Oracle 10 days rule and how it work

Oracle's “Ten Days Rule” ?? I know it's very confusing and hard to understand " Oracle Ten Days Rule”. I will try to explain these "Ten Days Rule”. Please check my post on oracle auditing risks too. Oracle's “Ten Days Rule” is very confusing not even for us but sometimes for oracle's sales representatives too. You have to pay a lot of money means a lot if you follow them wrongly. We all may think that by these "Oracle 10 day rules" we can run our DR(disaster recovery) server for ten days without purchasing any license. Let me tell you, This is totally a myth.


I was working for one of our clients in INDIA and They were so confident about these Ten-day rules that they are under these rules. After discussing with their IT mgr, We come to the point that yes they were totally confused with this "Oracle 10 days rule".


So What is the Oracle 10 day rule?

 
These "Ten Days Rule” are actually very simple. It can apply to fail-over situations and yes it's a very important part. These "Ten Days Rule” can apply to active/passive hardware where oracle is installed on both of your nodes or you are sharing the storage. We know what cluster services we are using like Failsafe for Microsoft (similar to RAC), OCRS ( Oracle Cluster Ready Services), Oracle RAC, etc. . Like for example our primary server got fails and we have a fail-over server that means our services will get less impacted because of any crash. The good part of the oracle is, They will allow you to install binaries on fail-over sites without any licensing cost for that node for only 10 days.


But according to this 10 days rule, you need to buy the licenses for your fail-over site/server if and only if it is up and running for more than 10 days in a given calendar year. That means if you have used all ten days in the starting year then you cannot use this for the rest of the year.


Also, the interesting part is if your primary server got failed at 11:30 pm Saturday and you moved to fail-over at 11:35 pm and after the help of your DBA's and your Team you manage to get back to the primary site by 02:00 am i.e. Sunday. So this will count for two days. haha, interesting right? So by using just approx one and a half hours, We have just used our two days out of ten days. Really crazy,
So now we know that Oracle 10 days rule will work on calendar days, not on time.


The ten days rule is also confused with Oracle’s license policy for testing backups. In this case, we can install Oracle on a different server and check backup that is reliable or not. But after checking the backup we need to shut down the servers until you need to test the backup again. Also, the interesting part in this is, you cannot keep checking your database backup, again and again, every other month. There is one restriction and that is, you can only start and check that server to check your backup four times, and you cannot test the scenario for more than 2 days regularly, yeah of course in any given calendar of the year.


I hope it will help you to avoid the trouble, As we already paying much to oracle and don't want to pay them more ;). Please comment on this post if you find anything wrong.

Points added from comments:- 

 xavier :- well, you can not use this rule in site failover. This rule is only applicable to clusters with shared logical storage localized in a single data center.

Keep sharing, keep the smile.