Saving a million on Oracle licenses within 2 days

Sometimes all pieces fit together.

A customer hired License Consulting to take a look at their Oracle environment. The investigation concluded that the company was incompliant with Named User licenses, and even after a migration, a substantial amount of processor licenses should be bought. To be precise: Oracle licenses valued at € 1,000,925.44.

In close cooperation with the IT management organization we went out to look for alternatives to buying that many licenses. Out came several options, including a downgrades to Standard Edition, Standard Editioin One and even Microsoft SQL or MySQL. But obviously such a down / crossgrade also some at a price and risk. It was decided to stay on the Enterprise Edition database. However, the hardware and architecture was changed, resulting in a license purchase (after migration of Named User licenses) of only € 10.230,00. During that change, the databases were also upgraded to a supported version, being 10g. How do you think Oracle would have dealt with the client in the original situation?

Again, yet another customer case where the customer was able to eliminate a compliance risk by pro-actively seeking for their own imperfections.

Reference calls with customers are always possible upon your request. And remember, you can’t manage what you don’t know!

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license.

September 16, 2010 · Saved in Oracle

Replies

6 replies op “Saving a million on Oracle licenses within 2 days”

  1. Michel Hoogenboezem on September 27th, 2010 5:38 pm

    Simple case of de-virtualization or… ?

  2. Daniel Hesselink on September 27th, 2010 5:59 pm

    amongst others :-)

  3. Michael Atsedewoin on December 24th, 2010 4:31 pm

    Scenario:
    1 Server on Primery site (Oracle 11 g EE )
    1 Server on Standby site (Oracle 11 g EE )
    1 Server on DR Site (Oracle 11 g EE )

    The No of server licence=3 * 0.75 * 4= 9 Licences
    The stand by and DR site servers are going to be used by Active Data Guard (Read Only Servers )

    For God’s sake pls tell me the no licences’ the I
    need to aquire for Active Data Guard Option ?

    The servers are Sun SPARC 4 cores and all the servers are going to be used by a WEB based bussines applllication

  4. Daniel Hesselink on January 12th, 2011 10:37 am

    HI Michael,

    sorry that your query slipped my attention. But here it is:
    Active Data Guard license is required for the 11g standby database when using either:
    • Real-time Query
    • RMAN block-change tracking on a standby database

    For other scenario’s you won’t need it.
    See further information here….hope it helps!

  5. Oscar Torres on October 27th, 2011 2:39 pm

    Can you assist with confirmation to a couple of questions below:

    Do test/development Oracle Db servers need to be fully licensed? My undertanding is Yes

    Data Guard is free with EE but you still need to pay for the EE standby database on the remote server correct? My undertanding is Yes

    Thanks

    Thanks

  6. Daniel Hesselink on November 30th, 2011 11:14 am

    Hi Oscar,

    sorry for the late reply but yes: You’re right about all.
    Only if you do testing/debugging of applications that were developed with iDS, with users that have an iDS license, an exception can be made for Test/Dev servers.

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