What are the conditions of Oracle Standard usage under Broadcom's resale partnership with Oracle?

Products

• Data Loss Prevention Oracle Standard Edition 2
• Data Loss Prevention Enforce

Issue/Introduction

The reason of this KB article is to provide information as to what scope of usage and support is available to customers who have purchased Oracle Standard from Broadcom as per our resale partnership with Oracle. The details in the KB have been provided by Engineering. 

Resolution

Under our OEM resale partnership with Oracle, we can resell only the Oracle Server Standard Edition (SE2) product without the cost of the Oracle support. However, that means that all Oracle product support must come from Broadcom as necessary to fulfil the OEM needs. Thus while Oracle Standard itself is licensed with several features, all those outside of our OEM requirements are not documented and thus not supported by us. 

Deviations to our documented Oracle implementation (even if under the Standard Edition 2 license) will not only be not supported by Broadcom, but often will put the Oracle instance itself outside of Broadcom support and we will revert to only supporting the schema.

There are features outside of the OEM SE2 scope, an example being RMAN (Recovery Manager) backups, which are called out in our documentation (in this case - Recovery Guide). We only officially support cold backups for our OEM use; however customers are allowed to use the other backup options available to them (like RMAN) and still retain support of the OEM use. RMAN is outside of our OEM, so the customer must already have a DBA with the knowledge to directly support its use. We cannot support RMAN nor can we open an Oracle support case on a customers behalf.

There are some customers that already have an Oracle DBA with expertise that only purchase our OEM because its cheaper and utilize more of the Oracle standard features knowingly taking responsibility for the Oracle product support while retaining support from Broadcom for the DLP Schema so long as they do not alter the schema.

Customers that alter our schema cause the schema/database to be unsupportable, therefore making the DLP product unsupportable. To maintain DLP product support, customers must have a support exception in writing for any changes they want to make to the schema. These exceptions are generally granted with the understanding that any issues as determined to be caused by that alteration may require the customer must reverse that change or accept the functional loss.

Additional Information

Removed from Archive, this is still valid.