Oracle standard edition has no multi-core licensing restrictions
Reading this article in hemant’s blog from last June, he made an interesting observation:
1. Oracle has priced for the Xeon QuadCore Processor at the rate of 1 Processor based on
the single socket justified as “When licensing Oracle programs with Standard Edition One or Standard Edition in the product name, a processor is counted equivalent to an occupied socket” for a 3-year licence. Thus, Oracle used the combination of “Processor, not Core” for SE/SE-One and 50% of List price for a 3-Year Licence.
The Oracle store website’s licensing page has the exact same wording.
This means that, with SE/SEOne, you can really stretch your Oracle licensing dollar: an 8-way box with a pair of quad-core processors can be licensed with SEOne (in the US) for $10k, and $2k/year for support (sold on a per-chip basis too).
Now imagine running it on an 80-core chip!
Category: Group Blog Posts, Oracle
Tags: Licensing, Oracle
I have 2 Intel Quad Core Processors.
We want to install SEOne named users. How many named users are required minimum per processor?
@Tyrone: you can license Oracle by named user rather than by processor. Oracle’s licensing definition of named users is quite restrictive however, and includes any person who might access the database information, either directly or through an application. Often a processor license ends up being more cost-effective. If you opt for a named user license Standard Edition One license, the minimum purchase is 5 users total (not per processor).
Note that the rules for licensing Oracle Standard Edition and Standard Edition ONE have changed since this BLOG was posted.
Specifically, Oracle has changed the definition of “Socket”; when using processors implemented as a Mult-Chip Module, Oracle now counts each CHIP in the device as a “socket” for the purposes of licensing.
There is a very good chance, for example, that each of Tyrone’s Quad-Core “processors” (depending on the model) actually counts as TWO “sockets”. It is my understanding that this affects not only the number of “processor” licenses that need to be purchased (if using that metric) but also the eligibility of a given server to host Standard Edition (or Standard Edition ONE) licenses.