During OpenWorld I wrote about my thoughts on Cloud First, an approach Oracle is taking for some of its products now. A discussion on Oracle-L has sparked this post.
One of things I hoped Cloud First would accomplish was to allow Oracle to fix more of the bugs before they dropped the on-premise release. Let’s look at the current 12.2 timeline.
- 20th September (approx): The first 12.2 product was the Exadata Express, where you get a PDB in a fully managed cloud service, was released at OpenWorld. At least up until a few days ago this service was running was 12.2.0.0.3. That doesn’t sound like an on-premise release number to me.
- 4-5th November: At the end of last week the Database Cloud Service (DBaaS) on Oracle Public Cloud got an update to allow you to provision 12.2.0.1 instances. That sounds kind-of like the version number of a first on-premise release to me. Also, the DBaaS offering is not automatically patched, so Oracle must have a reasonable level of confidence with this release if they are happy to put production DBaaS customers on it. 🙂 There is no installation media on this service, but there is a zip of the “app/oracle/product/12.2.0/dbhome_1” directory structure in the “/scratch/db/db12201_bits.tar.gz” file.
- Currently the Database Cloud Service (Virtual Image), which builds a VM with installation media in the “/scratch” directory, does not allow 12.2.0.1 yet. Either they’ve not had time to finish this yet, or they don’t want to make getting the installation media so easy. 🙂
- 8th November: There has been some limited 12.2 documentation around since the release of Exadata Express, but the “proper” 12.2 documentation was released yesterday. There are still some missing bits, like the install/upgrade manuals, which is not surprising as they are not necessary for Exadata Express or DBaaS.
So as far as I’m concerned, we have only just got a product that resembles an on-premise release now. The meaning of Cloud First will be judged by how long it takes from *now* for the on-premise release to drop. If it happens soon I will be in the “Cloud First has worked out OK” camp. If there is an extended period between now and the on-premise release, I will be switching my allegiance to the conspiracy theory camp. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
PS. It’s possible there is still some work to put together conventional installation media. I have no knowledge of the internal processed at Oracle.
Yeah … on-premise is stuck with me.
I can’t find the USB stick I had the VM on
#just_kidding
Hello Tim,
You can access it through links inside these docs like 2 day DBA which points to installation guide: https://docs.oracle.com/database/122/LADBI/toc.htm