New Oracle licensing

There is a slight but extremely important change in the licensing modell of Oracle. The Multicore FAQ states:

Oracle Database Standard Edition can only be licensed on servers that have a maximum capacity of 4 sockets. When using RAC to cluster this limitation is mirrored in the cluster. It may be licensed on a single cluster of servers supporting up to a maximum of four sockets.

What does this means: Our workhorse server V490 is now usable with Standard Edition. So you can save a vast amount of money. Instead of 3 Licenses (each core is counted as 0.75) Enterprise Edition you need only three licenses Standard. Or you can build an incredible powerful OLTP RAC-Cluster with 4 T2000 servers. Although they have 32 threads there is only one single socket per Server. 128 parallel threads = 4 UltraSPARC T1 = 4 Sockets = within the limitation Standard Edition. Standard Edition = RAC included. And now the kicker: Niagara 2 equals 64 threads per socket. Means 256 threads per 4-node cluster. But: Still only 4 sockets. And you surely know it: Still Standard Edition.