You probably already know that
Oracle includes the Standard Edition (SE) of their database as part of JDE E1
licenses. Currently, Oracle SE allows customers to use four CPU sockets and
unlimited cores. Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) is free with SE as long
as you don’t have more than four sockets in the cluster. While SE does not have
many of the advanced features that Enterprise Edition (EE) has, most JDE E1
clients find that it’s more than sufficient to power their enterprise.
This changes in December when
the latest Oracle 12.1.0.2 patch is released. Oracle SE is being replaced by a
new product called Standard Edition 2 (SE2), and with it comes many important
differences. The biggest is that SE2 will be limited to two sockets and 16 CPU
threads (cores). Oracle RAC is still available, but you cannot exceed the total
number of sockets or cores. That means a two-node RAC on SE2 can have 1 CPU
socket and 8 cores per node. Existing installations of 12c SE will go on free
extended support until Dec 2016 (all versions of 11g go off support completely
in January).
Despite this major change, using
the included Oracle 12c SE2 for your JDE E1 database is still far cheaper than
any other alternative for a standalone DB server. Many clients don’t use more
16 cores on their databases, so this will probably not affect the majority of
JDE E1 installations.
That’s not to say that nobody
uses more than 16 cores. In those cases, upgrading existing databases to
12.1.0.2 will require clients to change their configuration to match the new
licensing requirements. If you’re not ready to downgrade your specs, another
option is to remain on the current 12c Standard Edition indefinitely. Support
may end in December 2016, but you can still keep using the database.
If you have too much activity to
scale back the number of CPUs, consider splitting the database in two. E1
allows you to move any part of your data to any database and have it all be
transparent to the application. Simply add a new Oracle SE2 database, then move
some of the data over to that new database. You could, for example, put all the
system databases (system, server map, object librarian, data dictionary) on the
new database server and leave production data on the original machine.
The last Oracle option is the
most expensive but is also the most flexible. Oracle Enterprise Edition (EE)
allows unlimited sockets and cores, plus you have access to all the advanced
features available for the Oracle database. If you’re already on EE then all
this talk about changes to SE doesn’t concern you at all.
References
Oracle database edition
comparison
Oracle SE2 product page
Oracle Lifetime Support Policy
