Re: Could Mark Townsend please comment on this question re: Standard Edition

Niall Litchfield wrote:
> >
> > There were several. If you want a short recap here you go:
>
> here's my take. Given that asking Oracle to comment definitively in
> usenet seems a little bit ambitious.

Were you having better luck getting this area straightened out by communicating with oracle via other channels? If so my apologies then.

> >
> > 1) Why does oracle ship the product with the options packs installed
> > configured and ready to use when in fact one can never license those
> > packs?
> >
> > a) is that a bug and should it be reported as such to oracle support?
> >
> > b) if it is not a bug then why is it done like that?
>
> No it isn't a bug. It's a design feature. This isn't intended to be
> flippant, if you think about how AWR works it isn't the sort of thing
> that can be removed easily from one code base (EE) in order to fit the
> others.

There are a lot of different opinions in this area. Is is possible that oracle wants people to be confused about the licensing?

One way to think about it is that if AWR really cannot be turned off then everyone that uses standard edition should be able to use it or at least license the usage of it. Similar considerations might apply to other parts of the other packs.

One poster hinted in this thread that some oracle sales people sell some subset of their customers standard edition license but expect/allow (?) these customers to use more of those features. That's not the type of typical conduct that most oracle professionals would want to be involved in at least in my opinion. Then again, if such alleged agreements were written down and signed off ... who knows.

Lots of confusion in this area.

If oracle really has put such serious development effort in this area that these features cannot easily be turned off, then maybe they should be free to everyone using standard edition? After all with the name of standard edition shouldn't everything that you need come along with one standard price?

>
> >
> > 2) Is the product properly designed so that it is fully functional
> > without using any of the packs?
>
> Yes, the option packs certainly make the use of Oracle more
> straightforward but you can manage Oracle perfectly well without them -
> though database control/grid control becomes an almost complete waste of
> time given the fact that it is built assuming all packs will be licensed.
>

This was a question more for oracle than for anyone else.

>
> > 3) What are the implications for any people who use grid control and
> > have a set of enterprise edition and standard edition databases that
> > they need to manage/monitor/support?
>
> Great question as far as SE goes - EE clients can be monitored by either
> Grid or database control, but then given that Mark has suggested that
> the thinking is that companies running SE don't need to monitor or
> manage their databases (quite an extraordinary suggestion in my opinion)
> then presumably they haven't paid much thought to this subject and/or
> are happy that money that could/should have gone to them goes to people
> who sell monitoring tools.
>

Thanks I kind of liked that question myself but again it's more intended for oracle.

> >
> > 4) Are there any potential legal implications for both oracle and
> > oracle customers because oracle is shipping a product that has features
> > enabled and ready to use that one cannot license?
>
> Great question, especially for AWR that is adding additional useless
> processing overhead (admittedly not much) to SE databases, that is there
> is processing going on/storage being used and so on, that SE customers
> cannot use. it would be interesting actually to see how AWR in
> particular compares with various legislations definitions of computer
> misuse.
>

It would be nice to get this area straightened out without involving the suits.

> >
> > That's probably a good set of items to start with.
> >
>
> I still, though to be honest I don't have much hope, stay with my
> original suggestion way back when that Oracle just take our money
> (http://www.petitiononline.com/oraman/petition.html) namely

What ever happened with the petition? Any updates?

>
> "We request that Oracle Corporation make all of its Enterprise Manager
> management packs available to all of its customers at the same price,
> regardless of the edition of the Oracle product that they have purchased."
>
> At the time Mark suggested that Oracle preferred to talk directly to
> customers, presumably they have a much larger sample that suggests that
> standard edition customers don't want to manage their databases
> responsibly.

That still seems to be the party line at this point. Received on Sun Oct 15 2006 - 17:04:41 CDT