Oracle Licence

Oracle Licensing

Processor licensing

You pay per Processor you run the Oracle software on; however Oracle has a special definition of “processor” which may or may not match that of your hardware vendor.
Intel Hyperthreading technology that makes one core look like two counts as 1 processor for this purpose. Other soft partitioning technologies are treated differently; for example, the Solaris OS has a concept of Containers, this is similar to hard partitioning on an HP machine; however Oracle does not recognize software partitioning with Solaris Containers prior to Solaris 10; and even then there are stipulations. Hard partitioning methods such as Sun’s Domains, IBM’s Logical partitioning are recognized as legitimate methods to limit the amount of resources that can run the Oracle software. If you are a MS or VMWare virtual machine user, the following document is a must read; Oracle Partitioning Policy document
Oracle Standard Edition uses a per-socket licensing scheme, however, Enterprise Edition used a per-core licensing scheme.
Standard Edition Per-socket licensing
If you use Standard Edition or Standard Edition One on a 2 processor system you simply need 2 licenses. However, if you use Enterprise Edition you need to take the number of cores into account as well.
Enterprise Edition Per-core licensing
Multi-core processors are priced as (number of cores)*(multi-core factor) processors, where the multi-core factor is:
This link describes this best: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core-factor-table-070634.pdf

Oracle Software Download

Available from :

  1. Oracle Download
  2. Some s/w may be available upon the Latimer ftp server, account = software. Click here for ftp information.

Sql Tools
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