A fresh view on Oracle licencing

Oracle licencing is an arcane area, which has given us all much puzzlement and hilarity over the years. The abstracts submitted for the UKOUG conference included two papers attempting to explain Oracle's policies. Recently, Mark Brinstead has stirred up the Oracle blogosphere with his open letter on the licencing of the AWR and ASH packages. Personally I would like to see Partitioning brought into the Enterprise Edition but I'm not holding my breath.

Niall Litchfield has come up with an alternative insight into the relative value of Oracle licences. His article comments on Kevin Closson's analysis of a recent TPC-C benchmark which compared Oracle and MS SQL Server. Niall noted that the benchmark was undertaken using Oracle Standard Edition rather than Enterprise Edition. Kevin's conclusions related to value for money so Niall has done the maths for an EE licence instead, with interesting results. Not the least of which is:

"One Oracle EE license equates to 32gb Ram and 400 disk drives in round numbers."

Update

One of my colleagues points out that IBM's Quad-Core servers qualify for Standard Edition licencing, which could push the SE price performance even further.