Creating a Free Oracle Database at AWS

Have you ever heard about Amazon RDS?

Amazon RDS is a Relational Database cloud based service, which intends to help you to automate administrative tasks like hardware provisioning, database creation, backups, etc. Currently six database engines are available under this service: Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB.

This post provides a quick step-by-step on how to create your first Oracle Database RDS.

Requirements:
– Have an Amazon AWS account. If you don’t have one, don’t panic! You can still create one at: https://portal.aws.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/registration/index.html

Now, how to create a RDS? Here it goes:

1. Log in to the AWS Console and open Amazon RDS Console at:
https://console.aws.amazon.com/rds/home

2. Click on the button “Create database”.

3. On the “Select Engine” choose Oracle.

4. Choose the Oracle Edition you want to use.

5. On the “Instance Specifications”, choose the License Model, the database version and the DB instance class. Note: Current free tier is 20GB of allocated storage.

6. Specify your instance name, a master username and password.

7. On “Network & Security”, just select Create New VPC and new DB Subnet Group. Mark “Yes” on public accessibility. Note: EC2 instances and devices outside of the VPC will be able to connect to the DB instance.

8. Customize “Database options” to your own preferences (you can leave it as default).

9. Specify the backup and monitoring preferences (you can leave it as default)

10. If you want to export any logs, you can mark to publish them to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

11. Choose your maintenance preferences and create the database.

12. Once the database is created, you can see the connection details and connect normally through your preferred client. Not sure how to connect to your newly created instance? You can see the official AWS documentation here, or simple use SQLPlus:

sqlplus ‘user_name@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=)(PORT=1521)) CONNECT_DATA=(SID=)))’

At this point, you will be able to see some details like your endpoint DNS, the security group rules, DB Connections, CPU Utilization, Free Storage Space and other cool stuff that Amazon AWS can provide!