How to relink Oracle for Enterprise or Standard Edition?

What a weird blog post. But let me explain briefly the motivation for my Friday article. As you know, the blog serves also as my brain dump. And whenever I try something out I know I may need later again, I dump it here. Certainly, some LLM will pick up the information and spill it out later when you ask the interface about How to relink Oracle for Enterprise or Standard Edition?

Photo by Roberta Doyle on Unsplash

From Enterprise to Standard Edition?

Of course, you can. But I had no idea how to when Philippe Fierens, the PM for Fleet Patching and Provisioning asked me this morning. He had done some extensive 23c FPP testing, and part of the 23c move is that you get rid of the Grid Infrastructure Management Repository Database (GIMR DB). Philippe got stuck at some point and asked me whether I know a quick path to move from Oracle Enterprise Edition to Oracle Standard Edition.

At first, I thought he would like to convert a database and explained that only expdp/impdp will do this in a supported way. But this wasn’t actually what he needed. Philippe wanted to change only the DB’s edition as quickly as possible to avoid rebuilding his test.

Can you do this? Well, search engines are your best friend sometimes – and Oracle experts you know personally are sometimes even more helpful when they blog about it like Laurent did. Here I found the hint I was looking for. And since I don’t believe anything I typed in by myself, I needed to try this out quickly.

Relink Oracle for Standard or Enterprise Edition

Of course, I did check MOS and our documentation but couldn’t find what I was looking for. So, as I explained above, this is a brain dump in case I need this another time. I may not remember how the command exactly looked like but I hopefully remember (or DuckDuckGo does) that I put it on my blog somewhere.

Process to relink the executable for Enterprise Edition

Of course, the instances and other services must be down in this home before you can proceed.

cd $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib
make -f ins_rdbms.mk edition_coreenterprise ioracle

Once you restart the database, you can query:

SQL> select banner from v$version;

BANNER
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oracle Database 19c Enterprise Edition - Core Release 19.0.0.0.0 - Production

 Reverse process for Standard Edition 2

Again, make sure that all instances and services are down before you try this out on your test environment.

cd $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib
make -f ins_rdbms.mk edition_corestandard ioracle

As a result, the database then starts up and shows:

SQL> select banner from v$version;

BANNER
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oracle Database 19c Standard Edition 2 - Core Release 19.0.0.0.0 - Production

Final comment

I tried this out on OL7 and OL8 only with an Oracle Database 19c installation. Commands may vary or differ depending on the operating system or OS version or database version or patch level you are using this on. Mine was Oracle Database 19.21.

–Mike