We had to do an Oracle license audit and provide the results to Oracle a
few months ago. They specified what query they wanted us to run, so no
problem there. Management has decreed that we do quarterly license audits
now. We incorporated the query into the audit, but questions have come up
about the results. Seems there were multiple rows for the same feature
with different values for CURRENTLY_USED, FIRST_USAGE_DATE, and
LAST_USAGE_DATE. I was pulled into this only yesterday and knew nothing of
how they were querying the database for component usage until then.
Query used:
SELECT
name c1,
currently_used c4,
TO_CHAR(first_usage_date,'yyyy-mm-dd') c3,
TO_CHAR(last_usage_date,'yyyy-mm-dd') c5,
detected_usages c2,
replace(feature_info,chr(10),' ') c6
FROM dba_feature_usage_statistics
WHERE first_usage_date IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY last_usage_date desc, name;
I did a little research and testing on the dba_feature_usage_statistics
view and saw that the multiple rows tied nicely to the dates we upgraded.
I suggested adding VERSION to the query and ordering by name and version
for better readability. This helped but the next questions were why are
there multiple rows and do we have to look at all of them for an audit?
That's where I need a little help. I did some more research, but can find
nothing as to when the rows are inserted. I know there is a job that runs
every 7 days to update and verified it is running successfully. So now to
my questions.
1. Are rows inserted into wri$_dbu_feature_usage when the database is
created and/or another feature is activated or at some other time?
2. Do we need to consider the rows for previous releases when doing our
audits or select only the rows for our current version?
3. Do we consider all features or only those that have a value of TRUE
for currently_used?
I appreciate any guidance you can give me. A link to another source for
clarification/information would be helpful, if possible.
Thank you,
--
Sandy B.
