Oracle Managed Services
Last reviewed by Tyler Eastridge
AceMQ runs your Oracle Database estate for you: monitoring, backups with restore tests, Data Guard, Release Update patching and the pager. We work inside your data centre or cloud account (Tier 3) or on infrastructure AceMQ runs (Tier 4), with partner Oracle specialists behind the engineers. It covers the database engine only, not Oracle E-Business Suite, Fusion or other Oracle applications. If Oracle Autonomous Database or Amazon RDS for Oracle fits your workload better, this page says so.
Support quotes answered within 1 hour, by a senior engineer.
Planning a build, upgrade or migration instead? See AceMQ Oracle Database consulting and services.
Customers
Partners
What's Included
No add-on pricing for incidents. No per-ticket charges. One contract covers the whole surface.
We manage monitoring of what predicts Oracle incidents: tablespace and fast recovery area headroom, archive destination space, Data Guard transport and apply lag, failed RMAN jobs, listener status, blocking sessions and ORA- errors in the alert log. Then we take the pager, so an alert reaches an engineer who has your topology in front of them.
RMAN backup and archived log policy matched to your recovery point and recovery time targets, restored into a scratch environment on a schedule and timed. Where Transparent Data Encryption is on, the wallet is backed up and restore-tested too, because a backup you cannot decrypt is no backup.
On Enterprise Edition estates with Data Guard, we manage the standby: transport and apply lag, protection mode, standby redo logs, and a switchover rehearsal on a schedule so the failover runbook has been run. RAC node operations are in scope where you run it and your licences cover it.
Release Updates planned, tested on a copy first and applied in agreed windows, with rollback steps written down. The patches themselves come from Oracle under your own Oracle support contract; AceMQ plans and applies them and produces none of its own.
Top SQL, plan stability, statistics and memory sizing, reviewed on a schedule. We check which diagnostic packs your licence covers before using AWR or ASH, and use Statspack or SQL trace where it does not, so tuning never creates an obligation by accident.
Privileges, roles and audit settings reviewed against least privilege, encryption and wallet handling checked, and Release Update level tracked against the releases you actually run. Access to your environment follows your change process and is logged.
Why AceMQ
Run managed Oracle in your own data centre or account (Tier 3) when residency and compliance keep the data in your boundary, or have AceMQ host it (Tier 4) when you want endpoints and no infrastructure to run. The operator is an Oracle specialist under an AceMQ contract, not a generic hosting provider.
AceMQ holds the contract, the SLA and the escalation path, and brings partner Oracle specialists in as the work needs them. An incident starts with an engineer who has your topology and runbooks in front of them. The 15-minute response is a response time, not a resolution time.
Which packs and options you own decides which diagnostics we may use, whether RAC or Active Data Guard are on the table, and what a safe design looks like. We work inside your entitlements and tell you when a task needs something you do not hold.
Restore, failover and patch runbooks, topology documentation and monitoring configuration are maintained as yours. If you bring operations back in-house, or move a database between your infrastructure and ours, there is a current handover pack.
Cloud, Kubernetes, bare metal, hybrid, and air-gapped — including environments where you can't give us outbound network access.
Provider comparison
Three different ways to stop running Oracle yourself. Autonomous Database and RDS for Oracle are platforms: the vendor runs the engine on its cloud and you work inside its limits. AceMQ's managed service is people: engineers who run standard Oracle on infrastructure you own, or on ours. The right answer depends on the workload, so each row answers one question.
