Andrew,
Your absolutely right. During the DOTCOM fiasco commercial database licenses were based on the number of
processors& the speed of those processors. Oracle's PowerUnit pricing was one of those stupid attempts. A power unit
wasdefined as 1 CPU running at 1 MHZ. Mind you a powerunit was cheap (around $50US as I remember), BUT!!!!! Simple
example(that I've intimate knowledge of)
HP9000/L2000 2 way 700 MHZ processors
Oracle: 2 * 700 * 50 = $70,000US
Server: $30,000US Including OS
Try a SuperDome
Server: $120,000US
Oracle: 12 * 1000 * 50 = $600,000US
Today things have gotten better as in less complicated. Oracle dumped PowerUnits for CPU pricing. Enterprise Edition
is$40,000US per processor ($80,000US for that L2000 today). Standard Edition is $15,000US per processor. Still makes
onecringe every time you talk about it. Hopefully Oracle has seen the light. Larry Ellison (CEO) spoke about site
licensingat Open World. Rumor mill has it that it'll boil down to # of employees times $150US (Enterprise Edition per
seatlicense fee). After that its' have fun. Use all the software you want. Of course there's still that 21% annual
maintenancefee that they'll get you for.
Dick Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA
Oracle Certified 8i DBA