Re: Third party support
Date: Thu, 12 May 2016 09:26:16 -0400
Message-ID: <20160512092616.6b6167b3_at_jeremy-nb.localdomain>
On Thu, 12 May 2016 13:13:48 +0000 Brian Pardy wrote:
> Jeremy Schneider wrote:
> > As others have said in this thread, no third party company can
> > legally provide you with bug fixes, patches or new Oracle versions.
> >
> > They can't give you anything that you can download unless it's a
> > script or something that they wrote themselves.
>
> I do not consider this statement true in all circumstances.
>
> For example: SAP users who purchased their Oracle licenses from SAP
> as an ASFU (application-specific-full-use) receive full distributions
> of Oracle version upgrades, downloadable from SAP's support site.
> Monthly patch sets incorporating some-but-not-all Oracle recommended
> and security patch sets are also produced by SAP in coordination with
> Oracle and provided by SAP as a download from the SAP site.
>
> Such users pay their support fees directly to SAP, not Oracle, and
> IMO SAP thus qualifies as a third party company legally providing bug
> fixes, patches, and new Oracle version. Such users have no
> entitlement to access MOS or contact Oracle support (unless available
> via a separate contract for another Oracle product unreleated to the
> SAP environment). SAP provides first line support and will escalate
> issues to Oracle on the back-end when necessary, as I recently spent
> a good month or three working with SAP/Oracle support to resolve an
> ORA-600 appearing on a production system during bitmap index creation.
>
> This flavor of third party support may only be available from vendors
> that have reseller/support contracts with Oracle; for all I know SAP
> may be the only third party operating along this principle.
Good point. Actually I'm sure SAP isn't the only one; Oracle is pretty open to people embedding their db software in products.
Would be interesting to know if there was some cheap product out there with embedded DB software that you could purchase support for, and somehow manage to extract the security patches for use on other databases for which you no longer pay maintenance.
However I think it's pretty clear that Oracle is generally antagonistic toward companies who simply provide third-party support for software purchased from Oracle themselves; I'm sure that companies selling OEM/embedded have some pretty detailed contracts with Oracle that try to ensure that you're just updating the product itself (which contains the embedded DB) and not other databases you have sitting around.
-Jeremy
-- http://about.me/jeremy_schneider -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Thu May 12 2016 - 15:26:16 CEST