Oracle Database – Top 10 Compliance Issues Seen

Forty years after its first release, Oracle Database is still one of the most popular database systems for the world’s largest companies. Almost every organization, however, struggles with the complex contracts and constantly changing conditions, with all the financial risks involved.

In this article, we sum up the ten most common compliance issues seen with Oracle Database.

Oracle’s policy is that its Database software must always be directly available to use – 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Everyone can download the software and use it without any technical restrictions. This in fact happens in many organizations. In terms of speed and user-friendliness, the benefits are evident, but many end users do not realize their organization is responsible for meeting the conditions set by Oracle. For the IT department, it is difficult to keep an overview and ensure agreement and practice are in line.

As a compliance issue can result in major financial consequences, managing and understanding contracts is absolutely necessary. The two well known contractual documents many organizations deal with are the ordering document, which includes the number of licenses purchased and the license metric, and the license agreement, that provides the conditions under which the software may be used. In addition, there are program documentations, support renewals, technical support policies, online license documents and online guidelines.

To know exactly, from a contractual perspective, what you can do with your Oracle Database software, you must know the fine print. This is challenging for many organizations and compliance issues tend to appear daily. A lack of knowledge on how software needs to be licensed within a particular hardware infrastructure often causes problems, but things can also go south when installing or configuring software. The following Oracle Database compliance issues are most commonly seen by large organizations.