[Darth Reardon]

virtual hosts, where the critical calculation is not the number of cores the server lives on, but the number of cores it might migrate to. Oracle has already played this little game. If a server residing on a virtual host consumes two virtual cores and it's so licensed, no problem

My (second hand) understanding is that Oracle licenses by the physical core at the hypervisor level, even if you provision less to the VM. This is why HDS touts their ability with UCP to provision dedicated cores to an LPAR (not sure if they use that term) so that the hypervisor only has as many cores as you need to provision.

[some tech guy]

And who needs that stress when you have Amazon RDS or Aurora. Oracle are kinda struggling too. Dynamic DB, scaling to fit use, on a pay-per-load basis? No, Oracle is now dinosaur.

[some tech guy]

Or, if you require columnar, redshift.

I was in a meeting with SAP and you could see the uncomfortable going against redshift. You pay, but only what you use.

Disclosure: I don’t work for amazon, I’m just some tech guy.