Besides that, I agree with Jaffar.

It is that what we wanted really? We want Oracle to make the AWR/ASH free, i.e. no licensing fee.

I am half heartily happy of this change, as Oracle didn’t make the AWR/ASH license free tools.

Waiting for the day.

Jaffar

Doug! Of course, that’s exactly what happened. But that’s my point exactly and the fact that Oracle employees are reading our blogs, our mailing lists, and more importantly being responsive to them, is exactly the positive development I want to thank and congratulate Oracle for. By the way, Oracle corp definitely reads Pythian’s blog as I’m sure they read all the blogs including yours more than anyone’s (except maybe Tom Kyte’s)! After all, these blogs are about Oracle and they are Oracle, so that is completely natural. But just reading them is not really enough to become integrated in the user community, they need to respond to them and participate in the user community directly.

Out of interest, I looked it up - in the month leading up to the Thursday just before the Friday Mark published his letter, Oracle was the only non-Pythian non-ISP in our top ten visitor IP ranges:

I’m not particularly curious, but I think you should consider the possibility that one of the Oracle employees who frequent Oracle-L or are OT members might have raised the flag? My point is that I welcomed the letter, as I’m sure many did, and the community joined in in drawing attention to it but I’m not sure Oracle employees are fervent Pythian blog-watchers. Although I could be wrong and, even if I’m not, they will be now ;-)

>> I think these kinds of successes need to be applauded if we want more of the same.

Agreed. Only by giving due credit for a positive response might people keep listening.

When I wrote “and let’s give Mark Brinsmead most of the credit for the timing of this” (emphasis new) I really meant only the timing. The fact that this was already under development is completely true and I indicate as much! There is no doubt in my mind based on the actual conversations I had yesterday and on July 2, by email and by voice, that the acceleration of the publication of this note has everything to do with the blog, which brings me to…

On your other point, whether it’s the oracle-l or other means that got Oracle to take note and respond, I don’t know and we’ll likely never know - although I can ask if we’re very curious. But the fact of the matter I still think it’s a breakthrough for Oracle that essentially a blog post gets a response from corporate and an acceleration of the timeline to publish a note, within two days. I think that’s really unusual and great. And I also reiterate that in my mind this is at least in part a result of Justin’s efforts in this regard. And thus my note congratulating Oracle and underlining Justin’s efforts. They took some heat from James Governor at Redmonk (see my link above) about not being responsive and integrated into the blogosphere, and I think these kinds of successes need to be applauded if we want more of the same.

Cheers!

Paul

>> So as it turns out, Oracle has been working on a package to disable the AWR data collection without requiring a license for at least two months. But as of yesterday, it had not yet been published.

i.e. Oracle were working on it anyway, perhaps because of the efforts of others? But the Pythian blog has perhaps hurried things along.

>> And so, yesterday evening, and let’s give Mark Brinsmead most of the credit for the timing of this, Oracle published a method for disabling AWR collection without requiring a license to the diagnostic pack.

>> that clearly Oracle is reading and responding to our blogs, and this is the first step to integration into the Oracle blogosphere. Whether this is as a result of your efforts, Justin, or not, I think an “‘attaboy and good job” is order here too.

Or, sorry to sound churlish, but it’s perhaps the publicity from other blogs that brought them here? Many people publicised that letter on on Oracle-L, through their blogs, on the OT list and so on because they thought it was a good thing. My impression is that there have always been a lot of oracle.com hits to all blogs historically, so maybe it’s not just Pythian’s and it’s not something new?

Alex,

>> I’d be very interested to see what are those “features that do not require pack license but implicitly use AWR” that are unavailable when AWR is disabled.

I suppose that’s a little like AWR uses partitioning. whether you’re licenced to use it or not ;-)

I’d be very interested to see what are those “features that do not require pack license but implicitly use AWR” that are unavailable when AWR is disabled.

Moreover, it’s not an appropriate way of disabling licensed feature — the method that also leads to unavailability of standard features. It’s just once again confirms that AWR/ASH were designed as a integral inseparable part of Oracle RDBMS. I would like to say that Oracle engineers did an excellent job on there but unfortunately Oracle licensing policies put in place ruined the usability and caused all kind of frustration amongst the customers.

I hope Oracle will hear the voice of customers and “fix” the situation as advised in the open letter as opposed to delivering a “hack” that allows to disable this data collection.