But there is a minimum number of Named Users. For Enterprise Edition, that is 25 named users per CPU.
At the end of the day, the minimum cost for "Named User" licensing is 50% of the cost of CPU licensing. If your user community grows, the cost for "Named User" licensing can (and will) be much higher. Based on $800/user, named user licensing for an appliction exposed to the internet (the maximumcost case) could list at around USD $4.8 trillion, although for this, Oracle Corp would have to argue that everyone on the planet has access to the internet. You'd need to have a lot of CPUs (120 million) to make that worthwhile...
The minimum user counts for the Standard Editions are much more attractive... ;-)
Actually though, with Standard Edition One (or eXpress Edition) and modest storage requirements, the cost of the OS license can suddenly look veryrelevant...
If you get cpu, licenses, that is. You can also get per-user licenses, for much much less (something like $800 per User - but don't quote me on that number :-)
Stefan
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-- Cheers, -- Mark Brinsmead Senior DBA, The Pythian Group http://www.pythian.com/blogs