As an Oracle Gold Partner, we are accredited to assist customers in determining and transacting the most economic licensing solution for their immediate and long term needs.
We also provide managed services for customers who wish to offload data deployment and management tasks to free up resources for other projects or to mitigate skill shortages.
Please click below to view Oracle Database Licensing options:
Processor Licences
Oracle offers a choice of processor or named user licensing.
For Standard Edition Two, a licence is required for each occupied socket (installed physical processor). The number of cores is irrelevant. Enterprise Edition requires a license for each processor / core. In the case of multi-core, a factor is applied to the core count to provide a discount. Oracle publishes a matrix that details the more common processor models and the factor applicable to each. The core count after discount determines the number of licences required.
A processor license covers unlimited users of an INTERNAL line of business application (including web sites). The EULA excludes hosting because it doesn't provide for external users of an application that is line of business for a third party. Oracle may approve hosting on a case by case basis, applying different conditions for a single customer and multiple customer scenarios.
Named User Plus Licences
Unlike Microsoft's server and client access licensing model, Oracle named user licences don't require the additional purchase of a server licence. A Named User Plus licence is required for every individual human and non-human user (device) that connects either directly or indirectly to the database. This type of licence does not accommodate sharing or concurrent usage. Standard Edition Two requires a minimum of 10 Named User Plus licences. Enterprise has a minimum of 25 per CPU or discounted core count. Named User Plus covers multiple servers provided the minimum user count is met per server. For Enterprise, four separate servers each with one single-core processor require a minimum of 100 Named Users (25x4) even if only 70 users access the servers. This is more economical than buying 70 licenses for each of the 4 servers (i.e. 280).
Perpetual, Term and Finance Options
Term licensing and finance is available to lower initial outlay and minimise risk where future requirements are uncertain. These are useful for business start-ups and short term projects that need to contain costs until properly established. Term licences are available for 1 to 5 year periods. When the term expires, the user may purchase a further term or new perpetual licence. The cost of term licences is determined as a percentage of the cost of a perpetual licence as follows:
5-Year Term License at 70% of Perpetual Licence
4-Year Term License at 60% of Perpetual Licence
3-Year Term License at 50% of Perpetual Licence
2-Year Term License at 35% of Perpetual Licence
1-Year Term License at 20% of Perpetual Licence
Term licences are not renewable; they expire at the end of the term and either have to be replaced with new licences or the software must be decommissioned.
Cloud Deployment
Oracle allows you to lift and shift your on-premises licenses to a number of IaaS platforms ('Authorised Cloud Environments') including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Please call us for further information about this and for other Oracle Cloud services such as Oracle Database as as Service (DaaS).
Database Options
The Enterprise Edition of Oracle Database has a number of add-on Options and Management Packs that extend availability, performance and scalability. While the licensing for these is generally straight forward, please seek advice from a Grey Matter Oracle Licensing Specialist if you're considering Database Options. In most cases, these add-ons are licenced using the same metric chosen for the database but there could be exceptions if the architecture is complex.
Partitioning and Virtualisation
Oracle recognises certain technologies such as Solaris Containers and Oracle VM as a valid and foolproof way of restricting processing power to an integer number of cores to economise on licensing. Soft partitioning (e.g. VMware) is not recognised which means all CPUs must be licenced in the virtualised environment regardless of whether they are being used or not.
High Availability
Clustered failover allows a secondary node to take over when the primary in the same cluster fails. This is active / passive and doesn't require additional licensing provided the failover node isn't active more than ten days per calendar year. Regardless of cluster size, this concession is limited to two database servers only, i.e. one live and one locally mirrored failover copy. Any other arrangement where additional databases are current and actively being maintained (e.g. hot standby or remote mirroring) requires each server to be licenced using the same licensing metric.
Development and Testing
Non-collaborative development and testing by an individual doesn't require licensing for pre-deployment, non-production and non-commercial use cases. Licences are required for any commercial aspect of the development process such as sales demos, training etc. Likewise, on-going development and testing of an existing system requires licences where additional users or servers are involved.
Authorisation and Installation
The end-user is required to sign an Online Master Agreement (OMA) at the point of purchase. Oracle takes care of this in the case of Standard Edition Two and Grey Matter is responsible for initiating the OMA process for Enterprise licences.
Alternative Licence Types
Full Use (FU) licences are unrestricted licences that may be used for development, testing and running any of your applications. Application Specific Full Use (ASFU) and Embedded Software Licence (ESL) are cost-effective licences for third party ISV applications that deploy Oracle technology. Their use is restricted to the single application only. In the case of ESL, there are restrictions to the functionality presented to the end-user as outlined in the Oracle Embedded Charter.
Hardware Considerations
Hardware processing capacity is taken into account when licensing Oracle.
Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 (SE2) may only be licenced on servers that have a maximum capacity of 2 sockets. When used with Oracle Real Application Clusters, SE2 may only be licenced on a maximum of two single socket servers. Each SE2 database may use a maximum of 16 CPU threads at any time. When used with Oracle Real Application Clusters, each SE2 database may use a maximum of 8 CPU threads per instance at any time. The 16 CPU thread cap is a technical limitation in the Database program, not a licence limitation. SE2 database cannot utilise more than 16 threads at any time. On a typical Intel processor, each core contains two threads. For example, a 2 socket Intel-based server may contain two processors each having 10 cores, so the server has 20 threads in total (if hyper threading is enabled); SE2 will utilise a maximum of 16 threads at any time.
Enterprise Edition does not place constraints on the hardware specification.
Product Updates and Support (formerly known as Update Subscription)
This provides access to new Oracle releases including product upgrades, maintenance releases and patches. It also provides access to supported older releases which is particularly important for ISVs, systems integrators or anyone needing to deploy or work with earlier releases.
Product Support is a 24x7 support service that provides direct access to Oracle experts for product specific questions about installing and operating Oracle software. Web based support is provided via Oracle MySupport. This includes proactive notifications, customised home pages, technical libraries and forums, product life-cycle information, a bug database and the ability to log technical assistance requests. Support renewals are handled by Oracle direct.