| Question | AceMQ managed Oracle (Tier 3 or 4) | Oracle Autonomous Database | Amazon RDS for Oracle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who operates the database | AceMQ engineers with partner Oracle specialists, under a contract with a 15-minute emergency response. | Oracle. Its documentation says the service handles provisioning, backups, patching and upgrading, and growing or shrinking the database. | AWS runs the managed instance. You remain responsible for schema, SQL and performance. |
| Where it runs | Your data centre or cloud account (Tier 3), or infrastructure AceMQ runs (Tier 4). | Oracle's cloud. You manage no hardware or software. | AWS only. |
| Releases | The release you run today, with Oracle's lifecycle dates planned around. 19c, 21c and 26ai are covered. | Oracle decides when patching and upgrading happen. | 19c, 21c and 26ai. 26ai is Enterprise Edition only, and 21c and 26ai are multitenant-only. |
| Server and file system access | Yes. AceMQ works with system access to the hosts, inside your change process. | No server for you to manage. | No host file system access. |
| RAC, ASM and Flashback Database | RAC and Data Guard run where your edition and licences allow them. Exadata is scoped case by case. | The platform design is Oracle's. Check Oracle's documentation for any feature you rely on. | RAC, ASM and Flashback Database are not supported. Read replicas use Active Data Guard, which needs Enterprise Edition and the option licence. |
| Best when | You have an existing estate, depend on RAC, Data Guard or a specific release, need data to stay in your own boundary, or want one contract across several databases. | You want Oracle to run the platform and your workload fits what the service allows. | You are on AWS, your workload avoids the unsupported features, and you want AWS to run the instance. |
Sources: AWS documentation, RDS for Oracle releases and RDS for Oracle features; Oracle documentation, About Autonomous AI Database Serverless (Oracle's name for the service now); all checked 31 October 2026. Vendor limits change, so check them before you commit.
Tier 3 and Tier 4
Tiers 1 and 2 are AceMQ's Oracle support: you hold the pager and we respond and review. Tiers 3 and 4 are managed services: we hold it. The two managed tiers run the same operations. What differs is where Oracle runs and who owns what underneath it.
AceMQ operates Oracle in your data centre or cloud account, with system access and your change process. You keep the hosts, the data, the Oracle licences and the Oracle support contract, and you pay the infrastructure bill.
AceMQ hosts and operates Oracle on infrastructure it runs, with backups, standby and patching included. You get connection endpoints, not a server or an on-call rota. Licensing for Tier 4 is settled in the quote.
Release Updates and bug fixes come from Oracle under your own support contract, and a defect that needs Oracle code has to go to Oracle. AceMQ plans and applies patches, prepares the service request with the diagnosis done, and produces no Oracle patches of its own.
Many estates start with support and a first review, then hand over operations once the backups, standby and patch level have been checked. Nothing about Tier 3 or 4 requires a big-bang handover.
Tiers 1 and 2 are set out on the Oracle support page. Third-party Oracle Database support
Choosing honestly
A managed platform is the right answer for some workloads. These are the differences that decide it.
The application is new or already cloud-shaped, your DBA team is small, and you want Oracle to run provisioning, backups, patching and upgrades. You accept Oracle's limits on what you can configure and that patch timing is Oracle's.
You are already on AWS and the workload avoids what RDS does not support: RAC, ASM and Flashback Database are unsupported, and there is no host file system access. Active Data Guard read replicas need Enterprise Edition and the option licence.
The estate already exists in your data centre or cloud account, uses RAC, Data Guard, a specific release or file-system-level tooling, or has data that must stay in your boundary. Also when you want the same contract to cover PostgreSQL, Kafka or other engines.
Schema design, query plans, application behaviour and capacity planning still belong to whoever owns the workload. On a vendor platform that is your team; at Tier 3 or 4 an Oracle engineer owns them with you.
A move off Oracle is a different project: an exit assessment, then a migration scoped on its own. Oracle Database consulting and exit assessment
Releases
Managed operations do not change Oracle's calendar. The dates below come from Oracle's Lifetime Support Policy effective 2 October 2026, and they decide when an upgrade has to be planned into the service.
Premier Support to 31 December 2029 and Extended Support to 31 December 2032. The release most estates run, and the one most managed contracts are written around.
Premier Support ends in July 2027 and it has no Extended Support. An estate on 21c has the shortest runway and needs an upgrade plan first.
