Case Study: McMaster University achieves 80% database provisioning time savings with Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer

McMaster University gains 80% time savings in database provisioning

McMaster University, a large public research institution in Hamilton, Ontario with over 31,000 students, needed to become more agile but faced slow, insecure-feeling on-premises processes: provisioning a database or VM could take 5–10 days, and concerns about security and data sovereignty limited public cloud options. The university sought a low‑risk path to cloud-like agility while keeping data on campus.

By deploying Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, McMaster consolidated more than 175 databases down to 75 and achieved an 80% reduction in provisioning time. The move cut end-to-end refreshes from 10 hours to 1.5, reduced HR backups from an hour to 7 minutes, sped ETLs by 25%, improved scheduled query runtimes by 70%, and enabled scalable capacity during registration peaks—freeing DBAs to focus on new projects.

McMaster University

Kevin de Kock

Director of Enterprise Solutions and Applications