Microsoft and Oracle’s Oracle Database@Azure offering arrives in Europe. This year, a global expansion to fifteen regions is planned.

Oracle today announced that customers connected to Microsoft’s data center in Frankfurt can enroll in the Database@Azure offering. Both companies announced a joint cloud offering last year that allows companies to run Oracle infrastructure in an Azure data center. The offer was initially introduced in the USA, but is now also available in Europe.

Microsoft and Oracle plan to bring their offerings to at least fifteen regions worldwide this year. Excursions to France, Italy and Sweden are planned for Europe. It won’t be Belgium’s turn right away, but once the Azure cloud region is officially opened for our country, it’s certainly a possibility in the long term. Microsoft has not yet set a date for the official opening of the Belgian data centers. On-premises Azure regions provide compliance and latency benefits.

Expensive affair

Calculating the cost of Oracle services requires advanced math, and the Database@Azure offering certainly doesn’t make it much easier. Experts have already warned that it can be an expensive affair because you basically register with two providers. On Oracle’s website we read a price of 0.15 euros or 0.62 euros per vCPU and hour. You should count this double because Oracle charges its customers for two vCPUs, which is equivalent to one Oracle processor license. So be guided by the “price per unit”.

Additional costs will then be incurred for the Azure infrastructure. This is also charged per hour that you operate the servers. This amounts to 2.69 euros per hour for a single storage or database server and 13.5 euros per hour if you take a quarter rack. We highly recommend that you seek the help of an Oracle licensing expert and a math professor to estimate the cost of the offering for your business.