Oracle on Amazon RDS: licensee beware (Part 1)

It sounds like a great deal at first: spin up a fully-managed Oracle database instance with the license cost already baked in. And in a lot of ways, it can be a good deal. Take a look at the expense of managing the database, doing backups & patching, plus the hardware and software, and Oracle on Amazon RDS can be a great deal. But as always, be careful about the details.
Oracle Standard Edition HA

Almost one year after announcing that Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) is de-supported on Oracle Standard Edition 2 starting with Oracle Database 19c, the other shoe finally dropped: Oracle announced a new Standard Edition 2 High Availability.
Oracle Spatial: Free in all editions!

Just a quick update around Oracle licensing changes from last week. As of December 5, 2019, Oracle Spatial is no longer a licensable feature and is included free with all editions, including Oracle Standard Edition 2.
OpenWorld 2019: Multitenant Changes

More than 5 years after the initial announcement, it looks like Oracle is finally moving forward with its plans to move everything to pluggable databases. In July 2014, Oracle announced that non-CDB databases may be deprecated and unsupported in the future. At OpenWorld 2019, it looks like that will be the case with Oracle Database 20c and beyond.
Power Your Oracle Database and Business Applications Without Licensing Issues

Read time: 12 minutes