Standard Edition, Standard Edition One or Standard Edition 2?

You know how people complain that Oracle licensing can be very complicated?

Well, Oracle 12.1.0.2 Standard Edition 2 has been released after being announced earlier in the summer.  Great, but what about Standard Edition and Standard Edition One?

• Oracle 12c Database Standard Edition will only be available as a 12.1.0.1 release.
• Oracle 12c Database Standard Edition One 12c will only be available as a 12.1.0.1 release.
• Oracle 12c Database Standard Edition 2 12c will only be available as a 12.1.0.2 release.

A bit confused?  I know I was.

Basically, SE and SEOne (SE1?) are available options if you’re running a 12.1.0.1 database. However, if you like living your life in the fast lane (as well as making use of some really cool new features) and you’re running 12.1.0.2, both SE and SE1 editions are replaced by SE2.

The licensing restrictions are as follows.  The bold emphasis is mine:

“Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 may only be licensed on servers that have a maximum capacity of 2 sockets. When used with Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 may only be licensed on a maximum of 2 one-socket servers. In addition, notwithstanding any provision in Your Oracle license agreement to the contrary, each Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 database may use a maximum of 16 CPU threads at any time. When used with Oracle Real Application Clusters, each Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 database may use a maximum of 8 CPU threads per instance at any time. The minimums when licensing by Named User Plus (NUP) metric are 10 NUP licenses per server.”

By the way, SE2 does not support multi-tenant.  Don’t forget, though, Oracle have deprecated non-“CDB / PDB” architecture from 12.1.0.2 onwards, so you should install SE2 as a single-tenant pluggable database with a container database to follow Oracle’s recommended path.

One wonders whether the “SE2” nomenclature will persist. Will Oracle only offer “Standard Edition 2” and “Enterprise Edition” for Database 13.1?

“What happened to Standard Edition 1?
Why don’t they just call it ‘Standard Edition’?”

I do not know, dear reader.  I do not know.

Oracle Interactive Quick Reference

Remember those enormous posters of Oracle’s data dictionary views you used to see in DBA shops?

Here’s the Oracle 12c Interactive Quick Reference – more interactive and less need for pulp.

The Oracle 11g Interactive Quick Reference can be downloaded from here.

 

 

Oracle Big Data Lite VM 4.0

Following OpenWorld, Oracle released version 4.0 of their Big Data Appliance Lite Virtual Machine for VirtualBox.

It includes OEL 6.4, RDBMS database 12.1.0.2 with Big Data SQL, Cloudera 5.1.2, NoSQL database 3.0.14 and GoldenGate 12c.

The “Getting Started” page now has all sorts of good documentation, white papers and hands-on labs you can try out.

New Features of Oracle 12c Database Release 1 Patch Set 1

“NO RELEASE 1!!!”

I admit it, I’m one of those “no Release 1” bigots when it comes to new versions of Oracle’s RDBMS.

I know dogma is not meant to have its place in technology, but I have gone through far too much suffering in previous x.1 implementations to believe that it really is different this time, promise when Oracle try and persuade people to upgrade to their latest Release 1.

Oracle have been claiming that “this NEW version is rock-solid, man, none of the old teething problems” since 9.1, so it’s difficult for those DBAs who don’t enjoy pain to make the leap instead of waiting until the second patch set of the second release before starting on their upgrade planning.

HOWEVER, the latest patch set for Oracle 12cR1 was released this week and, BOY, does it have a lot of really cool features.