Oracle have announced the general availability of Standard Edition High Availability (SEHA) on Linux, Microsoft Windows and Solaris with Oracle Database 19c, Release Update (RU) 19.7.

It benefits from the cluster capabilities and storage solutions that are already part of Oracle Grid Infrastructure, such as Oracle Clusterware, Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM) and Oracle ASM Cluster File System (Oracle ACFS). RAC is NOT included in 19c SE2.

RAC

If you are using RAC in a standard edition variant and want to upgrade to 19c or beyond then you must either upgrade to enterprise edition (EE), convert to a single instance or move to the Oracle cloud.

Oracle SE2 license

Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 has been the cost-effective production use data base product for Oracle and superseded the previous SE and SE One editions in 2015. Here is an excerpt from the SE2 licensing as an overview of the requirements:

“Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 may only be licensed on servers that have a maximum capacity of 2 sockets. When used with Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 may only be licensed on a maximum of 2 one-socket servers. In addition, notwithstanding any provision in Your Oracle license agreement to the contrary, each Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 database may use a maximum of 16 CPU threads at any time. When used with Oracle Real Application Clusters, each Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 database may use a maximum of 8 CPU threads per instance at any time. The minimums when licensing by Named User Plus (NUP) metric are 10 NUP licenses per server.”

Overview of SE2

• Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 (SE2) replaced SE and SE1 from version 12.1.0.2
• SE2 has a limitation of maximum 2 socket systems and a total of 16 CPU threads – cores are not counted toward the license.
• SE2 is hard coded in Resource Manager to use no more than 16 CPU threads.
• RAC was included with SE2 in 12c and 18c but is restricted to 2 sockets across the cluster. Therefore, each Server must be single socket. One socket occupied in a two-socket server for RAC is not recognized!
• SE One and SE were no longer available to purchase from 10th November 2015.
• If you need to purchase additional DB SE and SE One Licenses you must purchase SE2 instead.
• Oracle is offering a free license migration from SE One* and SE to SE2.
• *SE One customers will have to pay a 20% increase in support as part of the migration.
• SE customers face no other cost increases for license or support, subject to Named User minimums being met.
• Named user minimums for SE2 are now 10 per server
• All the usual warnings about Oracle and VMware still exist.
• 12.1.0.1 was the last SE and SE1 release
• If SE1, SE or SE2 licenses are to be deployed in the Oracle Cloud 1 Processor license is equal to 4 OCPU.