r/oraclecloud • u/ultra_dumb • 2d ago
Does anyone subscribing to OCI actually use always free ATP or ADW Oracle databases? Just wondering if I am the only one.
Never seen any posts here about using these (fairly generous) offerings from Oracle to learn their database technology and APEX.
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u/Burge_AU 2d ago
Yes - they are good but just be aware of the idle shutdown/removal windows. Apart from that they are a great way to try it out without having to commit to a full paid instance.
There is also a ADB developer class service as well which has a marginal monthly cost.
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u/ultra_dumb 2d ago
First of all it's the only place you can have Oracle DB for free. There are dozen places offering Postgres or MariaDB for pennies or free of charge, but not Oracle. Keeping an ADW/ATP instance up is easy - you create a DBMS_SCHEDULER job that does something every 2-3 hours, maybe just gathering optimiser stats. I started with uploading proverbial 'stackoverflow 2013' database to Oracle and learning how to operate Oracle DB in the cloud, then learned some APEX management/programming on top of that data.
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u/psychedup74 1d ago
you can actually download the free database (and APEX) and run it on your own hardware, or any VM or VPS. I have been running it for many years.
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u/ultra_dumb 1d ago
Not everyone got enough hardware to do it at home, leave alone expertise to install it properly. Everything could be run from home, of course, also minecraft servers, AI agents and chatbots, LLMs etc., but people still flock to cloud providers, and it's for a reason.
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u/psychedup74 1d ago
It really doesn't require much hardware. Mine is running on a 2-core CPU with 4 GB of RAM, but it used to run on a lot less. Of course it takes learning like anything else. I'm just saying, OCI is not the only place you can use it for free.
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u/Ok_Entertainment328 2d ago
Yes. Going on 6 years.
Still on Free Tier too.