Not all Oracle Licensing Scripts are the same

Over the past 20 years I have been helping companies of all shapes and sizes get the best out of their Oracle License Agreements. I have developed tools, processes and a knowledge base to make sure my clients get compliant with what is often complex licensing agreements and deployment architectures.

I’m often brought in to validate the results of other tools or scripts. The base inventory of Oracle deployments is critical in getting the right result for our customers. It needs to be highly accurate, and it is clear from our work and research that this is a process that requires people and tools to work together to get the “gold-standard” of Oracle Inventory.

The process we have developed is based on this approach, the tool collects what it can and additional conversations are had about deployment architecture. For example: a customer’s naming convention FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) may include a reference to show whether an asset is production or non-production, however it is not common to indicate Failover. Tools to be quite frank, wouldn’t be able to identify the mode of Failover which is critical in understanding the license metric to be applied, so humans are required, sorry ChatGPT.

In the last year we have seen some unsettling developments in the inventory data collected, these fall into 3 basic categories according to our research.

In-house Developed Scripts

We often see clients with fairly large estates having developed their own techniques for collecting data to prove their Oracle license requirement. Some are very impressive, and stand up to very detailed scrutiny. However, most are very basic and just look for executables using their current SAM tools or Microsoft SCCM. This may be a so-so approach if you are only using Oracle Database Standard Edition (SE), but if you are using Oracle Database Enterprise Edition you will need to connect to the database and execute some SQL to get the data you need. ?Bearing in mind there are 18 chargeable options to the Oracle Enterprise Edition, and 5 Oracle Enterprise Management packs, all which need details checks to prove you have no usage. There are 694 Select statements in the current LMS Script, or 531 if you only check the automated processing section.

Oracle 3rd PTV program verified tools (What are verified Oracle tools? See this link)

Common issues:

Old tool version deployed at customer may not have the latest collection scripts implemented.

Upgrade path is expensive and is “6-12” months away.

The customer may not have purchased the Oracle “Licensing Module”

The tool may not have been correctly configured, or “taught” enough information about the environments.

Customer assumes the tool is correct and under audit conditions receives a large invoice.

Interestingly most verified tools use the exact same scripts that Oracle has provided and modified them. These are run as root on the target asset, which is run through an agent deployed to the target machine.

Tools and scripts provided by Oracle Licensing consultancies or Oracle Script processing providers.

Most of these are based on the Oracle LMS Scripts, basically a package of scripts which must be run on the target asset as root. This runs Operating system commands to get information about the system hardware. SQL is run on the target Databases collecting information about Option and OEM pack usage, number of users etc. Usually in a modified form, but sometimes they are just direct cut and pastes from the original.

I don’t recommend this as an approach and I have written previously on why I think it’s a bad idea to let anyone deploy an unsupported script to run as root on your production systems, with read everything rights, all tables, all data, I presume you bought an expensive Oracle Database possibly because it offers exceptional security.

In the below table we’re analysed various versions of the Oracle LMS Scripts and are showing additional commands run by version of the scripts. We have conducted a side-by-side analysis showing the detailed discrepancies based on the automated processing section.

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In this table we are showing two Oracle Script Processing providers scripts with the number of SQL commands.

It is quite clear from the analysis that these scripts match up exactly with much older versions of the Oracle scripts.

What’s the problem with that? Well typically Oracle LMS releases new script packages once or twice a year to match additional licensed features they want to check on. These are based on new releases/versions of the Oracle Database. So as our data shows, if you are using one of the processing systems by these providers then you are at significant risk non-compliance in your Oracle Licensing.

I was genuinely surprised that these vendors/consultancies haven’t updated their scripts in years, one of the scripts matches up with a 2018 release. ?

I recommend customers conduct periodic reviews of what versions of the scripts that are in use, and urge their providers to upgrade as soon as possible.

We offer reviews of Oracle Inventory collection techniques to make sure they are still valid. Get in touch if you want to discuss further.