> Oracle has a nasty licensing model where they charge you per core regardless of if that core is a physical one or not (hyper-threading). That's why you then

> Oracle has a nasty licensing model where they charge you per core regardless of if that core is a physical one or not (hyper-threading). That's why you then switch to their T5 or M-series with up to 3,072 processors, and then Oracle comparatively charges you peanuts, since those systems have relatively few physical sockets. And if you know SPARC, and you know Solaris, you can squeeze some serious savings. The problem, it seems to me, is that most system administrators and managers today are neither familiar with SPARC nor with Solaris, so they end up paying more in the long term in licensing and maintenance for running something else like MySQL on GNU/Linux. But that's their problem, not the guy's who knows SPARC and Solaris and how to save money, isn't it?