Oracle database service
Related services
The Oracle database service provides a central Oracle service, shared between its registered users.
It provides multi-user databases suitable for all purposes, most commonly medium to heavy use.
Overview
Eligibility
Available to:
- staff
- academic research users
- web account owners
The Oracle database service is available for staff and academic research users who need the extra processing resources of an enterprise system for large and resource intensive database applications.
It is provided using Oracle 11, and has no specific storage limit.
Please note, for most people the MySQL database service is better suited to their needs.
How to request
Contact the IT Support, giving a suggested name for your new database and a short summary of its purpose. We will then get back to you to discuss your needs.
Requests for a new Oracle database will take five business days to complete.
Help & troubleshooting
Help
Join the Oracle Google Group for notifications of problems and scheduled maintenance.
Library & IT Help Desk
If you're having problems using the Oracle service, get in touch with the IT Support.
Our commitments
| Service status | Live and supported service. |
|---|---|
| Hours of service | 24/7 |
| Service support | For help and support with this service, contact the IT Support. |
| Hours of support | Help from the Library & IT Help Desk is available 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday. |
| Target availability |
General IT Services targets:
|
| Resilience |
Older databases within this service run on physical servers, newer databases on virtual servers running on our high-availability virtual machine service. Filestores are replicated between data centres and should also fail over automatically. A backup is taken of all Oracle databases each day for Disaster Recovery purposes, enabling them to be restored to that point in time if the database were to become corrupted, or if a catastrophic event occurred to the file servers and/or data centres. For databases hosted on physical servers: If the physical server's hardware, or the data centre it is located in, fails then the database becomes unavailable. If the failure is likely to be for some time, IT Services staff can manually make the database available via a different server. For databases hosted on virtual servers: If the virtual server, or the part of the virtual machine service it is running on, fails then the database becomes unavailable temporarily. The virtual machine service's high-availability feature will automatically restart the virtual server elsewhere, at which point the database becomes available again. |
| Our performance |
Our service standards have been produced in consultation with our customers, and monitor the quality, timeliness and access to facilities and services:
|
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Complaints procedure |
If you wish to give us general feedback on this service, please see our Feedback page for ways to get in touch. If you wish to make a complaint, please see our complaints procedure. |
Your responsibilities
We expect you:
- to keep us informed about changes to your contact details
- to manage your use of Oracle databases allocated to you, eg sharing or securing them appropriately
- to contact us in good time if you foresee use of your database increasing significantly, either long-term or as spikes of heavy activity
- to let us know if you no longer need a database you have been allocated