Oracle Product Family and Pricing Highlights

This Oracle Whitepaper prepared at August 2006 summaries the five oracle editions, the advanced options and the management pack of Oracle;

The editions:
Standard Edition One,Standard edition, Entreprise Edition, Personal Edition, Express Editions

The options:
RAC, Partitioning, Advanced Security, Label Security, OLAP, Data Mining, Spatial

The management packs:
Change management, Diagnostic, Tuning and Configuration Management Packs

Oracle database software comes at a cost. As of March 2006, the Enterprise Edition sells at a list price of US$40,000 per machine processor. Standard Edition comes cheaper, $15,000 per processor (it can run on up to 4 processors but has fewer features than Enterprise Edition, it lacks proper parallelization, etc; but remains quite suitable for running medium-sized applications). Standard ONE edition sells even more cheaply, $5000 per processor (but limited to 2 CPUs). Standard Edition ONE sells on a per-seat basis, and costs $149 per user, with a 5-user minimum. Oracle Corporation usually sells the licenses with an extra 22% cost for support and upgrades (access to MetaLink – Oracle’s support site) which customers need to renew annually.

Oracle Express Edition(Oracle XE), an addition to the Oracle database product family(beta version released in 2005, production version released in February 2006), offers a free version of the Oracle 10g Release 2 RDBMS, but limited to 4 Gb of user data, 1 Gb of RAM, and which will use no more than one CPU and which lacks some Oracle features like an internal JVM, partitioning, bitmap indexes and materialized views.

So what does “Release 10.2.0.2.0” mean?

1st Digit: “10” is a major database release number.
2nd Digit: “2” is the database maintenance release number.
3rd Digit: “0” is the application server release number.
4th Digit: “2” identifies a release level specific to a component.
5th Digit: “0” identifies a platform specific release.

To check the Oracle version from the SQL*Plus prompt, issue following sql:

SELECT banner FROM v$version WHERE banner LIKE ‘Oracle%’;

BANNER
—————————————————————-
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.2.0 – 64bi

SELECT version FROM product_component_version WHERE product LIKE ‘Oracle%’;

VERSION
—————————————————————-
10.2.0.2.0

From banner column of v$version you can also identify if you are runing Oracle in 32-bit or 64-bit architecture. For another easy way to identify this you may check this link.

Refences Used :
http://www.oracle.com/database/product_editions.html
http://www.oracle.com/support/lifetime-support-policy.html
Oracle® Wiki
OracleBrains.Com Archive, Understanding Oracle Release Number Format Article