Overview
Oracle announced an increase in support and licensing pricing for their database platform last year, resulting in a considerably higher cost for running Oracle infrastructure for both Kuali and our self-hosted customers. Maintaining Oracle support in our Kuali Research product has always been an expensive and labor-intensive endeavor, and in light of Oracle's continued predatory pricing practices and the dwindling number of our customers who run KR against Oracle databases on-premise, we are planning to slowly phase out Oracle support from the Research suite of products. This change will allow us to keep prices low for our customers and free up more developer time to be focused on product development and other infrastructure improvements.
At the Kuali Research On-Premise Technical user group meeting of 11/19/2019, we began discussing the changes in Oracle pricing and our customers' plans to move away from the Oracle database platform as a result. Then on 1/21/2020 we proposed our own plans and tentative timeline for moving away from Oracle database support. At the recent meetings on 2/18/2020 and 3/17/2020 we modified our timeline at the community's request, and have settled on the following plan. Note that this will only affect those customers that have on-premise implementations that utilize Oracle (it does not impact hosted customers).
Approach/Timeline
We are planning to stop delivering Oracle SQL migration scripts in two phases:
1. We will remove Oracle testing from our continuous integration pipeline in May, 2020. We will continue delivering Oracle scripts after this point, but they will not be tested with the same rigor that they had been.
2. We still stop delivering Oracle migration scripts in the KR code base at the beginning of October, 2020. It will be up to the community to port our MySQL scripts to Oracle (and potentially contribute them back) past that point.
Note that we will not be making any changes to the code or our dependent libraries related to this process-- the code will remain fully compatible with Oracle database and we will continue to take contributions and bug reports if any issues arise when running against Oracle.
To support on-premise implementers in migrating their own Oracle database updates and running integration tests against Oracle datasets, we have made some of our internal tooling for these processes available in the main KR codebase (see https://github.com/KualiCo/kc/
In the future we hope to share some examples of how we set up and run our integration tests against a fresh Oracle database running in Docker-- while this may not be directly compatible with your infrastructure, it should give you an example of the steps we run and how we configure our integration tests if you'd like to run them in a similar manner. I also plan to talk to our customer success engineering team about sharing some of our scripts and tooling for migrating MySQL data to Oracle SQL. They have a lot of experience migrating our customers' data that way, and there's always the option of them providing the conversion as a service too.
Forum for Discussion
We also created a post in our Community forum to capture Kuali's plans for phasing out Oracle support over the coming year, and to provide some resources for hopefully making this transition a little less painful. Also, a place to discuss any questions/issues that may arise:
We hope this is a good resource and a place to discuss any questions/issues that may arise with us and other community members.
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