Amazon has added Oracle to its lineup of Web-based database services in the cloud. Starting today, you can bring up Standard, Standard One or Enterprise Editions of Oracle 11g Release 2 databases, with a variety of licensing and pricing options. This is the first time that you can have a cloud-based fully licensed Oracle database.
If you already own an Oracle 11g license (or want to purchase it separately from Oracle), you can bring it to the Amazon cloud, or launch a new instance with the license included for an additional fee. The company will be adding new features in the future, including support for fault tolerance (a good thing too, given the recent outages of AWS). Amazon has beefed up its console display so you can see at a glance what versions and options you have selected for each database instance. Smaller databases instances will start at 11 and 16 cents per hour, for licenses included or not, respectively.
This adds to the existing MySQL instances, along with SimpleDB non-relational service, that Amazon already offers.
For more information, a great white paper from Frank Munz on how to configure your database instances can be found here.
