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They do that with their own stack too (or at least they did). To avoid costs, you have to set up the VM such that it is locked to certain cores, and then that

They do that with their own stack too (or at least they did). To avoid costs, you have to set up the VM such that it is locked to certain cores, and then that avoids the virtualisation portion of the license issues. Oracle's always had very flexible, very hard to understand licensing. I know I never understood it. Pricing per-core,per-feature? Ugh. Then they make it really easy to add new features without knowing how much it costs. Double Ugh. We had a developer add a feature that cost us $100k/core just to process some XML. We quickly replaced it. We had a customer drop their Oracle license fees by 90% by locking their Oracle processes to specific cores (from 20 cores to 2). Personally, I've never liked Oracle. Whenever I interact with them, it hasn't been fun (and I worked for them for a couple of years). Although, Oracle's Cloud Licensing doc is clear about the requirements saying that every vcore is a core. [1] [1] http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/cloud-licensing-0...

DrStalker 11y ago
Have you ever tried to buy a server with only a single core for licensing reasons? It's impossible with modern hardware, the best we were able to do was a double core/single CPU system to run some oracle bits to talk to other oracle stuff. This server processed around half a dozen tiny xml files a day and buying a dedicated physical server saved a few hundred thousand over any other option we could figure out.
- rodgerd 11y ago
  The best option is usually another DBMS stack if you can support it. DB2 does support much saner licensing, for example.
  - hydrogen18 11y ago
    Your advice is spot-on, but you have to remember that many times the software being ran was written by someone who has long since moved on. Even if the source code is readily available, no one may be around to handle to porting it to another RDBMS. Admittedly, this is where much maligned dependency injection frameworks can be useful. I have "upgraded" a large number of old Java software packages by simply placing a newer version of the library's jar on the classpath.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    Well, if we are comparing licenses, Postgres has an unbeatable licensing, and a much better Oracle compatibility tools.
- walshemj 11y ago
  You did not consider using a simple Open source system to do this or are you unlucky and work for a corporate where its Oracle everywhere?
rodgerd 11y ago
> They do that with their own stack too (or at least they did). Nope. If you buy Oracle's virt stacks (either RHEV-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off-and-using-XEN or Solaris), they happily let you sub-capacity license. It's been that way for at least four or five years now. > To avoid costs, you have to set up the VM such that it is locked to certain cores, and then that avoids the virtualisation portion of the license issues. Under current licensing, that's a no, unless it's running in an Oracle branded VM, or zVM. No pinning or soft partitioning are recognised otherwise.
gaius 11y ago
You might be bemused to learn that there are consulting companies selling the service of figuring out your Oracle licenses for you http://www.version1.com/Enterprise-Solutions/Software-License-Optimisation http://www.version1.com/Enterprise-Solutions/Software-Licens...
- cafard 11y ago
  I was interested, but not surprised.

DrStalker 11y ago

Have you ever tried to buy a server with only a single core for licensing reasons? It's impossible with modern hardware, the best we were able to do was a double core/single CPU system to run some oracle bits to talk to other oracle stuff. This server processed around half a dozen tiny xml files a day and buying a dedicated physical server saved a few hundred thousand over any other option we could figure out.

rodgerd 11y ago
The best option is usually another DBMS stack if you can support it. DB2 does support much saner licensing, for example.
- hydrogen18 11y ago
  Your advice is spot-on, but you have to remember that many times the software being ran was written by someone who has long since moved on. Even if the source code is readily available, no one may be around to handle to porting it to another RDBMS. Admittedly, this is where much maligned dependency injection frameworks can be useful. I have "upgraded" a large number of old Java software packages by simply placing a newer version of the library's jar on the classpath.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  Well, if we are comparing licenses, Postgres has an unbeatable licensing, and a much better Oracle compatibility tools.
walshemj 11y ago
You did not consider using a simple Open source system to do this or are you unlucky and work for a corporate where its Oracle everywhere?

rodgerd 11y ago

> They do that with their own stack too (or at least they did). Nope. If you buy Oracle's virt stacks (either RHEV-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off-and-using-XEN or Solaris), they happily let you sub-capacity license. It's been that way for at least four or five years now. > To avoid costs, you have to set up the VM such that it is locked to certain cores, and then that avoids the virtualisation portion of the license issues. Under current licensing, that's a no, unless it's running in an Oracle branded VM, or zVM. No pinning or soft partitioning are recognised otherwise.

gaius 11y ago

You might be bemused to learn that there are consulting companies selling the service of figuring out your Oracle licenses for you http://www.version1.com/Enterprise-Solutions/Software-License-Optimisation http://www.version1.com/Enterprise-Solutions/Software-Licens...

cafard 11y ago
I was interested, but not surprised.