Oracle licenses, understand jargon to avoid confusion

The wide variety of licenses, the complex and confusing rules and conditions becomes clear to Oracle users very soon. For those who are unexperienced with Oracle, the different Oracle terms can be challenging to them. As with other software companies, Oracle’s world has its own language that differs from industry standard in a number of important respects. Very useful to know before reading an Oracle licensing guide. Understanding these terms is an important first step in gaining a better understanding of licensing knowledge and your partnership with Oracle. 

Term 1: ‘partitioning’’

This term is often used during Oracle related discussions. Partitioning van mean two very different things.

• Partitioning is the name of a licensable option on the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition that help customers to break a large database in to smaller pieces. In this context, reference is made to a specific product.
• Partitioning could also be used as a term of segmenting a physical server into multiple section. Each section will act as a separate system. Oracle has qualified a number of technologies as hard partitioning. In this category, Oracle allows to segment a server, and this allows to reduce licensing costs. Another category is soft partitioning, and this is forbidden to license only a part of the physical server. 

Term 2: ‘’capped’’ and ‘’uncapped’’

The terms capped and uncapped are sometimes used informally to refer to hard and soft partitioning. However, the confusion lurks at IBM LPAR technology. This is one of the methods that Oracle qualified as hard partitioning. When it comes to Oracle licenses, LPAR is a valid hard partitioning technology, regardless of whether the LPAR’s mode is capped or uncapped. So an uncapped LPAR is still hard partitioning.

Term 3: ‘’multiplexing’’

The term multiplexing is often used by Oracle. Especially within the Named User Plus Licensed metric definition, the term is not very standard. The result: customers are often confused as to what it really means.

Oracle uses multiplexing in the scenario where there is a technology layer between the database and the front end that masks some or all of the users entering data into the database. TP monitors or web servers are common examples that Oracle provides. In a multiplexing scenario, front-end users enter data that should not be ‘’seen’’ by the database. Oracle wants to make clear that all users must be licensed, regardless of which user accounts are logged in the database.

Term 4: ‘’Batching’’

The last term we know off that Oracle uses, is batching. It refers to the one-time transfer of large amounts of data from one computer to another. While the description of computer to computer leaves room for interpretation, Oracle considers a batch to be a transfer from one specific relational database to another.