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Amazon RDS – Oracle Features

Oracle is very popular Relational DB which is available in the amazon RDS services with its enterprise edition features. Almost every feature of Oracle can be leveraged in the RDS platform. Below is a brief description on MYSQLs major features in RDS platform.

Supported Versions

The versions 11.2 and 12.1 are the major versions supported in the RDS platform. If no version is mentioned during the DB creation, it defaults to the most recent version at that point in time. Below is an example of how to get the supported DB Engine versions using AWS API in a python SDK program.

import boto3
client = boto3.client('rds')
response = client.describe_db_engine_versions(
    DBParameterGroupFamily='oracle-ee-12.1',
    DefaultOnly=True,
    Engine='',
    EngineVersion='',
    ListSupportedCharacterSets=False, #True,
)
print(response)

When we run the above program, we get the following output −

{
   "ResponseMetadata": {
      "RetryAttempts": 0,
      "HTTPStatusCode": 200,
      "RequestId": "f6805635-3e16-4014-83cd-dfdaf3f17950",
      "HTTPHeaders": {
         "x-amzn-requestid": "f6805635-3e16-4014-83cd-dfdaf3f17950",
         "date": "Fri, 14 Sep 2018 03:46:38 GMT",
         "content-length": "1455",
         "content-type": "text/xml"
      }
   },
   "u'DBEngineVersions'": [
      {
         "u'Engine'": "oracle-ee",
         "u'DBParameterGroupFamily'": "oracle-ee-12.1",
         "u'SupportsLogExportsToCloudwatchLogs'": true,
         "u'SupportsReadReplica'": false,
         "u'DefaultCharacterSet'": {
            "u'CharacterSetName'": "AL32UTF8",
            "u'CharacterSetDescription'": "Unicode 5.0 UTF-8 Universal character set"
         },
         "u'DBEngineDescription'": "Oracle Database Enterprise Edition",
         "u'EngineVersion'": "12.1.0.2.v12",
         "u'DBEngineVersionDescription'": "Oracle 12.1.0.2.v12",
         "u'ExportableLogTypes'": [
            "alert",
            "audit",
            "listener",
            "trace"
         ],
         "u'ValidUpgradeTarget'": []
      }
   ]
}

Oracle Licensing

There are two options for using oracle licenses in RDS. They are License Included and Bring Your Own License.

License Included Model

In this model Amazon holds the license for the software you are going to use. Also AWS itself provides the support for both AWS and Oracle software thorugh its support program. So the user does not purchase any separate license. The platform pricing includes the charges for licensing cost the user pays. The two editions supported in this model are Standard Edition One and Standard Edition Two.

Bring Your Own License (BYOL)

In this model the user brings in the license she holds into RDS platform. It is the user’s responsibility to maintain the compatibility between the license, database instance class and database edition. The user directly contacts the Oracle support channel for any need. In this model the supported editions are Enterprise Edition (EE), Standard Edition (SE), Standard Edition One (SE1) and Standard Edition Two (SE2).

For a multi A-Z deployment, the user should have license for both primary DB instance and the secondary DB instance.

Oracle DB Parameter Group

The oracle DB involves many DB parameters to be configured for various features and performance needs of the database. Aws makes these parameters visible through CLI commands, which the user can use to query for the parameter values. Below is the CLI command and the sample output.

aws rds describe-engine-default-parameters --db-parameter-group-family oracle-ee-12.1

Below are the some important parameters obtained as a result of above CLI command.

{
    "EngineDefaults": {
        "Parameters": [
            {
                "AllowedValues": "TRUE,FALSE",
                "ParameterName": "_allow_level_without_connect_by",
                "ApplyType": "dynamic",
                "Description": "_allow_level_without_connect_by",
                "IsModifiable": true,
                "Source": "engine-default",
                "DataType": "boolean"
            },
            {
                "AllowedValues": "CHOOSE,OFF,CUBE,NESTED_LOOPS,MERGE,HASH",
                "ParameterName": "_always_semi_join",
                "ApplyType": "dynamic",
                "Description": "_always_semi_join",
                "IsModifiable": true,
                "Source": "engine-default",
                "DataType": "string"
            },
            {
                "AllowedValues": "TRUE,FALSE",
                "ParameterName": "_b_tree_bitmap_plans",
                "ApplyType": "dynamic",
                "Description": "_b_tree_bitmap_plans",
                "IsModifiable": true,
                "Source": "engine-default",
                "DataType": "boolean"
            },
    {
                "AllowedValues": "TRUE,FALSE",
                "ParameterName": "parallel_automatic_tuning",
                "ApplyType": "static",
                "Description": "enable intelligent defaults for parallel execution parameters",
                "IsModifiable": true,
                "Source": "engine-default",
                "DataType": "boolean"
            },
            {
                "AllowedValues": "ENABLE,DISABLE",
                "ParameterName": "xml_db_events",
                "ApplyType": "dynamic",
                "Description": "are XML DB events enabled",
                "IsModifiable": false,
                "Source": "engine-default",
                "DataType": "string"
            }
        ]
    }
}

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