GCP Oracle Migration: Optimize your Workload

Oracle is widely used to store, manage, and perform complex operations on data, making it ideal for business-critical operations. You can efficiently scale your business data by hosting Oracle services on the Google Cloud Platform.  

GCP offers efficient resource utilization, which can be helpful when performing operations like data processing, analysis, and visualization. Integrating these platforms provides many benefits, including reduced cost, simplified operation, and enhanced performance.

This article will discuss how the GCP Oracle integration can help you optimize your business workloads. 

Understanding GCP Oracle 

GCP Oracle is an integration between two platforms that allows you to run Oracle services over the Google Cloud Platform. You can host Oracle on GCP and use Google Cloud’s features, such as cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and reliability, to enhance your data performance.

Google Cloud offers integration with various Oracle solutions, including Oracle databases and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Setting up virtual private clouds within the Google environment can secure your network and ensure low-latency communications between two platforms. It allows you to migrate your Oracle workloads to GCP and ensure uninterrupted access to the Oracle services. 

Comparing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cloud Platform are designed to tailor different organization needs. Here are some of the key differentiating features between them: 

Workload Migration 

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers fully managed Oracle database services, such as VMware solution control, which can be used to optimize workload migration across the cloud. OCI’s migration management is closely associated with Oracle’s ecosystem and benefits organizations with Oracle-specific workload requirements.

In contrast to OCI, GCP offers different migration options, including rehosting, platform, and rewriting. It allows you to optimize your workloads and ensure flexibility across various workloads and platforms.

Deploy the Same Public Cloud Power On-Premise

Oracle provides you with Cloud@Customer. It is a completely managed cloud region that brings all the services on Oracle public cloud to the customer data center. You connect easily to data center resources, reducing stringent latency and consumption costs. 

GCP offers Anthos, a hybrid multi-cloud solution based on container-based deployment. Although it is less comprehensive than Cloud@Customer, it provides consistency of data management in a multi-cloud environment. 

Security Automation With the Zero-Trust Approach

OCI’s zero-trust framework incorporates security measures, including Oracle Security Zone, Oracle Cloud Gurard, and OCI IAM. These measures provide you with:

• A different segment within the cloud will be used to create secure enclaves to safeguard sensitive data. 
• It offers continuous monitoring and threat detection with automated responses to security threats.
• It manages centralized identity access, enforcing the least privileges and access controls to authenticate users.

In contrast to OCI’s zero-trust framework, GCP’s framework emphasizes context-aware access and device controls. BeyondCorp is a Google implementation of zero-trust security service. It is a comprehensive security service that provides single sign-on, granular access control, and user device authorization, helping improve your organization’s security posture.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Oracle provides manageable SLAs that allow you to manage, monitor, and modify data resources across the organization according to your needs.

Compared to OCI’s SLAs, Google’s SLAs have a narrow scope. It offers SLAs for individual services, such as cloud storage and computing engines. That focuses on reducing uptime and increasing resource availability.

GCP Oracle Migration Strategies

Google offers various migration strategies to address varied constraints related to hosting workloads from Oracle to GCP. These strategies help you with licensing, manageability of data, and maintenance costs. Let’s take a deeper look at them: 

Rehost

Rehosting lets you move your Oracle applications to GCP without making any modifications. It is also known as a ‘lift and shift’ strategy. This migration strategy is ideal when the business data has little or no changes. 

It is easy to implement and perform because you can use the same tools and skills as before the migration. You can use Bare Metal solution to migrate your Oracle workloads with specific configurations to the GCP environment. 

Replatform 

The Replatform migration strategy, or the ‘lift and optimize’ strategy, is an excellent choice to leverage the cloud’s core competencies. The cloud features include security measures, redundancy, and elastic computing. 

This migration GCP strategy allows you to keep the core Oracle application code. It helps reduce licensing fees and maintenance, as cloud-native solutions require less manual servicing. 

Rewrite

The GCP rewrite migration strategy lets you rewrite your Oracle application, enhancing its scalability and data availability. You can use Spanner database, a Google database service that allows you to scale your Oracle relational database globally. It uses SLA, ensuring appropriate resource allocation and enabling you to manage your source data efficiently.

How to Set Up Oracle Infrastructure on GCP Using Google Cloud Console?

There are several steps involved in creating a GCP Oracle infrastructure. You can run Oracle Exdatabase and Autonomous database service on Google Cloud. 

Let’s see how to set up the Oracle Exadata Database Infrastructure on GCP using the Google Cloud Console. 

Step 1: Go to Google Cloud and click Create Oracle Exadata Infrastructure. 

Step 2: Provide specific details such as the database instance name, infrastructure ID, the region you want to run your instance in, infrastructure model, and database and storage servers. 

Step 3: Once you fill out all the mandatory fields, click CREATE. The database will be created, and this window will open. 

