New features have been added to Amazon RDS for Oracle and you can now use a free web application development tool to create apps for Oracle database.

RDS (Relational Database Service) is Amazon’s web service for setting up and managing relational databases in the cloud, and RDS for Oracle can be used to deploy Oracle Database 11g. It is available either in a “License Included” model, where you use Oracle licenses that Amazon has organized, or in a “Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL)” model, where you use your own existing Oracle database licenses.

The changes to RDS for Oracle add support for Amazon VPC and Oracle APEX, XML DB, and Time Zones. The support for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) means you can work securely within your own virtual network. VPC lets you select your own IP address range and create subnets. You can now store data within Amazon S3 and set up permissions so that the data can only be accessed from within your Amazon VPC.

The other additions are to the Oracle rather than the Amazon side of the service. The support for Oracle Application Express 4.1 (Oracle APEX) means you can now use the free web application development tool to create apps for Oracle database.

The support for Oracle XML DB means you can work with XML data from within Oracle, including using the standard access methods for navigating and querying XML. Finally, the support for Oracle Time Zone means you can define which time zone a database should belong to as a displacement from GMT/UTC. This means you can ensure consistency when storing the time of events and transactions.