Oracle GoldenGate Audit Preparation

When Oracle GoldenGate is in scope for an Oracle audit or ULA certification the team preparing need to be aware of what exactly must be measured to avoid costly mistakes.

A client was asking recently about how they should measure Oracle GoldenGate from a license perspective.  The question was interesting as the rules have changed around GoldenGate products over the years as Oracle standardizes their license model for database and middleware to either core or NUP.

There are range of products in the GoldenGate family, a quick search of the latest Oracle Price list will give you the full list, but most organizations use either “Oracle GoldenGate” or “Oracle GoldenGate for non-Oracle Database”.

The license metric is number of processors (cores) on the source and destination database server. The exact definition from Oracle is:

“For the purposes of the following program: Oracle GoldenGate, only (a) the users of the Oracle database from which you capture data and (b) the users of the Oracle database where you will apply the data must be counted for the purpose of determining the number of licenses required.”

Mainframe and Teradata Replication Services are measured technically the same way but in practice you need to be carefully as deployment is different from standard.

For GoldenGate Application Adopters for JMS and FlatFile it’s the source database that counts.

Depending on implementation, Active Data Guard license is actually covered by GoldenGate and can be considered “free” for Enterprise Edition.  Extract from Oracle:

The license for Oracle GoldenGate includes the ability to capture database transactions from Oracle Database and deliver database transactions to Oracle Database. It also includes a full use license for Oracle Active Data Guard and a full use license for XStream. Note that the capture and deliver features of Oracle GoldenGate work with any edition of the Oracle Database, while Active Data Guard and XStream require Oracle Database Enterprise Edition.

Current GoldenGate Licensing Information can be found under the Oracle Fusion Middleware licensing documentation online.

Older Agreements

In the past the server on which the GoldenGate product was installed determined the number of processors, not any more.  It’s important to check the definition in your agreement when you bought GoldenGate as you may be on the older metric.

Compliance Risks

What you have to be extremely careful about when measuring your deployment of GoldenGate is the number of “available cores” on the source and destination databases.  In simple terms, if you use virtualization or clustering technologies (other than Oracle’s) you must license all cores on the physical servers, not just the cores available to the Virtual Machine the database is installed on.

GoldenGate audits are usually included as part of an Oracle Database or Oracle Middleware audit but the difference in license measurement needs to be appreciated so you declare the correct amount and do not receive an unexpected bill from Oracle.