Oracle enables every database option by default when you install or clone an image. Chopt is how you find out and turn them off — and why it is a change-control step, not a licensing position.
The Oracle Change Options utility — Chopt — is a command-line tool that enables and disables Oracle database options. It is embedded in all current versions of Oracle Database, 12.2 and above, which means every customer already has it. It lets you see which options are switched on against a given database, and switch them off again.
The options Chopt manipulates include:
Under Oracle licensing you pay for the database products and options you have installed, whether or not anyone in the organisation is using them. An option left on by accident is a real cost against a capability nobody asked for.
The risk compounds because of how Oracle behaves by default. Oracle’s own guidance is explicit: if you install or clone an Oracle Database image, all Oracle Database options are enabled by default. That is not an edge case — it is the normal outcome of a normal operation. Installations that do not complete cleanly leave the same residue. Every one of those chargeable options is visible to an auditor, and the responsibility for controlling them is yours.
In practice, most customers do not run Chopt after an Oracle database installation, duplication or upgrade. Those are precisely the moments when options and packs get activated and left on.
Make Chopt a mandatory step in the change process for Oracle Database environments. For any change:
Before the change. If you are cloning or modifying an existing environment, run Chopt first and record which options and packs are enabled and which are disabled. That snapshot is your reference point.
After the change. Run Chopt again and compare. Whether the change was a clone, an upgrade or a rebuild, it is not unusual to find options newly activated that alter your compliance position.
Then remediate. Use Chopt to deactivate anything that was switched on and that you are not licensed to use.
The discipline is what matters here. A snapshot taken only after the fact tells you what is on; it does not tell you what changed, or which change turned it on.
Chopt is a useful check inside a change process. It is not a licensing position.
The utility runs against one database at a time. It has no view across an environment, no notion of entitlement, and nothing to compare deployment against. That makes it good at the point of change and useless for managing Oracle at scale.
Use Chopt to stop non-compliance at source, and a proper Oracle licence engine for the wider picture. What that engine has to handle is fairly specific, and it is worth testing candidates against it. CerteroX SAM covers:
Certero is also a verified third-party tool vendor with Oracle License Management Services. In Certero’s own published wording: being a verified third-party toolset means that Oracle’s audit team can accept data from Certero during an official audit, as an alternative to installing Oracle License Management measurement tools. That is a conditional rather than a guarantee, but it is a materially better starting position than arriving with spreadsheets.
The combination is what works. Chopt keeps a single change honest. The licence engine tells you what all those changes added up to.
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