One of my corporate clients needed to choose between either MSSQL or Oracle for an in-house system, and this sort of garbage is exactly why I pushed them hard towards MSSQL. I'm not a fan of Microsoft's licensing schemes in general, but they look positively saintly compared to Oracle.
I had a look at Oracle prices the other day just out of curiosity. Back in the day driver support used to be solid for Oracle and touchy for everything else I used so that's the context in which I know it.
I went to the store, then clicked oracle database, and found myself looking at licenses of Oracle database Enterprise for just six hundred pounds. That's a lot cheaper than I remember it being. I added to cart to see what would happen. When you do this, it adds a "first year support" line as well that's not quoted on the page but does contribute to your bottom line. I found that deceptive.
Then I had an idea about what might be going on. I dug further to find the yearly cost of support for the database. It's far more expensive, and back to the prices of the old days. So I assume that you buy it at a merely expensive price, and then if you want fixes to their bugs, you'll have to keep paying money for it at a higher rate on a per-year basis.
Digging further, I found a link for Oracle database standard edition that was far more expensive and quoted on a per-processor basis. £11,730.00 per processor. Ouch.
No joke: When it comes to enterprise software licensing and pricing, a lot of the time I find that even the vendor's salespeople don't know how it works.
