NoSQL databases are renown of their high availability and speed. When using multiple nodes with storage failure on one node, the data is still partially available on the others.

NoSQL databases are offered by all the major cloud providers. The most popular NoSQL databases available today offer the following storage models:

• JSON storage model. eg Mongo DB.
• Wide-Column storage model. eg Cassandra DB.

But there’s another NoSQL database worthy of your consideration: Oracle NoSQL.

Fortunately, you can assess Oracle NoSQL database for free by signing up for an Oracle Free Tier account.

In fact, let’s compare getting started for free in Oracle NoSQL, with NoSQL databases from the other major cloud providers.

Google Cloud

Google are offering Bigtable as their NoSQL database.

Bigtable is ideal for storing very large amounts of data in a key-value store …

Key/value pairing is another popular storage model for a NoSQL database.

However, Google is not offering Bigtable in any of their free tiers.

https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier

Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba is a popular cloud service in Asia and for their NoSQL database, they offer ApsaraDB for MongoDB.

They offer a free service as follows.

Free trial for 1 month:

• MongoDB 3.4/4.0/4.2 1C2G
• 20 GB storage
• 3 Nodes

ApsaraDB for MongoDB is not available in any of their free tiers outside of the trial.

The ApsaraDB for MongoDB service offers high availability, but is free for 1 month with 20 GB of storage.

https://www.alibabacloud.com/free

Microsoft Azure

Azure Cosmos DB is a NoSQL database from Microsoft.

Azure Cosmos DB is a multi-model database service, which offers an API projection for all the major NoSQL model types; Column-family, Document, Graph, and Key-Value. The Gremlin (graph) and SQL (Core) Document API layers are fully interoperable.

Azure Cosmos DB has a number of APIs available:

• Native Core API.
• Mongo DB API.
• Cassandra DB API.

There is also a Table API that uses a key/value format.

There are two free offerings available:

Free trial for 12 months:

This offering is for 400 requests per-second with a provisioned throughput and 25 GB storage per month. The offer is for a total of 12 months.

Always free:

This offering is for 1000 request units per-second provisioned throughput with 5 GB storage per month. This offer is always free.

Microsoft has a generous always free offering with storage modes, and 5 GB of storage.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/

Amazon AWS

Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database that also has multiple storage models.

There are two free offerings available:

Free trial for 3 months:

AWS offers a NoSQL service named Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra).

That service is for a free three month trial, and has the following features:

• 30 million on-demand reads per month
• 30 million on-demand writes per month
• 1 GB of storage per month

Always free:

Amazon DynamoDB is available as an Always free offering, and has the following features:

• 25 provisioned Write Capacity Units (WCU).
• 25 provisioned Read Capacity Units (RCU).
• Enough to handle up to 200M requests per month.
• 25 GB of Storage.

Amazon DynamoDB is offered as always free and comes with 25 GB of storage.

https://aws.amazon.com/free/

Oracle Cloud

Oracle has its own NoSQL offering: Oracle NoSQL.

Oracle NoSQL Database leverages the Oracle Berkeley Database Java Edition High Availability storage engine to provide distributed, highly-available key/value and table storage for large-volume, latency-sensitive applications or web services.

Oracle NoSQL is based on the current product named Oracle Berkeley DB.

Similar to the other NoSQL databases, the Oracle NoSQL database has multiple storage models.

Always Free

Oracle NoSQL uses the following storage models:

• tables
• key-value pair.

Oracle NoSQL is available as an Always free offering, and has the following features:

• 133 million reads per month.
• 133 million writes per month.
• 25 GB storage per table, up to 3 tables.

Oracle has an extremely generous always free offering, with 25 GB storage per table for up to three per tables.

So let’s set this up from the OCI console.

Then select the tables option.

Currently the Always Free Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service is only available from:

• US West (Phoenix).

If your region is not US West (Phoenix), then you’ll need to upgrade to a paid account.

Again, you can enjoy this kind NoSQL experience with OCI Free Tier. We don’t bug you with a lot of emails, we promise 😉

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Paul Guerin is an international consultant that specialises in Oracle database. Moreover, he has presented at some of the world’s leading Oracle conferences, including Oracle Open World 2013. Since 2015, his work has been featured in the IOUG Best Practices Tip Booklet, and in publications from AUSOUG, Oracle Technology Network, Quest, and Oracle Developers (Medium). In 2019, he was awarded as a most valued contributor for the My Oracle Support Community. He is a DBA OCP, and continues to be a participant of the Oracle ACE program.