Premier Support to December 2031. Moving to it from 19c converts non-container databases to multitenant, which changes patching and backup, so it runs as a project inside the service.
Inventory, rehearsal on a copy with a fallback at each step, and a cutover window agreed with you. A platform change and a version change never share a production window.
The decision between staying on 19c and moving is set out on the 19c end-of-life article. Oracle 19c end of life: dates and options
Price drivers
AceMQ does not publish a price list for managed services. A managed Oracle quote is built from these inputs, and the written quote returns within 1 hour of your request.
How many databases and instances you run, how large they are, which are production, and whether they are Enterprise Edition or Standard Edition 2.
Standalone, Data Guard or RAC, and the recovery point and recovery time objectives that set the backup, restore and standby work.
From business hours to 24/7 on-call with the 15-minute emergency response.
At Tier 3 you pay your provider for infrastructure and Oracle for licences and support, and AceMQ for operations. At Tier 4 the infrastructure is in the AceMQ quote, and licensing for Tier 4 is settled in the quote.
Not a fit for
We would rather say so up front.
E-Business Suite, Fusion, HCM, ERP and EPM managed services are out of scope. This is Oracle Database operations. We can run the database tier underneath an application.
AceMQ does not resell Oracle licences, negotiate with Oracle, defend an audit or give legal advice on your agreement. Your reseller, your contract or your counsel does.
If you want to click to provision a database with no contract and no engineer, buy Autonomous Database or RDS from the vendor.
A single healthy database run by a capable DBA may need only a health check and a current backup test.
Running other engines too? One contract can cover PostgreSQL, SQL Server and more. Managed PostgreSQL services
Escalation Path
Every tier reaches a senior Oracle Database engineer. There is no tier-1 triage layer to get through.
P1 escalation path
A replay of one P1, from the first page to the written root-cause analysis
15-minute P1 response, 24/7.
A response time, not a resolution time.
P1 opened, on-call engineer paged
Phone, email or Slack reaches the on-call senior engineer directly, whether the incident is in RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL or Kubernetes. No web form, no tier-1 queue.
Senior engineer on your bridge
A senior engineer who already knows your environment joins a live bridge, so nobody has to re-explain your topology.
Specialists across the stack join
When an incident crosses components, the engineers who know each one join. For RabbitMQ, the path runs to the core team.
Written root-cause analysis
Root cause, the fix applied and the prevention steps, delivered after every P1.
Typical engagements
Typical engagement scenarios: what the work covers and what it delivers. They describe the service, not past results.
Regional Insurer
A typical engagement for a team weighing an exit from Oracle: classify every object by conversion effort, then convert and test one representative database before committing to the rest.
PostgreSQLOracle DatabaseOra2PgAWS DMS
Regional Retail Bank
Bringing an Oracle change data capture pipeline back inside its batch window after nightly jobs left the Debezium connector hours behind the source.
DebeziumOracle
Kafka
KubernetesOnline Travel Platform
Ongoing support for a MySQL change data capture pipeline that needed a full re-snapshot after a planned outage outlasted binlog retention and a trimmed schema history topic.
Debezium
MySQLSQL ServerOracle DatabaseKafka
Amazon RDS
Regional Insurer
A typical engagement to find out whether an Oracle Data Guard standby will really take over: transport and apply lag, protection mode, redo sizing, failover runbooks and client reconnection.
Linux
SaaS Platform Team
A typical engagement where a lean platform team adds remote Oracle DBA cover: on-call, restore testing, patch windows and a monthly review, without hiring a second DBA.
PrometheusLinuxIndustrial Manufacturing Group
A typical engagement to decide whether Oracle databases should stay on 19c or move to 26ai, and to plan the multitenant conversion, AutoUpgrade run and rollback for the ones that move.
