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Oracle Licensing on Development Environments - What do you use?

GaryMansell
6-Contributor

Oracle Licensing on Development Environments - What do you use?

Hi,

I was wondering what others were doing about Oracle licensing within their Windchill Development environments...

Our Oracle Sales guy says that we have to pay to use Oracle Std Edition One in our DEV VM's which seems wrong to me, the relevant part of the Oracle SE One license is here:

LICENSE RIGHTS

We grant you a nonexclusive, nontransferable limited license to use the programs only for the purpose of developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating your application, and not for any other purpose. If you use the application you develop under this license for any internal data processing or for any commercial or production purposes, or you want to use the programs for any purpose other than as permitted under this agreement, you must obtain a production release version of the program by contacting us or an Oracle reseller to obtain the appropriate license. You acknowledge that we may not produce a production release version of the program and any development efforts undertaken by you are at your own risk. We may audit your use of the programs. Program documentation, if available, may accessed online at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/indexes/documentation/index.html.

The way I read the statement is that you can use a free developer license on a developer machine as long as the installation of Oracle on the developer machine is not used for commercial/production use, which it won’t be as the developer is just using it to write code and he is the only one accessing the Oracle installation on the machine. The code is then copied to our Production server (which does have a paid license) and is used in a commercial/production manner on this system instead.

But it seems our Oracle guy does not agree - what do others do, do you use Oracle XE on your DEV machines with the DB name and size restrictions that come with it?

Rgds

Gary

2 REPLIES 2

I posted similar on PTC/User exploder recently - many comments. Seems to be a very wide spectrum of "interpretations" of the licensing for different companies with Oracle.

Seem that it would be extremely helfpul if someone from PTC would post a standard understanding of this, after reviewing with Oracle. It appears that we may join the large number of companies moving from Oracle to SQL server.

After a month or so of debate with Oracle, I had to bring the licensing department of FAST into the discussions which finally allowed us to clear up the problem and get to a conclusion with Oracle on this matter.

Oracle XE is just not suitable for use in our DEV environment due to the database name limitation, the size of the DB and the fact that we might also want a Cognos DB in the Oracle installation along with the Windchill DB.

Oracle have now agreed that it is OK for me to use the Free of Charge Oracle Developer Standard Edition One license for my DEV environment.

It appears that the confusion was due to the fact that they mistakenly thought that the DEV installation had access to the live PROD data, which it does not.

Here was what I proposed to Oracle; which they finally agreed to:

We would like to use the Free of Charge Oracle Developer Standard Edition license on our DEV machine rather than Oracle Express Edition as we need to be able to control the database name and the 11GB DB size restriction of Oracle Express is likely to be an issue for us.

The DEV instance of Oracle that we would use for our PTC Windchill Application DEV environment would be on a machine that only the Developer has access to – it is in a standalone VM which is only accessible by the developer on the local machine and has no external network access. In addition, the Oracle DB in the DEV System would only have the initial Windchill Application data loaded from the Windchill installation CD’s in it – it would have no live Production Data stored in it. We might create some dummy data or import a tiny subset of some old Production data for Development testing purposes (if necessary) but the DEV system would have no access to the live Production database data nor have a copy of it as it is many 100’s of GB’s in size.

Once some application code is finished on the DEV machine it is copied to the TEST System (which has a paid Oracle Std Edn One license) and has a complete, but out of date copy, of the Production System’s Oracle DB. The code is then tested here before being deployed to PROD if it tests out OK where it is used by the end users on our live Production System.

I hope this helps others.

Rgds

Gary

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