Lets ask Tom Kyte?

ps: is it coincedence - CAPTCHA asked me to type two words: scandal pretty ?

It’s also borderline entrapment that the extra licensed options are built in just waiting to be used. I don’t know how many people I’ve had to tell to not put that fancy “partition” clause on their create table. The AWR/ASH views should definitely be accessible without licensing too.

It’s like selling a car without a dashboard, or worse with a dashboard, but you’ll get fined if you look at the speedometer.

Licensing terms like this are one of the reasons that I tell the Oracle sales people that all of our new projects are coming up on SQL Server. I prefer to administer Oracle, but their greed is pricing them out of my market.

This is short-sightedness on the part of a company whose licensing costs already are among the highest in the industry and have a huge user population who lack the proper tools to understand performance tuning.

By restricting access and keeping performance troubleshooting a ‘black art’ of scripts and SQL-queries, the product is at a competitive disadvantage compared to other DBMS products.