LinuxSupport options
AceMQ offers Oracle Database support in four tiers, each handing more of the day-to-day work to AceMQ: 24/7 support and emergency response for databases your team runs, proactive reviews that find backup, standby and patch problems first, managed Oracle Database on your own infrastructure, and managed Oracle Database on AceMQ infrastructure. Oracle Database 19c, 21c and 26ai are covered by AceMQ engineers working with partner Oracle specialists. Oracle patches still come from Oracle.
You run it, we back you up
Best for: Teams that run Oracle themselves and need a second pair of senior hands when a database misbehaves at 3am.
You run it, we watch it with you
Best for: Teams that want the missing backup or the lagging standby found in a review, not in an outage.
We run it in your cloud or data centre
Best for: Regulated estates that must keep databases inside their own boundary and want someone else on the rota.
We host it and run it, as a service
Best for: Teams that want Oracle Database without an Oracle on-call rota.
| Who does what | Tier 1 24/7 support | Tier 2 Proactive monitoring | Tier 3 Managed, your infrastructure | Tier 4 Fully managed by AceMQ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs Oracle Database day to day? | Your team | Your team, with AceMQ reviews | AceMQ | AceMQ |
| Where does it run? | Your infrastructure | Your infrastructure | Your cloud account or data centre | AceMQ infrastructure |
| 24/7 incident response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response |
| Health checks and CVE alerts | On request | Scheduled | Included | Included |
| Patching and upgrades | Your team, AceMQ advises | Planned with AceMQ | Done by AceMQ | Done by AceMQ |
| Monitoring and on-call | Your team | Your team | AceMQ | AceMQ |
| Data, keys and accounts | Yours | Yours | Yours | Your data, hosted by AceMQ |
Every Tier can start as an ad hoc engagement or an annual partnership, and you can move up or down a Tier as your team changes.
One partner for Oracle Database
Support is one part of what AceMQ does for Oracle Database. The same engineers deliver consulting, health checks, migrations and end-of-life cover, and support the systems that usually run next to it.
FAQ
Still have questions about Oracle Database? Email an Expert
An Oracle managed service provider (MSP) operates your databases for you, and it is worth engaging when on-call, patching and restore testing compete with project work for the same people. A full-time DBA is one person you employ, with the cover gaps that implies. A remote DBA service usually supplies advice and ticket handling for databases your team still runs. Managed Oracle services mean AceMQ operates the databases: monitoring, backups, Release Update patching, Data Guard and on-call are ours under a contract with a 15-minute emergency response. Teams that keep a DBA often choose support (Tiers 1 and 2); teams that want Oracle to stop being their problem choose Tier 3 or 4.
Yes for your own data centre, VMware and virtual machines in your AWS or Azure account (Tier 3), or on infrastructure AceMQ runs (Tier 4). Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Exadata are scoped case by case. Autonomous Database and Amazon RDS for Oracle are run by their vendors, so Tiers 3 and 4 do not apply to them; ask us about support for the SQL and schema work around them.
At Tier 3 the licences stay yours and nothing changes. At Tier 4, licensing is settled in the quote before work starts. AceMQ does not resell Oracle licences, negotiate with Oracle or give legal advice on your agreement, and your Oracle support contract stays the source of Release Updates.
Yes. AceMQ works on Oracle Database in two ways: ad hoc engagements for a defined piece of work, such as a health check, an upgrade or an incident, or an annual contract that covers 24/7 support and proactive reviews. Many teams start ad hoc and move to an annual contract once the first engagement is done.
Managed Oracle Database is quoted per scope, with no list price: the price depends on the number of environments and nodes, the SLA, whether AceMQ runs Oracle Database on your infrastructure (Tier 3) or on ours (Tier 4), and the access and change process you need. Request a quote and AceMQ replies within 1 hour.
Let's talk
Reactive cover, proactive reviews, or AceMQ running Oracle Database for you on your infrastructure or ours. A senior engineer scopes it with you, and quote requests are answered within 1 hour.
Production incident right now?Email an Oracle Database Architect
Send us a message and we'll follow up within 1 hour — or book a free 30-min consultation directly.
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