Pluggable 12c

For anyone looking for information on 12c, there are several posts about OpenWorld at the dbi Services blog (see links at right). In particular there’s a summary post about the “pluggable database” describing how you could plug a database into a “container” database, clone it inside the container database, then unplug it and put it somewhere else.

When I heard about the feature, it crossed my mind that there were two “obvious” targets for this technology that Oracle had in mind – in no particular order:

• Consolidation onto Exadata – I’ve seen an Oracle presentation about a customer who moved 18 databases from 14 servers onto 2 Exadata quarter racks; that’s a lot of processes that have to be running per rack simply to keep the the many instances idling. If you plugged all the database into a single instance you should get no applicatin interfence between databases and a minimal set of background processes.
• Applications as a Service (or should that be Software as a Service – SaaS): if a 3rd party wants to run your Peoplesoft system for you, they would probably prefer to run one database with multiple Peoplesoft databases plugged into it.

Currently “real” consolidation means lots of work to change multiple databases into multiple schemas in a single database, and worrying about public synonyms; running multiple copies of the same application in the same database demonstrates the most extreme example of how pluggable databases bypass the problem. Just think how nice it would be, as a service provider, to keep a single “empty” Peoplesoft pluggable database in your container database which you clone whenever you sign up with a new customer. And, as a customer, if you want to change your service provider, perhaps you could insist that you supplier unplugs your Peoplesoft database so that you can plug it in at your new service provider.