Case Study: Rice University achieves scalable access and new research insights with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle MySQL Database Service

Rice University moves historic records of the slave trade to Oracle Cloud

Rice University needed to move and preserve SlaveVoyages, the world’s largest slave trade database, as its on-premises setup couldn’t easily scale for growing demand or support long-term access to the historical records. The team selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle MySQL Database Service to modernize the platform and keep the data usable for research, teaching, and public scholarship.

Oracle helped Rice University migrate and optimize the database using OCI, MySQL Database Service, Block Storage, Virtual Machines, and Object Storage. As a result, Rice University simplified collaboration, gained the scale needed for massive datasets, and enabled new statistical analysis and faster publishing of updates for the site’s 36,000 voyages, 10 million Africans transported into bondage, 11,000 intra-American voyages, and 90,000 emancipated names.

Rice University

John Mulligan

Humanities Computing Facilitator