#breakFreeFromOracle

A few years ago I was in the business of software license management. We built the tooling and knowledge to discover IBM and 3rd party software. To qualify it for license consumption measurements, you have to bring it all together, "aggregate it" and understand the license terms of a software product, for example exclude bundles, test or development instances, and/or  count them differently depending on the needs of the program.

Partition mobility was the great NEWS of the time: IaaS helped clients build flexible cloud-like infrastructures, improve utilization of their resources, and promised better business outcomes. Partition mobility meant that a logical partition on VMWare, Hyper-V, or AIX could move from one server to another, thus enabling High Availability characteristics and a means to react to varying workloads.

For example: Partition A on Server 1 has 16 cores and runs a commerce application server. For one day of the week, the workload is 50% higher. In order to avoid SLA impact, a mobility event is configured that moves the partition with the application server onto Server 2 with 32 cores for that one day.

In this example, we had to understand the mobility event and total license consumption at the high watermark (think MAX over a given period of time) of all participating servers for this specific software. #DB2 supports the above concept as a logical and reasonable means to charge for software.

In the DB2 licensing model Max(16, 32) = 32 cores to be licensed.

On the other hand, #Oracle has been a challenge all along in terms of licensing complexity. I did not fully recognize the deliberate way by which Oracle tries to generate more revenue from its existing customers.: They changed their licensing terms on the fly in November 2013, saying that AIX Live partition mobility is no longer considered an eligible sub-capacity technology.

As a result, all cores on the participating servers must be licensed!

In the Oracle model of my example, you pay license fees for 16+32=48 cores! I have heard from customers that this makes them very unhappy.

Partition mobility might be an extreme example, but it is a reflection of the unfriendly, complex licensing model that Oracle may use to optimize revenue.

Time to #breakFreeFromOracle. Try #DB2 instead. Check out DB2's Oracle compatibility here Conversion Guide or team up with others here StackOverflow.