Licensing restrictions on cloning databases
I've asked this in the Database forum, but I've not received any meaningful replies there. Apologies in advance if I'm repeating myself here to no good purpose.
We currently run Standard Edition 10.2.0.4. We use RMAN to clone a production environment to a different server and call that clone our test environment. We do the same thing to create development environments.
Our test & dev hardware is not especially great, however, so it was supposed that we could downgrade the licenses on those boxes to Standard Edition One (SE1), which would save us thousands each year. It was also suggested that we leave the production boxes at full Standard Edition.
We have been told, however, that if production is SE and test/dev is SE1, we cannot then legally use RMAN to clone from the one to the other. That our only choice at that point would be to use export/import techniques to move the data from the SE environment to the SE1 one.
I know licensing questions are awkward, and I'm not asking for a lawyer's opinion! I would just like to know whether anyone else has heard of or encountered this licensing restriction and has had, as a result, to use exp/imp or expd/impd instead of RMAN to create dev/test environments. Or is our informant completely misguided when he states that use of RMAN to clone between SE and SE1 environments would be outside the license terms for either?