October 4, 2012
That multi-tenancy discussion revisited
Keeping in mind Monash’s Third Law of Commercial Semantics,
No market categorization is ever precise
I’ll try to clarify my response to Oracle’s claims about Oracle12c being a “multi-tenant” DBMS.
I wrote a couple days ago:
Oracle is confusing people with its comments on multi-tenancy. I suspect:
- What Oracle is talking about when it says “multi-tenancy” is more like consolidation than true multi-tenancy.
- Probably there are a couple of true multi-tenancy features as well.
Now I’m even having doubts about the second part.
In simplest terms:
- Multi-tenancy is about making a single thing appear to be many different ones — typically one for each customer. Here the “things” can be databases and/or instances of the (same) application that talks to them.
- Database consolidation is about letting many different databases be hosted or managed more as one.
But from everything I’ve heard:
- Oracle12c’s announced new features improve database consolidation, not multi-tenancy.
More detail may be found at the links above.
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