Which Edition of Oracle RDBMS is Right for My Business?

Do I really need Oracle Enterprise Edition? Do I need Oracle Enterprise Edition in order to have a standby database? What version of Oracle do I need?  

We get questions like these a lot. Oracle’s editions and features can be a bit overwhelming. This post shares some key information that I hope will make your choice easier.

To keep this post to a manageable length, this post deals only with Oracle Version 12c and Version 19c, and excludes Oracle cloud offerings. A future post will cover those feature sets. 

Oracle Standard Vs. Enterprise

For each version covered below, I took the feature set from Oracle’s licensing documentation and listed those things that are available only in the Enterprise Edition of Oracle, and not in any of the Standard Editions.

But before we look at the specific features available in each version, let’s explore two important categories of features:

Data Guard

One of the more frequently used options in Enterprise Edition is Data Guard. A set of Data Guard features is listed in the first table for each edition below. These are used to implement high availability; that is, having a standby database available that is kept up to date with your primary production database in case your primary database goes down.

If Data Guard related features are the only set of “Enterprise-only” features that you need, then you may still be able to use Oracle’s Standard Edition. Here’s why:

DBvisit Standby, an alternative to Oracle’s Data Guard, provides an active standby database using any version of Oracle. You will still need to license the database software on both the primary and the standby server, but both can be much less expensive Standard Edition licenses. 

Oracle Security

Oracle has a number of important security options. 

The advanced security option is an extra cost option that is only available with Enterprise Edition.  This includes transparent data encryption, data redaction, data masking and subsetting (very helpful for development environments), and other security options. To adequately secure sensitive data at the database level, we advise that you use advanced security, and thus Oracle Enterprise Edition. 

With that said, if you are not using advanced security, and the only Enterprise-only option you need is Data Guard, then we recommend taking a good look at Dbvisit.

Oracle Version 12c Features

Below are the features that are only available in Enterprise Edition for Oracle 12c. If you need anything on this list, then you need Oracle Enterprise Edition. Period! 

Now we’ll look at features that are only available in certain versions of Oracle 12c Standard Edition, or that are limited in Standard Edition. The “Notes” column explains the limitations.

If you need any of the above features, then you may need Oracle Enterprise Edition, depending on the specifics as listed in the notes.

That’s it!

Your DBA team should be able to tell you if you need/use these Enterprise-only features. 

If you don’t need any of these features, then potentially you can save many thousands of dollars by using the Standard Edition instead. 

Oracle version 19c Features

OK, that’s it for 12c. Oracle 19c is essentially the same but with a somewhat different, more “evolved” set of options. The considerations mentioned above remain valid. 

First, let’s look at the 19c features that definitely require Enterprise Edition:

If you need any of the above, the you must use Oracle Enterprise Edition 

Now we look at the features that are included in the Oracle 19c Standard edition, but are limited.

If you are not using pluggable databases, or if three databases are enough, and if you are not using sophisticated plan management, then you can likely use Standard Edition.

If you know of any other enterprise-only options that are not listed here, or if you think I misstated anything, please comment.  I’d like to hear from you. Also, if you know of other good disaster recovery alternatives, let me know.

If you are not sure about any of this, or you just want to double-check your thought process, leave a comment or give me a call and I will be happy to have a conversation with you about it.