Oracle has announced that they are raising the prices on the Oracle 11g database. MS has kept the price of SQL Server 2008 the same (for now). I am still amazed that Oracle charges what they do when you can almost get two MS SQL Server licences for the price of one Oracle license. While Oracle has been shown to perform faster than SQL Server 2008 I would much rather have a system that is easier to work with and cheaper than one that I find dificult to work with and out of my clients budget range.

Here is a price comparison (NOTE: prices are based on manufacturers suggested price at the time of this writing)

*the differences I could find between these two editions was that Standard Edition One allows 2 sockets and Standard Edition allows 4 sockets plus clustering and workload management.