OK, it’s a little cheeky to use the blog for this when there are so many forums I could post this on and friends I could ask. What can I say? I have a lot of respect for the people who congregate around here, so ….
Does anyone have much experience of migrating their databases from Enterprise Edition to one of the cheaper editions, such as Standard? Did you find it an easy experience or not? Are there any unexpected issues you encountered?
There’s no substitute for prior experience here, so feel free to share yours and I’ll be grateful
I can’t speak about this authoritatively, but am I correct in assuming that you’re talking about the Enterprise Edition with Partitioning as the starting point?
Yes, without Partitioning. We have some with paritioning, but it’s the ones without we’d be looking at downgrading.
Now that some people who know what they are talking about have weighed in (Howard and others), let me throw in my one cent.
My employer deploys products to customer sites that use the Oracle database. For our first installations, we played it safe and deployed Enterprise Edition with Partitioning. As time went on, we began deploying sites with Enterprise Edition without Partitioning, Standard Edition, and even Standard Edition One.
To date, however, we have not converted any of our existing customers from one edition to another. Before we did such a thing, we’d need to know if the work involved in the transfer would exceed the delta in the license costs. (“If it ain’t broke, don’t break it” may apply here.)
Providing you are not using “EE only” features or those premium ones that you can only buy on top of EE (such as partitioning 🙁 ) and that you are within the four socket per machine or cluster limit (or else you need a EE license) down sizing could be an option. If features are an issue it might be worth upgrading the version – newer technologies sometimes cascade down the version tree on subsequent releases.
But of course, I have no real experience in downsizing – most of the people I deal with have the need for partitions PX and all the bells and whistles
I just downgraded 9 Windows 64-bit databases that had been created as EE databases even though the client had only purchased SE licenses… in the belief that if they didn’t use the EE features, they were in the clear (they wouldn’t have been, even if they really hadn’t used EE features, obviously!!).
Of course, it turned out that they HAD used EE features (external authentication of roles and bitmap indexes spring to mind), but they hadn’t used them too widely, thankfully.
I’m not sure it was the best way to do it, but since we also had issues with upgrading databases that had originally been created back in version 8 days, I took the view that the simplest thing to do was: fresh SE install on fresh OS, create new template database, import a full=y export from the EE databases, inspect import log for expected errors (“create bitmap index… feature not enabled” etc) and ignore, make sure no unexpected errors were listed, declare things a success.
We were lucky: the databases were only 40GB or so each, so import/export was a viable option, with only a couple of hours’ downtime each, which was acceptable to the business.
Had the EE features been more liberally employed or had the databases been much larger than they were… we’d have been in difficulty and life would have been a lot harder.
As it is, we were able just to shrug at the lost half dozen indexes and the role issue was equally ignorable.
Thanks Howard, that’s exactly the sort of experience I was looking for. Like Pete, I’ve never had to do this because I’ve been spoilt rotten with Enterprise Edition most of the time.
While upgrading is supported, downgrading is not (139642.1) but, yeah… it’s not the question here ! Your question could be : Do you like SE and SE1 (on 2 quad-core processors) ?
I really like SE1. I love RAC SE. I love EE. I can’t live without Diagnostic Pack and Partitioning. I’m happy I’m not the one to pay for the license. I don’t like 9i anymore. I wish Oracle can get more money for its database and make its products even better faster; I miss so many features. I like your blog. I like you.
I like your blog.
I just checked your blog properly for the first time. I like it a lot but I’m exhausted. A blogging machine!
Arrgghh! Sorry. I was on about the Ontario Emperor’s blog. Blame it on the jet-lag 😉
Thanks for the Metalink references. I must admit I was lazy on this occasion. One of the managers arrived at my desk as I was leaving and asked if I’d ever downgraded. I haven’t, but told him I’d run it by some others. Cheers
Yep export/import is the only way…and a nice clean oracle home directory. Watch out for the archive dest restrictions. SE One with a couple dual or quad cpu’s is the way to go!
Just to add – no point downgrading if the hw is *capable* of more than 2 cpus – its an EE box regardless of whats installed. Arg!
Can you explain that one. As far as licenses go, I thought it was about the flavor and sockets / named users
It is not easy getting your head around Oracle licences, and sometimes things change (or I think they do, but can never quite remember)
But for clarity, from the latest price list:
SE-1 single machine 2 sockets maximum
SE maximum of four sockets in either one machine or as a cluster
Multi-core CPU are counted on the number of occupied sockets – so a quad on a single package counts as one.
Enterprise licenses for all bigger machines.
So the machine sockets controls the minimum license required – it’s down to commercial sense whether named user or processor licensing is best for you. Oh, and EE processor licenses use core multipliers and not socket count..
That clarifies.
I agree. Oracle licenses have been never been easy to determine (most of the times, Oracle doesn’t know for sure either). IMHO it has been fuzzy for decades.
Never thought about the other way around.
I did it once, a long time ago. I double checked all the differences and if they were used or not. Have a view at the extensive list on Metalink Note:271886.1
(https://metalink.oracle.com/metalink/plsql/f?p=130:14:7460087652851496253::::p14_database_id,p14_docid,p14_show_header,p14_show_help,p14_black_frame,p14_font:NOT,271886.1,1,1,1,helvetica)
Double checked again. Then I checked all the dependencies regarding stuff that is interfacing (dblink, sql*net, web interfacing, apps, etc, etc) with the database. Created a skeleton database; tweaked it (this is the chance to do it over again and hopefully better); then I used full exp and imp to get the data across.
I remember working on a EE to SE migration project which was cancelled because of the backup/recovery restrictions in Oracle SE. In our case, critical show stoppers were its lack of tablespace point in time recovery and lack of parallel backup/recovery features.
Anyway, as Marco pointed out, MetaLink 271886.1 is a very valuable resource for double checking the limitations of Oracle SE.
Hi, all.
these are steps I did:
– Install the 10g SE on a test server;
– Export from owner on the production EE.
– Import to the SE on the test server.
until now, everything’s fine, but i’m still checking.
Assis
from Portugal