Oracle Grants Reprieves To Some Accounts On Multiplex Licenses

Oracle

A handful of customers who complained to Meta Group about what they saw as Oracle's reinterpretation of their database licensing costs, will "be grandfathered in" and not asked for more money, a spokeswoman said.

Meta Group issued a report Tuesday saying customers using Oracle data warehousing as a front end for "batch-processing" feeds were being audited by the database vendor and, in several cases, told to switch from named-user pricing to per-processor pricing to cover additional costs.

That would have entailed millions of dollars in additional costs for these customers, said Mark Shainman, an analyst at Meta Group.

At issue are multiplexing environments in which a Web server or a Transaction Processing (TP) monitor uses a shared pool of connections to a back-end database. That setup "masks the actual number of users" that connect to a given database and requires companies to either license the database on a per-processor basis or pay for all the users at the front end of the multiplexing software, according to the Meta Group report.

Meta Group contends that Oracle re-interpreted the term "multiplexing" to include large batch feeds from non-Oracle back ends into its database. That would mean that a company with hundreds of front-end users doing transactions on an IBM mainframe, which in turn may perform weekly downloads into the data warehouse, would now have to pay for all those front-end users of the mainframe or convert to per-processing pricing.

"Oracle will say this affects only a few customers, but in fact, this reinterpretation could affect all customers who have any kind of batch feed to an Oracle-based Decision Support System. This could impact all their data warehousing customers," Shainman said.

Oracle said it has not changed its software audit policy or its licensing terms and conditions. The company attributes the problem to customer misunderstanding of its policies.