A short post after a tweet of Johannes Ahrends (@carajandb on twitter). He brought to our attention that he was worried: SE2 doesn’t include RAC anymore in 19c. Is it a documentation bug? Unfortunately not… his worries appeared to be ligitimate.  He made a blogpost about it – in the German language. Tried to summarize some in this blogpost.

What’s in the documentation of 18c and 19c:

Screenshot of 19c licensing guide:

In 18c licensing guide:

So.. it’s correct. Is it a documentation bug?

Reaction of the product manager Marcus Michalewicz:

Effective with Oracle Database 19c, SE2 RAC will no longer be supported. This change will mainly take effect with 19c (19.3) GA and hence is not widely documented yet, but will by then.

Why is this important? 19c is a so-called ‘Long-Term-Support’ (LTS) version (note: “Release Schedule of Current Database Releases (Doc ID 742060.1)”. It’s at least remarkable to decrease the functionality of a LTS-version of a database. Why not wait until the next release.

The functionality of SE2 has changed more in the past,  Mike Dietrich summarized it well a while ago. I don’t know if RAC has been heavily used in SE2 by customers, but for the customers who did implement RAC….  well, they have to change their architecture again…

Upgrade paths:

And there’s of course a migration offer to go to the autonomous database :-) .

Resources:

Caranjdb / Johannes Ahrends: Kein RAC mehr für Standard Edition 2: https://www.carajandb.com/blog/2019/kein-rac-mehr-fur-standard-edition/

SE2, some questions some answers: https://mikedietrichde.com/2015/09/17/se2-some-questions-some-answers/

19c Licensing guide: https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/19/dblic/Licensing-Information.html#GUID-0F9EB85D-4610-4EDF-89C2-4916A0E7AC87

18c Licensing guide: https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/18/dblic/Licensing-Information.html#GUID-0F9EB85D-4610-4EDF-89C2-4916A0E7AC87

Release Schedule of Current Database Releases (Doc ID 742060.1).

Migration offer to autonomous: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/paas-iaas-universal-credits-3940775.pdf