Oracle has certified its flagship Database 19c Enterprise Edition database for the Arm architecture, in the cloud or on-prem – provided it runs on an Ampere processor.

Databases are a critical and ubiquitous workload, so Oracle bringing its flagship product to Arm will make the architecture easier to consider for many enterprises. As such it's a fillip for Arm servers, which – despite having a strong story in terms of price/performance and energy consumption – haven't yet made a dent in the server market.

(Notably, earlier this year our sibling publication The Next Platform crunched the numbers and [1]suggested Arm-powered boxes could account for 19 percent of server shipments by 2026.)

AMD's 128-core Epycs could spell trouble for Ampere Computing [2]READ MORE

That's good news for Ampere – a standout player in Arm servers with its manycore Altra processors, which are offered by Oracle, Microsoft, Equinix, and Google in their hyperscale clouds.

It's also good news for Oracle, which [3]invested in Ampere in 2019.

[4]

And maybe it's good news for Oracle users. The [5]announcement states that "Oracle Database 19c costs half as much when running on Ampere Altra processors due to the low Core Factor."

[6]Taiwan's titans bullish on challengers to x86 in the datacenter and beyond

[7]Openness of Oracle licensing and audit tools questioned

[8]Rejecting Intel, Oracle pumps up Exadata beef cake with AMD protein

[9]Kinder, gentler Oracle says it's changed, and now wants you to succeed

A "Core Factor" is one of Oracle's licensing constructs that sees most recent AMD and Intel CPUs rated as requiring 0.5 of a license for each physical core. Ampere CPUs are presumably rated at 0.25 licenses per core – a level Oracle already offers for its own SPARC processors.

Oracle's promised migrations to Arm will be simple: its Recovery Manager (RMAN) can be used to back up databases on their existing platform, with restores then able to use Arm machines as a restore target.

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While certifying its database on Arm is a big deal, Oracle continues to back other architectures – it recently [11]upgraded some of its data-munching appliances with recent AMD Epyc CPUs.

And Big Red's database is far from the first such tool to run on Arm: MySQL has done so for years, MariaDB can too, as does MongoDB. If you really wanted to revisit Informix, it also runs on Arm. ®

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[1] https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/01/04/the-interesting-years-ahead-for-servers/

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/21/amd_ampere_cloud_core_competition/

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/28/oracle_ampere_investment

[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZJ0B4uA9UKt1AOsBa9DKfgAAAI8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[5] https://blogs.oracle.com/database/post/announcing-oracle-database-19c-support-for-arm

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/31/computex_backs_arm_acclerated_computing/

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/17/openness_of_oracle_licensing/

[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/oracle_exadata_x10m/

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/13/oracle_q4_2023/

[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZJ0B4uA9UKt1AOsBa9DKfgAAAI8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/oracle_exadata_x10m/

[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/