Oracle Database 10.2 De-Supported

OK, that’s an alarmist title and is not really true. However, I feel this topic is important enough to warrant the title. I’ve talked to a lot of people lately that were not aware of the actual support status of Database 10.2 and below (it changed on July 2010 and the 1 year grace period ended July 2011). My goal of this post is certainly not to be critical of anyone, just to spread the word and allow people to make informed decisions.

The document “Oracle Lifetime Support Policy” (PDF, 474KB) discusses most of the details. There’s also a FAQ on MOS entitled “Oracle Database 10.2 End of Premier Support – Frequently Asked Questions [ID 1130327.1]” (HTML Version or Full Flash Version (for now…(details on that here)).

Here’s my quick summary of some key points:

• 10.2 general availability was July 2005
• “Premiere Support” is what you probably think of as “supported”.
  • It extends for 5 years from the date of general availability.
  • It ended for 10.2 in July of 2010.
  • Oracle offered a 1 year, no-cost grace period for 10.2 premiere support customers which ended in July of 2011. This was basically a year of free Extended Support.
• “Extended Support” is a for-cost option that allows you to extend Premiere Support for an additional 3 years.
• “Sustaining Support” is the level of support after Premiere Support ends, assuming you are not paying for Extended Support.
  • This is probably where a large majority of the 10.2 and earlier customers are today, but may not be aware of this.
  • This does NOT include a number of key services such as “New updates, fixes, security alerts, data fixes, and critical patch updates”.

A number of customers that I’ve talked to realized this situation when they went to download the latest Critical Patch Update and could not as they were on Sustaining Support.

The PDF also contains the following chart which is a nice overview of the dates for planning purposes: