They're doing the deal as part of a consortium, Oracle is getting TikTok's cloud hosting in the US market (at least). Assuming TikTok doesn't fade in the next few years, it'll substantially increase the size of Oracle's cloud business and they can use it as a marketing point.
It suggests that Oracle's cloud business has such dire traction that they can't acquire prominent customers for it any other way than to directly buy part of them. It also speaks to that Ellison & Co. view the cloud shift as a terminal threat for Oracle, one that is getting worse by the day, and that if they don't succeed at building up their cloud business, they will erode and die (and they're right).
Oracle stayed in the game in the last round through massive consolidation, buying up the competition one after another (eg Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc). They'll try the same thing this time around as their organic efforts have largely failed; we'll see how much success they have given they're far outgunned this time around (and running from much further behind).
Theoretically they do. Practically I couldn't even get an account last time I tried (a few months ago). It would attempt to charge my credit card a 1 dollar "check the payment is working fee" and fail (even though the charge was going through successfully).
They offer 2 free Oracle databases. The catch is they're Oracle databases.
In other words it's the same as every cloud provider: They hope you'll build a business system that uses enough of their proprietary tech that you can't easily move to another provider.
You can run mysql on any other free database on the 2 free compute instances. It is totally up to you.
The autonomous database is Oracle's offering of their Oracle database - that requires no DBA or tuning and runs on Exadata infrastructure.
They are offering it for free - because they want enterprises using existing on-premise Oracle databases, to move their existing DB applications to the cloud.
Oracle Autonomous databases comes with free Oracle APEX - which is a low code / no code toolchain.
Zoom is not a Chinese company. Its founder and CEO happens to be Chinese, and they have operations in China, but the company was founded, incorporated, and initially exclusively operated in the U.S.
Just like GM operating in China is not transferring any IP, this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Monza_(China) being manufactured under SAIC-GM, a forced joint venture between GM and Chinese state-owned SAIC Motor is fine and dandy.
