The first voices came on July 3rd, 2015.

After many years of existence, Standard Edition and Standard Edition One will no longer be part of the Oracle Database Edition portfolio.

The short history

Standard Edition has been for longtime the “stepbrother” of Enterprise Edition, with less features, no options, but cheaper than EE. I can’t remember when SE has been released. It was before 2000s, I guess.

In 2003, Oracle released 10gR1. Many new features as been released for EE only, but:

– RAC as been included as part of Standard Edition

– Standard Edition One has been released, with an even lower price and “almost” the same features of Standard Edition.

For a few years, customers had the possibility to get huge savings (but many compromises) by choosing the cheaper editions.

SE ONE: just two sockets, but with today’s 18-core processors, the possibility to run Oracle on 36 cores (or more?) for less than 12k of licenses.

SE: up to four sockets and the possibility to run on either 72 core servers or RAC composed by a total of 72 cores (max 4 nodes) for less than the price of a 4-core Enterprise Edition deployement.

In 2014, for the first time, Oracle released a new Database version (12.1.0.2) where  Standard Edition and SE One were not immediately available.

For months, customers asked: “When will the Oracle 12.1.0.2 SE be available?”

Now the big announcement: SE and SE One will no longer exist. With 12.1.0.2, there’s a new Edition: Oracle Database Standard Edition 2.

You can find more information here:

• Oracle Database 12c Standard Edition 2 (12.1.0.2) (Doc ID 2027072.1)
• Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 Standard Edition (SE2) available for download
• Database Licensing
• Oracle Technology Global Price List

Some highlights

– SE One will no longer exist

– SE is replaced by SE Two that has a limitation of 2 sockets

– SE Two still has RAC feature, with a maximum of two single-socket servers.

– Customers with SE on 4 socket nodes (or clusters) will need to migrate to 2 socket nodes (or clusters)

– Customers with SE One should definitely be prepared to spend some money to upgrade to SE Two, which comes at the same price of the old Standard Edition. ($17,500 per socket).

– the smallest amount of NUP licenses when licensing per named users has been increased to 10 (it was 5 with SE and SE One).

– Each SE2 Database can run max 16 user threads (in RAC, max 8 per instance). This is limited by the database Resource Manager. It does not prevent customers from using all the cores, in case they want to deploy many databases per server.

So, finally, less scalability for the same pricetag.

Other bloggers have already written about the behaviour of SE2. The best blog post is IMO from Franck Pachot. http://blog.dbi-services.com/oracle-standard-edition-two/

Cheers

—

Ludo

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Ludovico

Principal Product Manager at Oracle

Ludovico is a member of the Oracle Database High Availability (HA), Scalability & Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) Product Management team in Oracle. He focuses on Oracle Data Guard, Flashback technologies, and Cloud MAA.

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