Update on Oracle ECPUs
If you read my post on Oracle ECPUs last year, you would know that in 2023 Oracle introduced a new billing metric for Oracle Autonomous Database called ECPU. This was available as a billing metric alongside the legacy OCPU billing metric.
We have recently been notified that Oracle is ‘retiring’ the legacy OCPU billing metric for Autonomous Data Warehouse and Autonomous Transaction Processing and this post aims to outline the information available at this date in time.
When will OCPUs be retired?
Not any time soon I think, but in the email notification from Oracle, they confirmed the following information:
The OCPU billing metric has been retired on Autonomous Data Warehouse and Autonomous Transaction Processing as of January 2024 (see MOS note 2998742.1 for Autonomous Database Serverless and MOS note 2998755.1 for Autonomous Database On Dedicated Infrastructure and Exadata Cloud@Customer). It will be retired on Autonomous JSON Database and APEX Service soon thereafter.
Existing Autonomous Databases using OCPUs are not modified and will continue to use OCPU’s, but Oracle recommends that customers update all existing OCPU databases on Autonomous Database Serverless to the ECPU billing metric, via the available simple UI or API call.
ECPUs is the default pricing metric for new Autonomous Databases, but customers can choose to create their new databases using the OCPU pricing metric until January 2025.
So OCPUs will be available until January 2025, but Oracle are advising customers to transition to the ECPU billing metric now for all Autonomous Database customers. The question is, why would you do that? Here are some reasons why:
50% lower entry cost
The smallest Autonomous Database that can be provisioned with ECPUs is 50% less expensive ($0.672 per hour vs $1.3441 per hour with OCPUs).
Finer granularity for database scaling
Each incremental increase in ECPU database size is only $0.336.
Lower storage costs
Autonomous Data Warehouse storage price reduced from $118.40 to $25.00 per TB per month. Autonomous Transaction Processing storage can be provisioned in increments of 1GB, with a minimum of 20GB.
Up to 87% lower costs with database consolidation
Elastic Resource Pools, available on ECPU ADB Serverless databases, help consolidate deployments leading to major cost savings.
Please note that the prices mentioned above are the current list prices for Oracle Autonomous Databases with the ‘License Included’ license type. Please refer to the ECPU billing metric FAQ for more details about ECPUs and each of these benefits.
In Conclusion
Why has Oracle done this? Until we get more information and real-world examples and comparisons done, we will not exactly know the implications of OCPU vs ECPU costing. But the key thing to note is that it is supposed to make pricing easier to understand, plan and budget for, avoiding the issues and complexity of hardware changes.
According to Oracle (and to be verified over time) ECPU-based databases provide the same user-experience as OCPU-based databases, and you may convert existing OCPU databases to ECPU databases without disruption or downtime. In reality it makes no difference database-wise but makes a difference on pricing. With that in mind, customers should adopt ECPUs with confidence that they will get the same or better price-performance with no significant changes to their Autonomous Database experience.
It is yet to be seen whether Oracle introduces ECPU as a billing metric for other services, but it would be reasonable to suggest that eventually they will. Whether that is short or long term, remains to be seen.
Note that ECPUs have also already been introduced for MySQL Heatwave on AWS, so it would not be a stretch of the imagination to think that it will be available on other areas sooner or later.
ECPUs should help with rightsizing environments in the future; if you are only paying for what you consume, that is a fairer way of billing, rather than deciding on the number of OCPUs when in fact you may not use them all and have a lot spare … and pay for them upfront! It makes sense to use ECPUs in my opinion, but time will tell.
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About the Author:
Johnny Cree is an Oracle SAM Licensing Consultant at Version 1.
