Oracle licensing

Oracle Licensing
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This may not be a complete information but my small brain able to capture this much of information. As a System Administrator or Oracle DBA one should know about this details so posting on blog.

You pay per Processor you run the Oracle software on; however Oracle has a special definition of Processor which is consistent with Intel, AMD, HP and IBM but does not match Sun's one.

Intel Hyper-threading technology that makes one core look like two counts as 1 processor for this purpose. Other soft partitioning technologies are treated differently; for example, the Solaris OS has a concept of Containers, this is similar to hard partitioning on an HP machine; however Oracle does not recognize software partitioning with Solaris Containers prior to Solaris 10; and even then there are stipulations. Hard partitioning methods such as Sun's Domains, IBM's Logical partitioning are recognized as legitimate methods to limit the amount of resources that can run the Oracle software.

Multi-core processors are priced as (number of cores)*(multi-core factor) processors, where the multi-core factor is:

0.25 for SUN's UltraSPARC T1 processors (1.0 GHz or 1.2 GHz)
0.50 for other SUN's UltraSPARC T1 processors (e.g. 1.4 GHz)
0.50 for Intel and AMD processors
0.75 for SUN's UltraSPARC T2 processors
0.75 for all other multi-core processors
1.00 for single-core processors 

The complete factor table can be found at -

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core-factor-table-070634.pdf

For example, a SUN UltraSparc T1 system with 4 x eight-core processors will require 4*8*0.25 = 8 licenses. This is just an example. Sun UltraSparc T1 and T2 are not SMP capable, only Sun UltraSparc T2+ is SMP capable. Similarly, an IBM AIX system with 4 x eight-core processors will require 4*8*0.75 = 24 licenses.

For more details - http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/databaselicensing.pdf

License detection under Oracle 

Number of users and CPU/Processors:

SQL>select * from v$license; 

Database edition installed:

SQL>select banner from v$version where BANNER like '%Edition%'; 

Oracle Partitioning installed:

SQL>select decode(count(*), 0, 'No', 'Yes')
from dba_part_tables
where owner not in ('SYSMAN', 'SH', 'SYS', 'SYSTEM') and rownum = 1;

Oracle Spatial installed:

SQL>select decode(count(*), 0, 'No', 'Yes')
from all_sdo_geom_metadata where rownum = 1;

Oracle RAC installed:

SQL>select decode(count(*), 0, 'No', 'Yes')
from v$active_instances where rownum <= 2;