MySQL Heatwave
Data warehouse solutions
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What is MySQL Heatwave
MySQL HeatWave is a managed MySQL service with an in-memory, massively parallel query engine designed to run analytics and mixed transactional/analytical workloads on MySQL data. It targets teams that want to use standard MySQL tools and SQL for reporting, dashboards, and near-real-time analytics without moving data into a separate analytical database. HeatWave is offered as part of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and integrates with OCI services for security, networking, and operations. It also includes optional capabilities for automated data loading and query acceleration features within the managed service.
MySQL-compatible analytics engine
HeatWave keeps MySQL as the primary interface, which reduces the need to rewrite applications or retrain users on a new SQL dialect. It supports running analytical queries against MySQL data while remaining within the MySQL ecosystem of connectors, drivers, and administration practices. This can simplify adoption for organizations already standardized on MySQL. It is particularly relevant for operational analytics and reporting on application databases.
Managed service on OCI
Oracle operates the service on OCI, covering provisioning, patching, backups, and high availability options typical of managed databases. This reduces operational overhead compared with self-managed MySQL plus separate analytical infrastructure. It also benefits from OCI-native identity, networking, and monitoring integrations. For OCI-centric organizations, this can streamline governance and deployment.
HTAP-style workload support
HeatWave is positioned to support mixed transactional and analytical processing by accelerating analytical queries while keeping data in MySQL. This can reduce or eliminate batch ETL into a separate warehouse for certain use cases. It is useful when analytics must stay close to operational data with low latency requirements. The approach can simplify architectures for specific MySQL-centered workloads.
OCI-centric deployment model
HeatWave is primarily delivered as an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure managed service, which can be a constraint for organizations standardized on other cloud providers. Cross-cloud data movement and networking can add complexity and cost. This may limit suitability for multi-cloud strategies that require a single warehouse layer across providers. Procurement and governance may also be tied to Oracle cloud account structures.
Not a general-purpose warehouse
Compared with dedicated cloud data warehouse platforms, HeatWave is more tightly coupled to MySQL data and MySQL operational patterns. It may be less suitable as an enterprise-wide analytical store spanning many heterogeneous sources without additional ingestion and modeling layers. Organizations with broad ELT/ETL pipelines and diverse data types may still require separate lake/warehouse components. Some advanced warehouse features and ecosystem integrations can be less extensive than purpose-built platforms.
Scaling and workload boundaries
While HeatWave accelerates analytics, capacity planning still needs to consider concurrency, memory footprint, and workload isolation between transactional and analytical usage. Mixed workloads can require careful tuning and governance to avoid resource contention. Very large-scale, highly concurrent BI workloads may require architectural evaluation versus specialized analytical engines. Performance characteristics depend on dataset shape, query patterns, and cluster sizing.
Plan & Pricing
Pricing model: Pay-as-you-go (usage-based)
Units / billing metrics (official):
- MySQL Database - ECPU: billed per ECPU per hour
- MySQL HeatWave: billed as "HeatWave capacity per hour" (HeatWave capacity unit = 16 GB memory-hours)
- Storage: per gigabyte (GB) per month
- Backup storage: per GB per month
- Data transfer: per GB (various network egress categories)
Free tier / trial (official): HeatWave is included in Oracle Cloud Always Free (a permanently free tier) and Oracle offers a 30-day free trial with US$300 cloud credit. See notes below for Always Free resource limits.
Example estimated monthly costs (official cost estimator examples):
- OCI — Small configuration (1 MySQL.2 + 4 HeatWave.32GB + 200 GB storage): Estimated monthly cost US$127.93.
- OCI — Medium configuration (1 MySQL.8 + 4 HeatWave.512GB + 4 TB storage): Estimated monthly cost US$1,425.40.
- OCI — Large configuration (MySQL.32 + 30 HeatWave.512GB + 30 TB storage): Estimated monthly cost US$9,928.01.
- AWS — Small configuration (1 MySQL DB node 1 ECPU + 2 HeatWave nodes 16 GB + 50 GB storage): Estimated monthly cost US$116.
- AWS — Medium configuration (MySQL DB node 4 ECPU + 3 HeatWave nodes 256 GB + 1 TB storage): Estimated monthly cost US$2,028.
- AWS — Large configuration (MySQL DB node 16 ECPU + 25 HeatWave nodes 256 GB + 10 TB storage): Estimated monthly cost US$16,486.
Discounts / enterprise pricing: Not specified on the public pricing page. Contact Sales / Oracle for enterprise, committed-use or volume-discount pricing.
Notes / caveats (official):
- The public MySQL HeatWave pricing page is interactive and shows region/currency-dependent unit prices; the page emphasizes ECPU and HeatWave capacity (16 GB memory-hour) as billing units and provides a cost estimator for configurations. Exact per-hour/per-GB unit prices are displayed in the Oracle cost estimator UI when region/currency are selected.
- Always Free HeatWave resources (unlimited time) are limited in size (for example: a single-node HeatWave cluster with 50 GB storage and 50 GB backup and a small HeatWave memory allocation) — see Always Free details on Oracle's HeatWave free page.
Seller details
Oracle Corporation
Austin, Texas, USA
1977
Public
https://www.oracle.com/
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