Oracle expands integration with Microsoft Azure infrastructure

Oracle Corp. is using Microsoft Corp.'s Ignite conference today to announce that it has expanded the number of its Exadata database-optimized servers and Real Application Clusters colocated in Microsoft Azure data centers to nine regions,.

The total footprint now includes Brazil, North America, Europe/Africa/Middle East, Asia/Pacific and Latin America. The company also said it plans to add 21 new Azure regions with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure deployed inside them in 2025, bringing the total to 33 regions.

Oracle has been expanding its Azure presence since Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella (pictured, left) and Oracle founder, Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison (right) announced the partnership a year ago. Oracle Database@Azure gives customers of both companies a low-latency option to commingle their data with Microsoft's applications and infrastructure using the existing Azure portal, software development kits and application programming interfaces.

As part of the expanded partnership, Oracle said it would tighten integration with the Azure Resource Manager, a deployment and management service that provides a unified way to manage Azure resources, such as virtual machines, databases and applications, through a consistent interface.

"Typically, customers start with a landing zone with a certain set of resources for high availability and tie-ins to security services," said Leo Leung, vice president of product marketing for OCI. "They may build additional templates for certain types of workloads such as analytics and PowerBI," a set of Microsoft analytics tools. "All that is part of a template for automatic deployment in a click." The Resource Manager also continually checks deployment for drift or configuration changes.

Oracle is also Integrating Database@Azure with Microsoft's Purview data governance software to give users a view of all their Azure resources.

"The goal is to make the databases provisioned through Database@Azure native to the customer," Leung said. "The first stage was integrating into the Azure control plane for metering and monitoring. These additional services add operational simplicity."

Purview, which is an optional Azure service, can be used to set up consistent policies across Azure SQL and Database@Azure. In a multicloud environment, "it used to be up to the customer to figure how to operate the environments using third-party tools for things for logs or cost management," Leung said. "With our integration they can use the Azure services for those capabilities. Database@Azure behaves like a native service."

Oracle also announced a preview of a data mirroring feature between Database@Azure and Microsoft's Fabric data lake for reporting in Microsoft PowerBI analytics tools or to feed artificial intelligence training models.

Oracle's Application Express low-code toolkit can now be used to create forms and dashboards inside Azure. "When you're provisioning Database@Azure, you will have the option to deploy Apex for development and app execution," Leung said.

Oracle plans to provide its Exascale infrastructure inside of Database@Azure "to permit more granular sizing of database services," he said. "Customers will be able to start a lot smaller." However, no date for Exascale availability has been announced.