Once the Status shows value complete, your Oracle Exadata database is ready to run.

The process for setting up Oracle Autonomous Database is similar to Exadata. It just gives more configuration options when filling out the details in Step 2, which includes:

• Workload configuration to manage workloads according to your business needs.
• Database configuration to enable auto-scaling to optimize resource allocation. 
• The backup retention period is to extend the backup time to 60 days.
• Networking configuration to authorize services. 

How Does Hevo Help Streamline the Migration Process of GCP Oracle? 

Hevo is a real-time ELT data integration platform that streamlines the migration process of GCP Oracle through its no-code, flexible, and automated data pipeline. It offers robust transformation capabilities that help you standardize data from multiple sources in the Oracle database and align it with GCP’s data structure. Hevo’s pipeline requires minimal time to set up and configure, allowing you to integrate data cost-effectively.  

Here is how Hevo simplifies the data migration process:

• Data Transformation: Data transformation is critical for suitable analysis and decision-making. With Hevo’s built-in data transformation features, you can clean and standardize the source data before transferring it to GCP. 
• Automated Schema Mapping: With Hevo’s automated schema mapping, you can replicate the source data’s schema. This feature helps you maintain data consistency and reduces the need for manual mapping, saving time and ensuring seamless data replication.
• Incremental Data Loading: Instead of repeatedly transferring whole data sets, you can upload modified data into GCP using incremental data loading. This ensures that your data is current and up-to-date and reduces data transfer time, increasing performance efficiency.

Get Started with Hevo for Free

How to Optimize Oracle Workloads with Google Cloud Solutions 

GCP simplifies the data management process and optimizes Oracle workloads by providing the following facilities:

• Reduce TCO: GCP provides competitive pricing models, such as discounts for sustained usage and pay-as-you-go. These help reduce overall up-front software, hardware, and maintenance costs. 
• Scalability: Sometimes, it is difficult to access data in high concurrent environments. GCP offers SLA—a backed database that enables you to handle large volumes of data while protecting your operations from downtime. 
• Simplify Operations: Google’s fully managed database services allow you to focus on using the data rather than managing the infrastructure. It reduces the overhead work on your operations team, enhances productivity, and improves business performance.

Conclusion 

GCP provides a robust infrastructure for hosting Oracle workloads in the cloud environment. By integrating Oracle with GCP, you can have many benefits, such as workload optimization, resource utilization, scalability, and simplification of business operations. You can set up Oracle infrastructure using Google Cloud Console, which easily lets you manage and deploy Oracle databases such as Exadata and Autonomous. While GCP offers a powerful infrastructure to host Oracle services, you can use ELT tools such as Hevo to normalize data before integrating it into GCP. It helps you maintain data consistency and reduce overhead costs for normalizing data from various sources.

Want to take Hevo for a spin? Sign Up for a 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite firsthand. Also checkout our unbeatable pricing to choose the best plan for your organization.

Share your experience of GCP Oracle integration in the comments section below!

FAQs 

Q1. What migration tools does Google Cloud offer for Oracle databases? 

Google offers different migration tools for other purposes. Here are some of them: 

• Bare Metal Solution can lift and shift Oracle workloads with dedicated interconnected services. 
• Cloud SQL can be used to migrate Oracle workloads to a fully managed database, lowering the total cost of ownership. 
• You can also use Spanner to scale your Oracle workloads.

Q2. Can you connect the Oracle database to the GCP data stream?

To connect the Oracle database to the GCP data stream and extract data from it, you need to grant the user the following permissions:

GRANT EXECUTE_CATALOG_ROLE TO [gcp_datastream_username];

GRANT CONNECT TO [gcp_datastream_username];

GRANT CREATE SESSION TO [gcp_datastream_username];

GRANT SELECT ANY TRANSACTION TO [gcp_datastream_user];

GRANT SELECT ANY TABLE TO [gcp_datastream_user];

execrdsadmin.rdsadmin_util.grant_sys_object('V_$DATABASE','[gcp_datastream_user]','SELECT');

execrdsadmin.rdsadmin_util.grant_sys_object('V_$ARCHIVED_LOG','[gcp_datastream_user]',SELECT');

execrdsadmin.rdsadmin_util.grant_sys_object('V_$LOGMNR_LOGS','[gcp_datastream_user]','SELECT');

execrdsadmin.rdsadmin_util.grant_sys_object('V_$LOGMNR_CONTENTS','[gcp_datastream_user]','SELECT');

execrdsadmin.rdsadmin_util.grant_sys_object('DBMS_LOGMNR','[gcp_datastream_user]','EXECUTE');

execrdsadmin.rdsadmin_util.grant_sys_object('DBMS_LOGMNR_D','[gcp_datastream_user]','EXECUTE');