Introduction
At the peak there were an estimated 65 million landmines planted in killing fields world wide. In the 1990’s it was estimated that while 2.5 million landmines were being deployed per year only 80,000 were being removed. According to current estimates this may have turned around in recent years with more being removed than have been deployed per year. Of course with 250 million of the nasty devices stockpiled in arsenals around the world we have a long way to go to rid the world of landmines that usually end up killing and maiming more innocents than enemies. (All of these statistics taken from the “
Landmine Monitor Report 1999 - Toward a Mine-Free World”,
http://www.icbl.org/lm/1999/english/exec/.)
Now you may be asking, what in the world does this have to do with Oracle? It seems we have some landmines of our own inside Oracle, what I call license landmines. When you install Oracle using the Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) these insidious features are automatically installed and turned on, just waiting for an innocent DBA to trip them, resulting in license fee explosions that could maim or cripple the budget.
Identifying License Landmines
So, what are these license landmines? Here is a list of their top level names:
- Data Masking Pack
- Provisioning Pack
- Database Change Management Pack
- Database Configuration Management Pack
- Database Diagnostics Pack
- Database Tuning Pack
When you install Grid or Database control you get one quick warning about these (much like the EULA documents we all read when installing software) and then nothing else even if you trigger one of them. Of course internally Oracle monitors usage of licensed features and logs whenever a licensable feature is used. Then, at your most vulnerable point, when you are filing an SR for a problem and send off a RDA report to support, the RDA report has a section on used features for Oracle to use against you.
Disarming License Landmines
However, at least in Grid and Database control it is easy to disarm these license landmines. In release 4 of Grid Control you use the Setup Menu – Management Pack Access option to turn on, or off, any of the management packs for all monitored targets. In the Management Packs Access page you will un-select the packs you do not have a license for and check those you are allowed to use. Now, if you don’t have release 4 of Grid Control, Oracle has provided a way to turn off AWR (no mention of the other packs) with the dbmsnoawr.plb download from Metalink. Once you have the download, you simply do the following to disable AWR:
SQL> @dbms_awr.plb
To execute the package use the command:
SQL> begin dbms_awr.disable_awr(); end;
What Will This Do To My Grid Control?
Now, what exactly happens when you turn off the various packs? Let’s take a quick look at just the top level items that are controlled by various packs.
Data Masking Pack
When the Data Masking Pack is deselected you will lose the following items from the Administration Page from the Database Control area of Grid Control under the Data Masking header:
- Definitions
- Format Library
Provisioning Pack
When just the Provisioning Pack is deselected you will lose the following item from the Maintenance Page from the Database Control area of Grid Control under the Move Database File Header:
However, the Clone Database option from the Deployments screen is still available.
Database Change Management Pack
When the Database Change Management Pack is deselected you will lose the following items from the Administration Page from the Database Control area of Grid Control under the Configuration Management header:
- Dictionary Baselines
- Dictionary Comparisons
Database Configuration Management Pack
When the Database Configuration Management Pack is deselected you will lose the following item from the Maintenance Page from the Database Control area of Grid Control under the Software Deployment-Configuration header:
Database Diagnostics Pack
From the DBA point of view the most damaging pack to not have a license for is the Database Diagnostics Pack. Without this pack the entire Performance page of Grid and Database control is lost for the monitored databases. In addition to losing the entire Performance page, from the Home page (and all others) you also lose the following links:
- User Defined Metrics
- Alert History
- Blackouts
- Metric Baselines
From the Advisor Central page you lose:
Database Tuning Pack
The Database Tuning Pack, when disabled, disables the following Advisor Central links:
- SQL Access Advisor
- SQL Tuning Advisor
For a more complete list of the features in each pack have a look at:
What Now?
Well, first let me retract what I have been saying in some of my presentations (that it may be okay to use strictly the features provided in OEM at the basic level), given my findings during research for this blog I would have to say that the only way to not be responsible for possible license charges regarding these License Landmines is to not use any of their dependent features. I say this because of the fact that when you disable the license pack, the dependent features are also totally disabled in Grid and Database control.
So, if you are like most folks, you probably don’t know what you may have been given or licensed from Oracle when you purchased your database software. I suggest a detailed read of the purchase contract including the fine print, then use the Grid Control (in version 4) to turn off the packs for which you don’t have licenses. If Oracle finds you in violation of license terms, at a minimum they will charge you around $3000/CPU/Host/ Pack for every instance host where the packs have been used. They will also assume all of them monitored by Grid Control have had the executed packs run against them.
Please don’t be responsible for causing a budget maiming, disable those Oracle License Landmines today!