There is no doubt that Enterprise Edition Database offers superior functionality that many applications and administrators shan’t live without. I wrote about this nearly two years ago when UNIX manufacturers started dropping prices and core counts increased across all chip types, including IBM Power7.

Well, I recently created a financial comparison between Enterprise and Standard that seemed worth sharing. It bears repeating that Standard Edition is license-able on servers with a maximum capacity of four sockets. To my knowledge, Oracle has not limited the total number of cores across those four chips (since it licensed per chip), nor hamstrung Standard Edition under the hood to under-utilize all available cores.

In my example, consider 400 cores across 10 servers, each with 4 10-core chips. Licensed as Enterprise Edition, this would total nearly $10M in list licensing. If, instead, we deploy Standard Edition on four of those servers, our list licensing is just shy of $6M. Either deal is huge and would be awarded a discount of at least 65%, so we can extrapolate that deploying Standard Edition on 40% of those 400 cores saves about $3.3M over a five-year time frame.

I’m just sayin’.