I'm fairly sure that Oracle's pricing scales with the iron you plan to use: the more or faster CPUs you want to run it on, the more you pay. A large shop can easily get into the $100K license range, but Oracle figures that they will have spent way more than that on their hardware.
The trouble with this theory is that as hardware prices fall, Oracle is collecting a larger and larger share of people's IT budgets. That's why we are seeing more and more interest in open-source DBs ...
That's exactly correct. The last time I looked, Oracles pricing was $40K/CPU for the base license, $10K/CPU for table partitioning, $20K/CPU for RAC (clustering). It is no longer tied to CPU speed, just the number of CPUs. See:
http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=10167
http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=11221
http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=10183
If you want OLAP and Data Mining, it's another $20K/CPU each. Spatial (think PostGIS) is a mere $10K/CPU.
http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=11222
http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=11223
http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=10184
So for a pair of quad servers, using RAC, partitioning, OLAP, and data mining, you're talking
40 + 20 + 10 + 20 + 20 = $110K/CPU
8 x $110K/CPU = $880K
*plus* annual support (roughly 20% of purchase price).
Joe
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