Interesting discussion about Oracle BMW Racing use of technology to win the America’s Cup.

Ian Burns Podcast

Came across this white paper (Oracle Marketing Slick) and thought that at least it offers a good framework for the different considerations that you should be making about software purchases. Oracle often gets knocked for being very expensive which, is at least partly true, as it is. But, of course there is always more to the story. It is also true that because of the increased performance and better resource management you can save on several other fronts.

Reduce IT Costs With Oracle Database 11g R2

This is an interesting report for several reasons. With all our experience with the Oracle solution set I was surprised they ranked as highly as they did. Oracle has a fantastic Data Mining Capability as an Option to the Oracle Database. However, possibly more interesting is the apparent gap in predictive analysis. Perhaps another acquisition?

The Forrester WaveTM: Predictive Analytics And Data Mining Solutions, Q1 2010

While I know this does not have a lot to do with Oracle Technology I know that many of you like to hear what Larry has to say about just about anything. Enjoy!

I saw this today and thought it was pretty funny. It does bring to light the latest thinking within large IT organizations. The Oracle Exadata Machines are the next wave of innovation for large organizations. However, the pricing does seem to put it out of reach for most small to medium sized businesses.

Named Users vs. Processors

A question that customers often ask me is what type of Oracle License they need, Processors or Named Users. This is usually not too hard to determine if you understand the way that Oracle defines these two license types. From there a quick evaluation of your hardware configuration, some growth planning, and a little back of the napkin math will lead you to the correct answer. For the most part it comes down to a couple key break even points where the costs for user based pricing exceeds the costs for processor based pricing.

Oracle Database SE1 costs $180 per user and $5800 per processor. This means that the break even is 33 user per processor: So if you have 100 users and a 2 processor server then it is less expensive to purchase a processor based license.

The break even for Oracle Database Standard Edition and Oracle Enterprise Edition is 50 users per processor.

It is also important to consider growth. If you are able to purchase forward a little the increased dollar tend to make the discounts more favorable. Comparing this with needing to purchase just 1 or two users at a time to accommodate future growth and you will often find it is a better deal to buy forward some so as to limit the downside of buying by the drink.

For more information about how you count users see “What is a Named User?”

Oracle offers two different license metrics for the majority of their technology products, Named User Plus and Processors. Customers are often confused by what exactly a Named User Plus is. Named users are not an unusual metric at all and many software vendors have some sort of named users. Oracle along the way has had multiple different forms of named users themselves. Around 2003 Oracle introduced the Plus part of the named user licenses. We’ll get into this in a moment as it perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of Oracle licensing.

The easiest way to understand Named User Plus Licenses is to look at each word in the phrase separately. By “Named” Oracle simply means that you need have a separate license for each user. You can’t share them and there is no concept of a concurrent license for Oracle any longer.

By “User” Oracle mean any person, application, or device that in any way interacts with the Oracle Software. These “Users” are counted at what Oracle calls the multiplexing front end. Simply put you need to count everyone and everything that accesses the Oracle software regardless of how casual, indirect, or infrequent that interaction is.

Last and most important is the “Plus.” This is so widely misunderstood that many Oracle Sales Executives do not even understand it. It is a very under utilized aspect of the Named User License and can provide a huge advantage to you as a customer in reducing license costs. By “Plus” Oracle means that you only need to count each user once. What does that mean? Say for example you have three employees, Larry, Safra, and Charles, and they all work in the finance team. Lets also assume that Finance has three different applications they use to do their jobs each day and each of those applications uses a different Oracle Database on the back end. If you purchased a license for each of these users then that Named User Plus license would allow each of those users to access each of the three applications.

There are a couple catches here and also huge hidden advantages. First the catches. For most products Oracle has what they call a User Minimum, which for Oracle Database Enterprise Edition for example is 25 Named User Plus licenses per processor. This means that while a single Named User Plus license may access multiple Oracle Databases you must still meet the required user minimums for each processor of database deployed.

This also can present a real opportunity. Regardless of what you may have been told in the past for any and all Oracle Standard Edition One and Standard Edition products that user minimum is 5. Notice I did not say 5 per processor or even per server. The user minimum is just 5. This means that as long as your company purchases at least 5 users then those users can access any number of databases you have deployed provided that you are compliant with the other license rules associated with these products. Let’s look at an example.

I recently worked with a small Telco service provider that had several internal custom applications and a couple packaged ones as well. All of these applications ran on separate severs, all used an Oracle Database, and none were on a server with more than 2 Sockets (the maximum allowed for SE1 products). The company had 65 employees. By purchasing 65 Named User Plus Licenses the customer was able allow all 65 employees to access all 5 applications they had, on the 5 separate servers they ran on, at a very low cost. Additionally since their IT staff were counted in the 65 Named User Plus licenses they were also covered for an additional 3 servers that were used for Test, DEV, and DR. Quite a deal!

This is one of my favorite money saving tricks in the Oracle world!

Processors, Cores, and Sockets: What do I need to count?

This is not terribly complex but it is a question that comes up all the time. Oracle Processor based licenses rely on more metrics than just processors to determine the correct number and type of license you might need. For Oracle Technology Products that have Standard Edition or Standard Edition One in the name you need to count the number of “occupied” sockets in the server or system. For Oracle Enterprise Edition Technology Products you must count the total number of cores that a server or system has and then use one of the 3 multipliers that Oracle provides to determine the correct number of Processor Licenses that would need. Notice in both cases I mention server or “system” for all products you should consider any clustered severs part of the same system. This is important especially in order to avoid going over the maximum number of sockets allowed for SE or SE1 products. It most often comes up when trying to build an Oracle Standard Edition Database Real Applications Cluster, however, it also applies to VMware environments or other VM environments that are not built with Oracle VM.

Enterprise Edition Multipliers

For All Servers Containing Intel or AMD Multicore chips:
n cores x .5 = required number of processor licenses

For All Servers Containing Sun UltraSPARC T1 chips:
n cores x .25 = required number of processor licenses
**see the following table to verify the chip set qualifies for .25 multiplier

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/contracts/library/sun_server_table.pdf

For All Other Servers (any Unix based RISC chip architectures)
n cores x .75 = required number of processor licenses

Resources you might want to also see:
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/databaselicensing.pdf See Page 4 for information on processor based licensing

We created this blog to provide the latest information about Oracle, it’s products, acquisitions, licensing, and technical updates. Please feel free to explore. As always feel free to contact us at any time if we can be of any assistance.

Jim Kurtowicz
CEO
Serac Technologies, Inc.