Disclaimer: nothing you’re reading here is real, nor is confirmed by Oracle. Don’t think anything, don’t come to conclusions or take any action before the licensing documents will be updated with new information about this new Edition.
The news has come today (July 3rd, 2015).
After many years of existence, Standard Edition and Standard Edition One will be no longer 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 available (not immediately, at least).
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 read the MOS Note that introduces it here: Oracle Database 12c Standard Edition 2 (12.1.0.2) (Doc ID 2027072.1)
That means a lot of things.
– SE One will no longer exist
– SE is replaced by SE Two that has a limitation of 2 socket
– SE Two will be (maybe) a mix of the two other edition in terms of features
– SE Two will still include the RAC feature
– 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
It’s not known whether SE Two will be cheaper than SE or not, but my guess is that the price may fall everywhere between 10k$ and 25k$ per socket if they keep the per-socket licensing model.
As soon as the new Price List will be available, everything will be clear. But for know, I think that SE and SE One customers have to expect (a lot of) changes in Oracle Licensing.