Re: Virtualization

Mladen Gogala wrote:
> On Tue, 07 Jan 2014 20:39:27 +0000, Drazen Kacar wrote:
>
> >> Because on that instance you cannot legally apply patches. As soon as
> >> you start patching the instance, you have to pay for support.
> >
> > Unless you have a contract with Oracle which says you can patch it for
> > free. Or almost free.
>
> Or if Larry Ellison is your brother in law. Contracts like that are not
> something I've seen in my meager 25 years of a DBA career. But yes, you
> are perfectly correct: if Oracle allows you to patch for free, without
> paying for support, you can do it.

Oh, come on. If you are a developer company, or an integrator company or any other kind of company which is actually selling software or services that require Oracle's database to run, then you're eligible for entry in Oracle's developer program. I'm not sure how's it called these days.

They charge for it a bit, somewhere around 1000-2000 EUR per year (but don't quote me on that, I have never been in charge of finances). That buys you the right for all the patches for all editions and add-ons on an unlimited number of development instances. It doesn't buy you the right to log support requests. But patches and knowledge base articles from Metalink are included.

I've been there in two of my previous companies, one software developer, the other software integrator. I've never met Larry Ellison.

I'm not sure whether a software development department within some non-IT company (a telco, for example, or a bank) would be eligible, but I'd try to get in that program if I were them. It's just that I have never worked for a company whose core business wasn't IT[1], so I didn't have to try. But then, that shouldn't be a big problem. It is a way for Oracle to sell more Oracle software to parts of the company that will actually be running the application in production.

[1] With the exception that in my current company IT isn't core business, but I'm not running Oracle. We're cheap. :-)

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