Oracle Database Licensing Size is Everything

There seems to be a lot of talk about Oracle Licensing in regards to contracts, ULA’s and Audits. But for most customers the horse has already bolted a long time ago, and your neighbour 6 miles away has been trying to reach you for a couple of days to let you know she’s found your horse the garden eating her plants. More than likely you have already signed your License agreement, signed your ULA or signed your cloud agreement. What we don’t hear a lot about is practical examples of how to make it less expensive. 

So here are my 5 Real Life Licensing Mistakes in Oracle Database Deployments, catchy eh?

1. Co-Locating. Putting more than just a database on your hardware, adding middleware and applications or other databases on the same server as your Oracle Database increases your CPU requirements, higher the number of CPUs = higher the cost for Oracle.

2. Finger in the wind sizing: “I reckon we need a processor core per 50 users”. Meaning a: You don’t know how many users you have or what scale this is going to need, b: You haven’t done any load testing for your specific application usage. c: You have no idea what license metric you are going to apply, Named User or Processor? and that's just the start of the questions you need to ask.

3. Understanding how your hard-partitioning technology should be licensed. KVM- not pinning cores. AIX not using Shared Pools. Solaris, not configuring your Zones effectively. Windows, "I’m sorry why exactly did you deploy an Oracle Database on Windows in production, please share your decision-making process?"

4. Running your Unix based system at 60% CPU spin is a good thing. It’s designed to be using the CPU.

5. Tuning, eliminating rogue processes, using the right OS version for your DB version, removing options, all decrease Oracle Database CPU consumption.

I'm sure we have all come across examples like the above that have just happened as things evolve, systems change, and no-one spends the time designing the system to the constraints. Sure, having a 32 Core Server running an Oracle Database should work great for performance and users’ requirements, but the costs that come attached can get quite alarming.

So, before you commission your shiny new Oracle Database or start that project to migrate your Oracle Databases to the cloud, or just want to see if you can save some money, get in touch with an Oracle Licensing Subject Matter expert who understands and has some experience of how the costs will play out.