Oracle Database Pricing Now Varies with Processor Core Type

Published: January 12, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Get out those old Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard calculators, because Oracle has changed the pricing scheme for its Oracle 10g database again, and you are going to have to do math to figure out what you owe.

Just before IT Jungle went on holiday break and just after we reported that Oracle had cut Sun Microsystems a break by counting an eight-core, 32-threaded "Niagara" UltraSparc T1 processor as two cores as far as Oracle 10g licensing is concerned, Oracle decided to create a stratified pricing structure for all platforms.

Under the new Oracle 10g pricing scheme, you have to count up the number and type of processor cores you have in your server and then multiply the number of cores by a "processor factor" that is dependent on the type of core. Any single core processor of any architectural type has a processor factor of one, which means there is no price break. You pay from $4,995 to $40,000 per processor core on the Oracle database, depending on the edition you choose (Standard Edition One, Standard Edition, and Enterprise Edition). On the UltraSparc T1 chip, you count up the cores and multiply by 0.25, which yields 2 on the eight-core chip. So a machine with a single T1 counts like a two-core server, which stands to reason given the fact that the T1 chip has about the same performance as two X64 or X64 cores. On any Intel or AMD processor with more than one core, you count the cores and multiply by 0.50. Basically, a dual-core Xeon or Opteron chip is being counted as if it were a single core. This is the new bit to the pricing. Any other multicore processor--including IBM's Power4 and Power5 chips, Hewlett-Packard's PA-8800, Intel's future "Montecito" Itanium, Sun's UltraSparc-IV and UltraSparc-IV+, and Fujitsu-Siemens future Sparc64 VI processors, have a processor factor of 0.75. You have to round up once you do the math, too, to calculate the number of Oracle 10g licenses required.

So if you want to save on your database costs, Oracle is strongly suggesting that you move to dual-core X64 processors wherever possible. Oracle has to implement such pricing, of course, to compete with open source databases in the Linux market and to keep the pressure on Microsoft and its new SQL Server 2005 database. This pricing scheme is reminiscent of a similar scheme that Oracle had a few years ago, where mainframes, Unix, and X86 platforms had different multiplication factors to reckon the cost of an Oracle database license. Customers were very annoyed by this at the time, and Oracle went to a straight per-CPU pricing scheme. This time around, end users are not really raising their hackles, since they understand that the price of software has to bear some resemblance to the capabilities of the underlying machine. High-end Unix customers can't be liking this all that much, but you can bet the Oracle sales force is. These customers are not going to move off Unix any time soon, and a 25 percent break is better than none. And those customers who do not like per-CPU pricing scheme with processor scaling factors can always go with per-employee or per-user-seat pricing schemes.