Where I work, our business is mainly based on using our in-house legacy system which uses Oracle database for storage. Migrating away from Oracle involves compl

Where I work, our business is mainly based on using our in-house legacy system which uses Oracle database for storage. Migrating away from Oracle involves completely rewriting the legacy system (which I think should have been started many years ago) and that costs money. As it happens, we're specifically using Oracle Standard Edition in a RAC configuration which is nice and cheap. RAC on standard edition allows you to use up to 4 physical processor sockets without needing to go to Enterprise edition. One particularly annoying part of Oracle licensing is that if you run it on a virtual machine, they require licensing for every core on the virtual host - it makes no difference how many cores are allocated to the database instance itself.