disable AWR legally.

Oracle have responded, possibly to Mark Brinsmead's blog, possibly (given the package dates) because they already were aware of the issues, or maybe for some other reason. Anyway, there is, as of yesterday a supported method (go on call the support analysts I dare you) for disabling AWR.  Metalink Note  436386.1 has the details. There's a suggestion that this is also available on OTN - one assumes for the Express Edition customers though I don't see it yet.

I find this interesting because it suggests some interesting things, not least about web2.0 (aka a more interactive web) that Justin blogged about a while ago. It seems to me that maybe Oracle is understanding community interaction. When 10g came out and it became apparent to me that ASH etc were unavailable to SE users (we used SE at my employer back then) I started a petion. I got a similar response in terms of numbers, the petition was also discussed on usenet. I got this reply at the time, in public, from a relevant Oracle employee (at the time)

I will follow up here as I was involved in the initial and subsequent decisions, and while the petition is useful as part of the decision making process, the dialog is typically more useful.

 

Remember that SE and SE1 are targetted at small enterprises or departmental deployments, running non-mission critical applications, on small machines, typically with less than a couple of 100 of GB of data, typically with a small number of users (perhaps no more than 100 concurrent), and where we do not believe there is a full time DBA, if any at all. Anybody outside of these simple criteria we think is actually running EE (and we have this user base surveys that seem to back this categorization up)

As such, the full functionality of Diag and Tuning pack seemed to be overkill given this target environment.

Now either we have the target wrong, in which case some demographics about what people are actually doing with SE or SE1 would help, or the full functionality of the packs are required for even very simple environments, in which case we have the product wrong, or something in-between is required, in which case I would love to hear what people think should be in the in-between.

 In other words, we have customer intelligence and so we know what you want, AWR,ASH etc provide no benefit to SMEs and departments and so on.

It seems to me that the apparent rushing out of a newly supported package in response to a blog and petition suggests that Oracle are getting that customers count in a way  that they didn't two years ago. This is great. It also unfortunately suggests that the licensing is not planned to change post 11g. Otherwise why release the package. If so please still sign the blog entry. And Oracle make damn sure that SE installs run this script as part of installation. You know that it makes, legal, sense.