The reason to keep your support contract on obsolete and no longer supported
versions of Oracle is that Oracle support will still provide you assistance as
long as you have a contract. So if you hit an issue you can open an SR and if
support can identify a known issue that has a patch you get the patch or
workaround from the support article. And as long as you maintain your support
contract you qualify to upgrade when management finally determines that "we are
not going to scrap this system so what do we need to keep it running" and you
jump from say version 8.1 to 11.2.
Mark Powell
Database Administration
(313) 592-5148
________________________________
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf
of Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2017 12:37:28 AM
To: tim.evdbt@xxxxxxxxx; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: About restore from 11g
Hi Tim,
We're not talking about licensing, we're talking about support charges.
And they cannot charge for something they don't provide: support for
11.2.0.3 instance. It is possible to cancel support contract and no
longer pay for support. The CSI# gets invalid and there is no support
for the installed software. No more bug fixes or technical support
requests. The license is still valid. However, with 11.2.0.3 instance,
it is no longer possible to get support without a special contract. So
why should the 11.2.0.3 customer pay for support, especially if there is
no intention to upgrade to a supported version? You are getting all
worked up about a wrong thing: support is not the same as license. I can
buy an Oracle license, without support. Annual support cost is typically
22% of the license cost. Your statement is valid for Oracle license, but
not for support. License cost is usually negotiated based on capacity,
although there are exceptions. Support cost is ALWAYS negotiated as a
percentage of the licensing cost, no exceptions.
It is also possible to decrease the capacity use of Oracle and say that
the company will no longer use Oracle on X CPU cores but will use it on
Y CPU cores, where X > Y. That, as a matter of fact, happens quite
frequently, with companies moving data warehouse type databases to SQL
Server or SAP Hana. It usually causes a hostile license audit by Oracle
Corp. but the frequency of those is dropping rapidly, as the competition
increases. Those hostile audits did not make many friends to Oracle
Corp. and the victims are quite likely to switch to another RDBMS.
Somebody at Oracle Corp. has finally seen the light and they are no
longer doing those audits with the same vigour and regularity, as the
time of general availability of SQL Server 2016 on Linux is drawing
nearer. And a little birdie told me that AWS support will be available
right from the start. There is also a bad news on the application front:
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-SAP-generally-selected-over-Oracle-in-ERP
Do you know that SAP also works on SQL Server? Quite frankly, I will buy
you a meal in New York City, in the restaurant of your choice (up to
$150 per person, to keep it within reason) if the prices of Oracle do
not come down significantly in the next 2-3 years, with much more free
stuff, like partitioning and advanced compression being included free of
charge. You can remind me of this promise on 05/01/2020. Alternatively,
I come to Denver at least once per year, the same offer applies.
Regards
On 04/26/2017 10:05 PM, Tim Gorman wrote:
Oracle doesn't charge for what is actually used; they charge for how
much capacity is available.
...just the messenger here...
On 4/26/17 19:30, Mladen Gogala wrote:
On 04/26/2017 08:39 PM, Tim Gorman wrote:
Err, I don't think that is how support works... :)
Hmmm, I doubt that they can charge you for support of an unsupported
version. Charging for service that is not provided is allegedly
illegal, so I've been told. And the statement that the version
11.2.0.3 is unsupported means that Oracle Corp. will not provide
support for it. Consequently, they cannot charge for support, for
11.2.0.3 instance.
