I found this article:
https://jhdba.wordpress.com/2014/08/06/preventing-standby-databases-opening-in-active-dataguard-mode-chopt/
The summary is that you did not make the change intentionally. Oracle did it
without your asking, without your knowledge, and without warning you that it
had made a change that would cause you to incur additional licensing charges.
Iggy
Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2016 08:26:29 -0800
Subject: Re: Accidental Use of Oracle Active Data Guard
From: napacunningham@xxxxxxxxx
To: John.Hallas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
CC: dimensional.dba@xxxxxxxxxxx; andrew.kerber@xxxxxxxxx; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Just wanted to reply with a Thank You to all. I appreciate all the great advice.
I know I shouldn't take it personal, but it really does irritate me that Oracle
seems to take the position of criminalizing their customer first. I really do
try my best to stay within compliance as it is the responsible and respectable
thing to do, but the respect sure does feel one sided when dealing with
licensing. I'm just hoping that working with Oracle we can resolve this.
Thanks again,Michael
On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 11:00 PM, John Hallas <John.Hallas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
What an excellent response Matthew. This is really helpful information for
anyone responsible for ensuring that license compliance is adhered to.Thanks
for taking the time to write it up and post to the list. John
www.jhdba.wordpress.com From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Dimensional DBA
Sent: 09 February 2016 02:04
To: napacunningham@xxxxxxxxx; 'Andrew Kerber'
Cc: 'oracle-l@freelists org'
Subject: RE: Accidental Use of Oracle Active Data Guard Don’t answer this
question to the list, but you need to think about why is a licenses audit being
performed? Normally a license audit is only performed when it is believed you
are in violation your licenses, such as turning on the OEM push back of data to
Oracle Support for your databases, uploading files you provided during a recent
SR, Talking to Oracle sales folks about what you are doing in your company
including using products that they know are unlicensed, your company is in
negotiation to reduce licensing cost or there is some other negotiation going
on. For you, it would have been helpful to ask for the list’s support the
moment your company was given notice that Oracle was demanding a license audit.
We could have helped you in advance and eliminated the foreboding you are
feeling . For now, you need to take a moment and breathe. Once a license audit
has started things are out of your hands and normally in the hands of Chief
Legal Counsel and the CFO (sometimes the CIO) of your company. Having done
licenses audits when I worked for Oracle Consulting, companies I have worked
for (second thing I do normally starting with a company) and now in my own
consultancy, what is being looked for normally relates back to that question up
above. It really depends on the skill of the Oracle consulting person sent as
to what breadth your audit will take as there is no training course in Oracle
Consulting on how to do a license audit and there is nothing in the contract
that determines how a license audit will be performed from a technical basis.
Some pointers during the license audit1. Your technical personnel should
not be talking to the auditor, including not going to lunch with them. Only a
management level person normally part of the Legal or Finance team if not the
Chief Legal Counsel or the CFO themselves, who will relate to the technical
team what is needed from them for the audit to be performed.
2. Your team should only provide Oracle what is required. You do not have
to fulfill all requests from Oracle as they normally overreach in their
requests. Your upper management will help with that decision.
3. They should not have to have direct access to your servers if you
provide a person to run the commands. Normally technical person is accompanied
by lower management level person to ensure the conversation is only run this
command and put output here, instead of the broader questions Oracle Consulting
will want to ask.
You can send me a private email and I can provide you with a list of things to
check for in unconventional places to verify license compliance. As to your
question of defense, having worked for a variety of Chief Legal Counsels, some
of who were previous prosecutors, you again need to breathe. The defense can
be impeded by the answer to the first question, but if your license snafu is a
single database server and a human has made a mistake, the defense is simple
and your Chief Legal Counsel will deal with it.If this is one of a variety of
license violations then the defense gets more complicated, versus it is single
error committed on a single server or across the whole fleet. Single error type
versus multiple error types. I have worked with Oracle Sales on a variety of
license issues, but normally I am telling them when an issue occurred instead
of them finding something in a licenses audit. There are a variety of things
that you can do to help your Chief Legal Counsel which includes gathering up
your logging information listener.logs and alert.logs on your databases before
they roll off and interpreting the data for them. Some examples of license
violations I have encountered.1. Those new server replacements had twice
the cores as the previous servers and the DBA team and management was oblivious
to that when the upgrades were done. This basically was a 32 core addition that
including EE Edition, RAC, Partitioning, ASO, Management packs etc. It took a
couple of weeks to get back into license compliance.
2. A standby or primary server crashed and another server was pressed
into service to maintain HA and the other server actually had a higher core
count than the previous server.
3. Databases were flipped off of servers to new servers and the previous
servers were never deprecated or used again, but the Oracle SW was still
installed.
4. A set of test servers utilized production licensing for testing, then
when the production servers were built, someone forgot to turn off the servers
with still running databases in test.
5. A UNIX/Linux admin mistakenly put the deployment line in Chef/Puppet
code and deployed Oracle SW to the fleet left there until I did a license audit.
6. A UNIX/Linux admin moved multiple physical servers to a VM Ware
servers and spread the databases across the entire physical server fleet, which
took 2 months to shuffle things around and condense the Oracle part of the
fleet onto a smaller number of physical VM Ware hosts.
Matthew ParkerChief TechnologistDimensional DBA425-891-7934 (cell)D&B
047931344CAGE 7J5S7Dimensional.dba@comcast.netView Matthew Parker's profile on
LinkedIn From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Michael Cunningham
Sent: Monday, February 08, 2016 5:01 PM
To: Andrew Kerber
Cc: oracle-l@freelists org
Subject: Re: Accidental Use of Oracle Active Data Guard Thanks Andrew.
On Feb 8, 2016 4:42 PM, "Andrew Kerber" <andrew.kerber@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:Contact
house of brick technologies. They have done quite a bit of work with oracle
audit defense.
Sent from my iPad
On Feb 8, 2016, at 5:37 PM, Michael Cunningham <napacunningham@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:Hello all, we have an Oracle audit going on and we are being told we are
going to get charged for using Active Data Guard. Has anyone been successful in
working with Oracle to have them realize these were unintentional and not
deliberate? Technically the feature was enabled, but it was by accident and
incorrect configuration of srvctl. As it happens, we had one standby database
configured with db_startoption=open, and the other standby database with
db_startoption=read only. The first was as a result of requiring a "failover"
to physical standby and we missed setting the db_startoption=mount when we
rebuilt the standby on the server that used to be primary. Each of the problems
have been corrected, but Oracle is working on a bill and I'm looking for some
advice from the group. -- Michael Cunningham
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