Oracle database service
The Oracle database service provides a central service, shared between its registered users.
It’s for users who need the extra processing power of an enterprise system for large and resource-intensive database applications.
Key features
- Provided using Oracle 19 or higher.
- Suitable for moderate to heavy use.
- Multi-user capability.
Access instructions
- Contact IT Support with a suggested name for your new database and a short summary of its purpose. We'll then get back to you to discuss your needs.
- Requests for a new Oracle database take five business days to complete.
Available to staff, academic researchers and web account owners
Authorised users can use this service on University-managed and personal devices.
App-based
Compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.
Funded by the University
There isn’t a cost to you for standard use.
Access instructions
- Contact IT Support with a suggested name for your new database and a short summary of its purpose. We'll then get back to you to discuss your needs.
- Requests for a new Oracle database take five business days to complete.
Guides and help
How-to guides and set up
Join the Oracle Google Group (google.com) for notifications of problems and scheduled maintenance.
Contact for support
If you're experiencing technical issues and need advice, please contact IT Services.
Service commitments
We ask that you:
- keep us informed about changes to your contact details
- manage your use of Oracle databases allocated to you, eg sharing or securing them appropriately
- contact us in good time if you foresee use of your database increasing significantly, either long-term or as spikes of heavy activity
- let us know if you no longer need a database you have been allocated.
The following policies apply to all IT services provided by the University.
Availability
- This is a live service, available 24/7.
Support
- This service is managed by IT Services.
- We are responsible for monitoring, identifying and fixing faults.
- Support is available during our opening hours.
Standards
- Our service performance and standards have been produced in consultation with our customers. We regularly monitor the delivery, performance and availability of facilities and services.
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. They can 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.
We appreciate feedback as it helps us review and continually improve our service.
Page last reviewed: 9 September 2024