What is the Oracle 10 day rule for disaster recovery?
The Oracle 10 day rule for disaster recovery lets you run your production database on an unlicensed failover node for up to 10 separate days in a calendar year, used only when the primary node fails. The allowance assumes a clustered pair of nodes attached to the same storage array, where the second node sits idle until a genuine outage moves the workload across. The 10 days are a total for the year rather than a fresh window per incident, so two outages of six days each would exceed the allowance and put the failover node into licensable use. A partial day counts as a full day, which matters when a failover lasts only a few hours but spans a date boundary. The mechanics for the whole database estate sit in the Oracle Database Licensing Guide.
Does a standby database need a full Oracle licence?
A standby database needs a full Oracle licence the moment it does any work, because the 10 day allowance covers only a cold node that stays idle until failover. This is the distinction auditors press hardest. A node that is mounted, that has the database open, or that is applying redo logs is performing recovery work, and recovery work is use. The classic Data Guard physical standby that continuously applies logs is therefore licensable, and Active Data Guard, where the standby is open for read while it applies, is always licensable and additionally requires the Active Data Guard option itself. The free failover node is the narrow case of a second cluster member that is powered or idle and only takes the load when the first one stops.
Map each disaster recovery node to one of three states: cold failover inside the 10 days, log applying standby, or open read standby. Only the first is free. License the other two, and document the failover dates so you can prove you stayed inside the allowance.
Is the 10 day rule in the contract or in policy?
The 10 day rule lives in an Oracle policy document rather than in the signed Oracle Master Agreement, so your contract governs first and the policy is only an interpretation Oracle publishes. This is the same pattern that runs through Oracle partitioning and many options claims: the policy paper is often more restrictive, or simply different, from what the customer actually signed. If your agreement grants broader failover rights, or is silent in a way that favours you, the contract wins. The practical effect is that you should never accept an audit finding on disaster recovery at face value. Pull the agreement, read the licence grant and any failover or testing clauses, and compare them against the policy the auditor is citing. The policy is a starting position, not a binding term.
| Node state | Doing work? | Licence needed |
|---|---|---|
| Cold failover, idle until outage | No | Free up to 10 days a year |
| Mounted but not open | Yes | Full licence |
| Physical standby applying logs | Yes | Full licence |
| Active Data Guard, open for read | Yes | Full licence plus the option |
What about disaster recovery testing?
Disaster recovery testing counts against the 10 day allowance just as a real outage does, so a quarterly failover drill that runs the workload on the standby node consumes days from the same annual budget. Many teams discover this only in an audit, having tested diligently every quarter and unknowingly spent their entire allowance on drills. Plan the test calendar against the 10 days, keep each drill short, and record the exact dates the production workload ran on the recovery node. That record is your evidence. For the wider estate sizing picture, see right sizing the database estate, and to choose the cheaper metric per database first, see processor versus Named User Plus.
What is the next step?
The next step is to inventory every disaster recovery and standby node, classify each by what it actually does, and license the ones that do work while documenting the failover dates on the ones that do not. Most estates carry at least one standby that has quietly become licensable, and finding it before Oracle does is the difference between a planned purchase and an audit finding at list price. Download the database licensing guide for the failover decision tree and the evidence template, and bring us your estate when you want the classification done for you.
Download the database licensing framework for the disaster recovery decision tree and the failover evidence log. Get it from the white paper library, or read the full Oracle Database Licensing Guide.