Overview of the Data Share Tool
Oracle Autonomous Database enables you to create shares using the share tool.
Sharing objects requires two steps. The Provider provides data share for access and the Consumer role consumes (or receives) access to the published shares. The provider creates a share with the objects to share in the desired cloud object location. The provider also adds the recipient. The recipient accepts and receives the configured shared objects from the provider for consumption.
You must have the correct privileges to create or consume a data share. In case the Data Share card is disabled, click on the tool tip and follow the steps for the administrator to grant you the required privilege.
Select the Data Share menu from the Data Studio suite in the Database Actions homepage to access this tool. This opens the Data Share homepage. It consists of widgets that enable you to provide and consume share objects.
This is the homepage you view after you have enabled sharing and set Provider identification details.
If you do not see the Data Share tool card then your database user is missing the required DWROLE role.
Click Quick Start Guide to familiarize yourself with the Data Share tool.
Click PLSQL or Data Studio (Web UI) to try Data Sharing with PL/SQL or Data Studio without creating an account on Oracle Cloud tenancy.
Click Enable Sharing to grant sharing permission to you as a provider. See Access and Enable the Data Share Tool for more details.
The widgets are defined in the following sections:
Share Terminology
Provider: The Autonomous Database Serverless enables the provider to share existing objects. The share can contain a single table, a set of related tables, or a set of tables with some logical grouping. It could be a person, an institution, or a software system that shares the objects.
Example: An institution, such as NASA, that makes a data set available via data.gov.
Recipient: A Share recipient is an entity that associates an individual, an institution or a software system that receives a share from a provider. A recipient can have access to multiple shares. If you remove a recipient, that recipient loses access to all shares it could previously access.
Example: An external system, such as Microsoft Power BI, that supports the Delta Sharing REST API.
Share: A Share is a named entity in the provider’s instance. It can be a group of datasets shared as a single entity.
Example: A SALES table that needs to be shared within an organization.
Overview of Providers and Recipients
A Data Share is the logical container that contains objects (such as tables) that share recipients will get access to a share and all tables within this share. A Data Share also implements security mechanisms on a high object level which simplifies the authorization for a set of individual objects. A provider creates and publishes share of a versioned type. The recipient is given access to a share. The provider can modify shares (both data and metadata) after the provider publishes the share to the recipients.
Use Case of Data Share
A marketing agency can share sales information with multiple interested parties. The Data Analysis tool analyses the data, generates insights and then the application shares the information with interested parties.
How the Data Share tool works?
Data is made accessible by the data sharing provider (that is an Oracle Autonomous Database) to the data sharing recipient at query time in parquet format for a versioned share. A live share uses cloud links and can only be consumed in an Oracle database The provider can only share data which they have access to when they log into an autonomous database instance.
As a data provider, you create a share and select other additional entities to share. The Oracle Data Sharing for general recipients is based on the open delta sharing standard protocol, providing a simple REST-based API to share data in parquet format. For near real-time access to shared data, customers can use Live Shares accessed using the consumer's ADB-S instance.
The Autonomous Database Serverless Versioned Sharing protocol works as follows:
- The provider creates and publishes a share that can be shared with one or multiple recipients. Every recipient will get a personal activation link to download their own JSON profile with the necessary information to access their share.
- The versioned share recipient registers with the share server by entering the URL for the end point along with a client ID, secret key and a bearer token.
- The versioned share recipient retrieves data from the share by calling the /shares/../tables/../query endpoint to obtain a list of URLs. The recipient then sends a GET request on these URLs to obtain the parquet files.
- For a Live Share, the intended recipient will copy the sharing ID from the consumer page and publish the share that can be shared with recipients. This is the case when provider shares to only one PDB.
- A provider can share also share to ALL_REGIONS, ALL_TENANCY, or ALL_COMPARTMENTS.
Features of Autonomous Database Serverless Share
- Share objects easily across Autonomous Databases and all tools or APIs that support the open delta sharing protocol.
- Share versioned data with many recipients without data replication for all recipients.
- Establish secure and centrally managed data sharing and collaboration within and across organizations.
Share Architecture
The following diagram is a generalized flow diagram of the architecture of the Data Share.
Prerequisites for Share Providers
Here are some prerequisites for a share provider to use the share tool:
- For a versioned share, you must have read and write access to a bucket to store or cache your shares.
- The schema you wish to use to create and publish shares must be enabled by an
ADMINuser.
Prerequisites for Share Recipients
The share recipient must have a valid email address a provider can use to register the recipient to use the share tool. Oracle Data Share allows to share the information about a recipient's activation link by email.
Parent topic: The Data Share Tool