Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – Database System with Multitenant license included?

When you create a Database System on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with license included, how many PDB’s are you allowed to create? Easy answer would be: “well license is included, so all you can eat”. WRONG.

Before 19c, you need a multitenant license if you want more than 1 pdb. Starting with 19c, you can use 3 pdb’s  without license. This can be seen here (under column DBCS EE)

https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/19/dblic/Licensing-Information.html#GUID-0F9EB85D-4610-4EDF-89C2-4916A0E7AC87

But here is the catch. If you think you can use all the options unlimited when buying ‘license included’ from OCI, you should look at:

https://www.oracle.com/database/vm-cloud-pricing.html

You can see that the Multitenant is only included from ‘Enterprise Edition High Performance’ onward. So NOT in Enterprise Edition.

Enterprise Edition below 19c gives you 1 pdb included

Enterprise Edition 19c upwards gives you 3 pdb’s included

Enterprise Edition High Performance (any version) gives you many pdb’s included.

The Enterprise Edition High Performance is suggested as default when you create a DB System:

 

 

 

 

 

 

And it gives you the option to setup a single PDB from the console. Later you can add PDB’s as needed, but the rules above need to be respected.

If you want to prevent creating to many PDB’s in 19c, you can set the max_pdbs parameter.

SQL> show parameter max_pdbs

 

NAME                                 TYPE        VALUE

------------------------------------ ----------- ------------------------------

max_pdbs                             integer     3

 

SQL> create pluggable database TOOMANY admin user ADM identified by Welcome123;

create pluggable database TOOMANY admin user ADM identified by Welcome123

*

ERROR at line 1:

ORA-65010: maximum number of pluggable databases created

 

Take care.

Note: I am not an Oracle spokesman. I cannot guarantee that the contents in this article is right. Always check with Oracle to verify you are license-compliant.