The Oracle Server Worksheet – how long is a piece of string?

If you have been audited by Oracle, or are an Oracle Partner or Oracle Licensing Consultant you should know what the Oracle Server Worksheet (OSW) is. If you don’t then here’s an explanation: the OSW is an Excel spreadsheet which customers provide to Oracle to declare their usage/consumption of Oracle. It should list all the clients Database Instances, ERP, Middleware, it also lists the hardware information associated with the asset that you have deployed Oracle onto. CPU types, number of cores, Hardware Manufacturer and so on. It also asks clients to list the Environments, Dev/Prod, and asks for user numbers and Options OEM Pack in use.

In an audit, Oracle are going to charge you for what you declare and confirm it with data they will collect with tools or scripts.  

So, it’s a very important document. It originated from an Oracle Database licensing tool that has now been superseded by the newer Oracle Measure Tool (OMT). It was used as an input to the tool to create the connection strings to access each Oracle instance listed in the OSW, those were the days!

It is also incredibly time consuming and difficult to fill out. It feels a little like one of those grating online forms that keep stopping you from continuing until you have filled in fields like asking for a county when you live in a city. The constant drop downs and auto-comments, the sheer volume of repeated data. For the database, declaring which Options and OEM Packs to declare is probably the hardest.

Okay, so you start to fill it in and realize you’re going to need the following internal Subject Matter Experts; Hardware Asset Management, Software Asset Management, Oracle DBA, Legal, Commercial, Contracts and probably some-one who knows the logons to all the Oracle servers and some-one from Networks who can open up the firewalls, and, oh yeah the team that manages the VMware estate.

Then having a look at all the folks in this Zoom meeting, you’re thinking quite correctly that this is probably a project, and invite the next available Project Manager. She joins the meeting and looks sadly at the convened attendees. She’s starts by explaining that the last Oracle Audit she worked on cost the company she was previously working at a Multi-Million-dollar settlement. Everyone sighs.

So, for what looks like a quite innocuous spreadsheet, suddenly a team of 5-10 people have to sprung into action. And it’s going to take time, and you only have 30 days. So, 20 actual business days.

For a company with 5-10 databases, it won’t take too long an afternoon or a day let’s say. For 50-100 Databases, you could be done in 5 days, if you have everyone on hand and ready. So, let’s say 2 weeks because Steve and Sarah are out on their honeymoon. For anyone with over 200 or 300 databases you’re probably not going to do it justice in your 20 days, and you all have actual jobs that need doing too. I have done obe or two that are over 10,000 database instances, and to be frank it wasn't just Excel that wasn't very happy.

Now it's time to hand over the OSW, so here is where the cat and mouse game begins; you declare it first, then they check it and tell you need to buy something else. You hire an expert, and they tell you (hopefully with proof) that you don’t need to buy it.  You ask Oracle to check the proof, they disagree, and you ask for other checks to be made. This goes on so long that you feel that you’ve been inside the same Columbo movie for 6 months, hearing the following line repeating in every meeting “Just one more thing ….”.

Now I could start to tell you about how easy our tools are to use or how fast they are and how much more cost effect they are, I won’t, what I will say is probably more important. Here are my top tips for dealing with the OSW.

·        Get independent expert help right at the start.

·        Understand their experience and motivations.

·        You will need to pay the expert, if it’s free it’s probably not independent.

·        Bear in mind everyone thinks they're an expert, even me!