If you read through the actual Oracle 19c documentation, esp. the “Database Licensing Information User Manual” you might notice that for Standard Edition Two (SE2) the feature “Oracle Real Application Clusters” (RAC) is set to “N” (No). Anyone who – like me – thought this was a documentation bug is unfortunately wrong.
After talking to some Oracle representatives I was told that starting with version 19 RAC is indeed no longer available for Standard Edition 2. Existing customers using RAC need to stay with version 18 or downgrade to single instance. More critical is that Version 19c is the long term support (LTS) release. This means standard support will last until March 31st 2023 and extended support until March 31st 2026 while version 18 is only supported until first half year 2021 (24 month after release of version 19). Detailed information can be found in “Oracle support (Release Schedule of Current Database Releases (Doc ID 742060.1))”.
After the termination of Standard Edition One in September 2015 and the throttling of Standard Edition 2 to 16 threads this is again a functional reduction of the low end oracle Edition.
VMware virtualization might be an high availability alternative and standby databases like Dbvisit standby will cover the disaster recovery part easily. But nevertheless the future of Standard Edition is uncertain. My fear is that more and more customers might move to another database e.g. PostgreSQL.
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