Re: Oracle-Users

  • From: "Mark Brinsmead" <pythianbrinsmead@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: dannorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:40:28 -0700

>
> While Oracle does need to be licensed for development, it is relatively
> common practice for companies to use named-user based licensing in
> non-production environments as that is often much less expensive than the
> CPU-based license model.
>
>
"Much" less expensive?  Only for the Standard Editions.  For Enterprise
Edition, there is a minimum of 25 named users per CPU.  Since each Named
User costs about 1/50 of a CPU license, the *minmum* cost for Named User
licenses (on Enterprise Edition) is 50% of the cost for CPU licenses.

It is probably more fair to say "somewhat cheaper".  :-)

Because it can be so difficult to monitor (and *prove*) compliance with
Named User licenses, I know of more than a few sites that choose to
sacrifice the "savings" offered by Named User licensing in favour of the
relative safety and certainty offered by CPU licensing.  CPUs after all are
(usually) easier to count than Named Users.  More importantly, the counts
are much harder to dispute with CPUs.

Unless you run Standard Edition, that is.  ;-)
**

-- 
Cheers,
-- Mark Brinsmead
  Senior DBA,
  The Pythian Group
  http://www.pythian.com/blogs

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