RE: standby and Oracle licensing

Cluster isn't necessarily RAC.

At the site of one of my customers we run happily SE, on Linux and Polyserve Matrix Server with the Oracle HA kit. The customer runs its app. as an ASP. They have appr. 70 companies (some of them worldwide) using this app. embedded in their recruitment sites. The old Alpha server couldn't cope with the load any more. Now we have just some Intel boxes running, connected to a SAN. Every clusternode sees the same storage. Every node runs two instances (everything is pretty much standardized. With one schema per customer you get a hell of a lot of child cursors when all sessions frequently use the same SQL, but for another schema. 2 instances with 20 schemas run better than 1 instance with 40 schemas). When a node fails, another node will start an instance for the same database, usually within 40 seconds. The HA kit takes care of that. And the service is available again...... The failover time might even beat brown-out periods and other management tasks RAC has to deal with upon failover. You know, RAC might save the session, but if it takes more than, say, 90 seconds, a lot of apps I know of would have quit already because of a timeout. One can state that the instance was there all the time. It was not responding, but hey who cares, that's not part of the SLA. Yes, a node might have to deal with 3 or 4 instances. But there is no problem. The nodes can handle that easily. If not, we will just add another node as a warm standby. If we need that, it is because the license sales are going well. We can afford an extra node by then.

No need for EE. Smallish boxes with SE will do the job. Scalable. When they sell more licenses, we'll just introduce a new box, some instances, maybe even some disks.
And, BTW, it performs like a dream.

Yes, it's a cluster. No, it isn't RAC. It's not very complex. It's not very expensive. I like it.

We still have a DR-site with another node. 4 instances, the old vanilla hot standby solution with archive log shipping. That thing is licensed as well. 2 CPU's, one SE license for the node.

Best regards,

Carel-Jan Engel

===
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. (Derek Bok) ===

On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 13:43 -0500, Paula_Stankus_at_doh.state.fl.us wrote:

> Hate to tell you this but I was told the same thing. I went through
> Government Sales.
>
> Basically for standby (with data guard) you have to pay for licenses for
> your DR server.
>
> "Cluster" would be RAC. My understanding is that for the $$ of EE you
> get to run RAC BUT for the different nodes you have to buy Oracle
> licenses.
>
> SQL Server allows you not to have to license the inactive node.
>
> Oracle needs to be more competitive IMHO.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
> [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of David
> Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 1:16 PM
> To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
> Subject: standby and Oracle licensing
>
> I am under the impression that a physical standby DB is licensed under
> the EE license for the primary and there is no additionl costs to run
> the standby. We are be told now this is not true by Oracle sales and
> they sent us a doc:
>
> Failover: Nodes are configured in "cluster" with the first installed
> node acting as a primary node. If the primary node fails, one of the
> nodes in the cluster acts as the primary node. In this type of
> environment, Oracle permits licensed Oracle Database customers to run
> the Database on an unlicensed spare computer for up to a total of ten
> separate days in any given calendar year. Any other use requires the
> environment to be fully licensed. Additionally, the same metric must be
> used when licensing the databases in a failover environment.
> * Standby: One or many copies of the primary database are maintained on
> separate server(s) at all times. These systems are configured for
> disaster recovery purposes. If the primary database fails, the standby
> database is activated to act as the new primary database. In this
> environment, the primary and the standby databases must be fully
> licensed. Additionally, the same metric must be used when licensing the
> databases in a standby environment.
>
> What is your understanding of this?
> "cluster" "failover" "standby"
> They are really cuttign off their nose here again.
> --
> ..
> David
>
>
> --
> http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>
>
>

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