31/03/2017 ThinkingaboutdowngradingfromOracleEnterprisetoStandardEdition?

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Thinking about downgrading from Oracle Enterprise

Standard Edition?
By Franck Pachot September 16, 2014 Database management No Comments

You are using an Oracle Enterprise Edition and thinking about downgrading to the Standard Edition? In this case,
you must be sure that your applications are compatible. Its not something easy to check. Here are a few ideas.

Why?
Why do you want to downgrade to the Standard Edition? For licensing costs, of course. Today, it is difficult to find
a server with only a few cores. And Oracle Enterprise Edition is licenced per number of cores which are
physically in the machine. You change your hardware and you will find that you cannot have a machine with the
same number of cores. Even if the performance is fine, you will need to buy more software licenses because of
those new multicore processors.

Another reason is virtualization. You want to consolidate your servers, but you dont want to pay database
software licenses for all your datacenter capacity.

So the Standard Edition is a good alternative: besides the fact that they are chaper, the licenses are counted per
socket and not per core.

Oracle Standard Edition doesnt have all features, but you can accept that. The reduction in the cost of licenses
can compensate several days of development, tuning or administration, as well as the acquisition of third party
tools to compensate what is missing on SE (for example dbvisit standby for high availability).

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But you need to identify those features that you are using and that come with Enterprise Edition only
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1. Read feature availability

The features available only in Enterprise Edition are listed in the documentationwhich shows which ones are
available in Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition.

So the first thing to be done is to read that list and mark what you know you are using.

But there are two problems:

Its sometimes difficult to understand. For example, do you see clearly that you cant send e-mails for
Enterprise Manager notifications when you dont have diagnostic Pack?
You probably dont know all what you (or your developers, your application) use.

2. Query feature usage

Oracle comes with a nice view about feature usage. DBA_FEATURE_USAGE_STATISTICS. Its nice because you
have information about what you used, with comments, dates, etc. And its also exposed in Cloud Control.

But did you ever try to match that with the documentation from the link above? Thats difficult:

some Enterprise Edition features are not checked. For example, the usage of materialized view is shown,
but without the distinction about those using query rewrite (which is an EE feature)
some subset of features triggers usage even when they should not (for example the Locator part of
Spatial do not need Spatial option)

3. Import to standard
One important thing to do is to import into a Standard Edition and check what fails with an ORA-00439: feature
not enabled error. Because what is nice is that when you install Standard Edition the features not available are
supposed to be disabled at link time.

One tip: you probably need to import metadata only so you want to import it in a small database. But when you do
that you will see that your datafiles are increasing because of the initial segment size. This is because the
deferred segment creation is an Enterprise Edition feature. So the tip is:

impdp content=metadata_only transform=storage:n

The big advantage when testing the import is that you are already testing the migration procedure, because its
the only way to migrate from Enterprise Edition to Standard Edition.

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The problem is that it warns about static feature those in your data model. Not about the usage. For
Service
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example you will know that you cant create bitmap indexes. But you will not know that you will not be able to do
bitmap plan conversion from regular indexes.

Testing the import guarantees that the migration can be done, but you should test the application on a SE
database with data in order to validate usage and performance.

4. Try and test

After having checked everything, from the obvious which is documented, to the little things we know by
experience, I usually advise the customer to test. Install a test database in Standard Edition. Test the application,
test the monitoring, test the administration procedures (no online operation, no flashback database,). If you
plan to migrate with minimum downtime with a replication tool (such as dbvisit replicate) you can start to
replicate to a Standard Edition database. Then you will be able to test the read-only use cases, such as reporting,
which may suffer from the lack of some optimizer features (adaptive plans, result cache,)

5. Decide
Then you will decide if you are ready to downgrade to Oracle Standard Edition. Of course, it will no be
transparent. You will have to find some workarounds. The decision is just a balance between the cost reduction
and the time you can spend to do manually what was automatic in EE.

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