Oracle licensing

Oracle Database licensing

As we would like to provide some licensing guidelines for Oracle Database.

Today’s software environments are complex, particularly with the integration of the web, the proliferation of corporate extranets, and the increased usage of corporate self-service applications. To ensure data integrity and security, companies often utilize multiple database instances to manage their application development environments.

Database Metrics

The Oracle Database editions; Standard and Enterprise can be licensed using either the Named User Plus metric or the Processor metric. Although, the Oracle Database Personal Edition can only be licensed using the Named User Plus metric. In this section, we review the benefits associated with each metric.

Named User Plus: This metric can be used in all environments. Additional licenses are required based on the Oracle Database edition.

Typical Database Software Environments:

• Production Environment
• Test Environment
• Development Environment

Oracle Licensing Optimization

For Oracle database instances deployed on physical server (a hardware box in a data center). The capability of this hardware box is divided into various Virtual Machines (VMs). The virtual clients just use the capacity of a physical server in an optimized way.

Let’s say if they have a physical server and if they only deploy one application on that physical server, the whole physical server is being provided to 1 application and it cannot be given to any other application. But when you create VMs you can have multiple applications on the same physical server and when you virtualize these VMs; your applications become capable of moving from one VM to the other for load balancing within the server.

Source of the used blog image: Oracle

Oracle Software Licensing Example

Here is an example which explains Oracle database scenario with virtualization.

Let’s say there is a cluster with four servers hardware configuration, where the hardware configuration is two processors and having four core/processors. That basically means there are 8 cores (4 x 2 cores/processors).

Database Enterprise Edition comparison

Let’s assume that a database enterprise edition along with the tuning pack is deployed on one of the servers. The customer also has 364 users. If someone wants to decide what license metric is applicable, and also to save cost, how would they do that?

One Named User Plus is $950 and the Cost of 1 Processor license = $47.500 as per the market price.

The ideal calculation should be: an Enterprise Edition with 2 processors and 4 core each, would require 8 core licenses.

Oracle licensing recommendation

Now this is about four Oracle processor license requirement which is occurring from a four-server cluster.

Without hard partitioning in a clustered server environment, the capability can increase and the application can run on different resources from the same physical server. It is not dedicated to 1 VM and hence it can move.

This often creates a license requirement for the whole cluster. This means your cost of 16 processors will be $760,000 (16 x 47,500) without any discounting factor.

• Example: When licensing the Oracle Database by Named User Plus, all users who are using the Oracle Database, as well as all non-human operated devices that are accessing the Oracle Database must be licensed.

Furthermore, it is relevant to explain Oracle database licensing in partitioned environments. Partitioning can provide tremendous benefit to a wide variety of applications by improving performance, manageability, and availability.

Always evaluate according to which licensing metric should the Oracle database licenses be procured which allows cost savings!

You can use partitioning to help reduce the number of licenses that are required for your Oracle database installations.