Today’s keynote at Oracle World mentioned that Oracle’s coming to Amazon’s EC2 cloud.

The bottom line is that you can now get some Oracle products, including the Oracle 11g database software, bundled as AMIs (Amazon machine images) for EC2 — i.e., ready-to-deploy — and you can license these products to run in the cloud. Any sysadmin who has ever personally gone through the pain of trying to install an Oracle database from scratch knows how frustrating it can be; I’m curious how much the task has or hasn’t been simplified by the ready-to-run AMIs.

On the plus side, this is going to address the needs of those companies who simply want to move apps into the cloud, without changing much if anything about their architecture and middleware. And it might make a convenient development and testing platform.

But simply putting a database on cloud infrastructure doesn’t make it make it a cloud database. Without that crucial distinction, what are the compelling economics or business value-add? It’s cool, but I’m having difficulty thinking of circumstances under which I would tell a client, yes, you should host your production Oracle database on EC2, rather than getting a flexible utility hosting contract with someone like Terremark, AT&T, or Savvis.