Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 - FAQ

Yes. In late 2019 Oracle announced that Oracle Spatial and Graph and Oracle Machine Learning would become part of the core offering of the Oracle Database 19c. Oracle Database SE2 users can now use all of the functionality that these previous Enterprise Edition Options only options provide.

Yes. Oracle Multitenant Architecture is Oracle's strategic architecture. We recommend all users leverage this model to benefit from the rich functionality it offers. From Oracle Database 21c onward, Oracle Multitenant architecture (also known as Container Database (CDB) architecture) is the only supported Oracle Database architecture. See the Oracle Database Licensing Information User Manual for details on Oracle Multitenant's terms of use.

From version 19c onwards, users of Oracle Database Standard Edition can no longer use Oracle Real Application Clusters.

However since most users of Oracle Real Application Clusters and Standard Edition used it to provide protection from failure of a server rather than for the scalability of database, Oracle is replacing it with Standard Edition High Availability. This solution provides cluster-based failover for Standard Edition Oracle Databases using Oracle Clusterware. Oracleʼs Oracle Database SE2 (SE2) customers thereby benefit from the high availability capabilities and storage management solutions that are already part of Oracle Grid Infrastructure, such as Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) and the Oracle ASM Cluster File System (ACFS), free of charge.

Investment Protection: You can choose to stay with SE or SE1, and Oracle will continue to offer support as per our support policies as follows:

• SE1 and SE for 11.2.0.4 are in extended support, which includes patching, through the end of DEC2020. Extended Support fees are waived from Jan-2015 to 31-May-2017
• SE1 and SE for 12.1.0.1 are in premier support, which includes patching, through the end of AUG2016. Sustaining support is then available indefinitely. Zero-Cost License Migration from SE and SE1: SE and SE1 customers can choose to upgrade to Oracle Database SE2 without incurring any additional license cost.

A small percentage of the install base uses Oracle Database Standard Edition with 4 socket systems. The most common configuration is 2-socket. For the small percent of customers that do run SE on 4 sockets systems, the following options are available:

• Continue to stay with Oracle Database Standard Edition on version 12.1.0.1 and below for their existing licenses and Oracle will continue to support it as per support policies.
• Consider an upgrade to Oracle Enterprise Edition or Oracle Database Cloud Service.
• Switch to a new 2-socket server (likely offering more processing capacity).

Yes, Oracle Database SE2 can be licensed on a single processor of a 2 socket server provided the server is hard partition (using any of the approved hard partitioning technologies; see the Partitioning Document here) such that Oracle program is not installed and/or running on the 2nd socket.

No, Oracle Database SE2 may only be licensed on servers that have a maximum capacity of 2 sockets.

Yes. You may run as many Oracle Database SE2 databases on a server as it can support.

Yes. For more details, visit the Upgrade from Oracle Database Standard Edition to Oracle Autonomous Database page.