Just this week in Brighton at TechFest19 by UKOUG I’ve heard one of the common complaints about our license strategy. Something I can’t comment in my position. But even better that we are announcing some very good news now. Oracle is listening. It is a reaction to customer’s wishes.
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Spatial and Graph
Effective December 5, 2019, Oracle Spatial and Graph (OSG) option will be included with Oracle Database. This will affect Enterprise Edition, SE2 and Database Cloud Service (DBCS) Standard Edition 2 and Enterprise Edition. This means, you can use Spatial and Graph in all editions of the Oracle database including SE2 without extra license. And this includes all Spatial features as you can read in Oracle Database PM VP, Jim Steiner’s blog post.
TAFKAP and TOFKAOAA = Machine Learning
Anybody remember this acronym? Prince, on of the greatest musicians ever (and by the way, an incredibly good guitar player) used this acronym a long while ago when he had a bigger argument with his record company. It stood for: The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Now you can guess what TOFKAOAA stands for? The Option Formerly Known as Oracle Advanced Analytics (OAA). Today we call it Machine Learning. And actually I have to credit the ML PMs for this analogy.
But names shouldn’t matter for you in this case. The important news are: As of December 5, 2019, the Machine Learning (formerly known as Advanced Analytics) feature of Oracle Database may be used for development and deployment purposes with all on-prem editions and Oracle Cloud Database Services.
License Guide
You can find this information already in the License Guides for all versions. We updated them already.
- Spatial and Graph Data – Table 1-12
- VLDB, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence – Table 1-13
Standard Edition 2
And especially regarding SE2 one important fact to note:
All features are included to the extent that the underlying database supports them. For example, Oracle Database SE2 does not support parallel operations, so Machine Learning, Graph or Spatial features will simply execute serially on SE2.
Remember? 3 PDBs …
As we announced it at Oracle Open World 2019 in San Francisco, you can have 3 user-created PDBs without having a license for Oracle Multitenant. You can create 3 PDBs per CDB (and you can have more than 1 CDB of course on the same server) also in Standard Edition 2 (SE2), not only in Enterprise Edition (EE). For SE2 you may need an extra patch. Please check with Oracle Support as the base installation allows you only a single PDB per CDB.
Summary
Actually these were a lot of very exciting positive and potentially unexpected license news in the past weeks. At DOAG19 on stage I’ve got enthusiastic applause during my AutoUpgrade talk when I mentioned the 3-PDB-announcement. And Spatial and Graph as well as ML being available in all editions without extra licenses required are very good news indeed, too.
More Information
Please find further information here:
- Oracle 19c Licensing Information User Manual (PDF)
- Oracle 19c Database Licensing Information User Manual (HTML)
- Announcement on blogs.oracle.com/database
- 3 PDBs inlcuded – Upgrade Blog
- Machine Learning in Oracle Database
- Spatial now free with all editions of Oracle Database
- Graph Database and Analytics for everyone
And please watch Oracle Database Development EVP Andy Mendelsohn’s video, too.
–Mike
On the other hand 19c removed RAC from SE2. At least for us RAC is much more useful and important than 3 PDBs and spatial.
So now SE2 is basically the same as SE1 was just three times more expensive and with 16 active sessions limit. I would not call this positive news.
Hi Jokubas,
I hear what you are saying. But this gets decided way above my pay-grade.
For a lot of customers, the 3 PDB offering as well as the Spatial availability (both are for SE2, too) are extremely positive news.
I didn’t write that everything is perfect/super/hyper/great 🙂
Cheers,
Mike
Hi Mike,
How do we install Spatial on 12.1.0.2 SE2? Spatial is greyed out within DBCA.
Thanks, Markus
Hi Markus,
I’d assume with the scripts normally used for EE. But let me double check.
Cheers,
Mike
Hi Markus,
Mike is correct, running mdinst.sql does the trick, except if you want to use the RDF Graph features or if you require the explicit topology model (ie. the SDO_TOPO package). In those cases you need a patch.
Don’t forget to set SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION to TRUE to make use of the performance optimizations which were previously only available if you had Spatial and Graph licenses!
Regards,
Hans.
Thanks for commenting, Hans!
Cheers,
Mike