If you are serious about it, there is always a way to arrange a reference call with a current Exadata customer.

Oracle specifically positions and limits SE databases to avoid customers using it in high scale applications. Online backup is working with any release but it removes parallel backup and I think incremental backup. There is also no way to use normal partitioning in SE unless you want to mess around with “poor man partitioning” using UNION’s. And etc. and etc.

Standard replication is included in SE and even some support for Streams but I wouldn’t use it for bulk data load. I would say that Oracle SE would work in such federated data warehouse when you design it in the application and design your data load appropriately. However, querying federated Oracle SE databases is not straightforward and required either development of, perhaps, using some third party tools. I know Continuent has interesting solution for that.

“Shared disk and shared everything solutions don’t compete on price-performance.”

Shared disk makes writing applications so much easier and that’s where I think the major advantage is. You don’t think about database replication and how to architect you application for that. These days it’s a huge advantage when developers can shorten time to market for their products.

There are, of course, some applications that either absolutely need shared disk architecture or to cumbersome to design with shared-noting. I don’t think there are too many of those, however. :)

Anyway, total cost has many components and licensing might be only a small portion of it.

I want to read more about scale-out deployments based on Oracle. Assuming SE one can be used, this costs about $6k per core plus 20% per year for maintenance (about $50k for the license per 8-core master + $10k per year for maint) and then multiply that by 2 to cover license + maint for the slave. I am not sure how much more it costs to get replication and hot backup for that setup. Replication is a must have and hot backup is really nice to have.

@Mark: There is nothing that prevents Oracle to scale just as others do with shared nothing architecture. Pythian has had number customers adopted that approach with Oracle SE and have been running for years. However, some applications are not designed (because it’s either too difficult or they are just designed sloppy) to scale easily on shared nothing architecture.

@Alex: that’s very well may be. I have tried to fish some info on that I haven’t got any signs of yes or no.

@Martin: It takes some time for two companies to align and the delay in merger caused by EU investigations might very well impact the OOW release of Exadata on Sun hardware. On the other had, HP is completely different company, even though it is a close Oracle Partner (or was?).