Oracle has never been known to be cheap, and they hold on to the image. After a long wait, the price of Oracle 11g has finally been announced at a staggering $40,000 per cpu or $800 per user. The price only goes for running the database on Linux and there is still no availability date for 11g on windows or unix.

I cannot help but wonder why anyone would upgrade to 11g, especially right now. Sure there are improvements compared to 10, but there are two things I recommend to think about :

• Do you really need to upgrade ? I don't like to be the first in line for new releases, let the new version become adult first.
• The price is no different from what you pay for 10. So there's no benefite here.

Furthermore, I believe that any other company this size, that releases software for one platform only, should call it a beta release.