Idt has now been six months since the “Oracle AI Database 26AI Enterprise Edition” was released, and there is still no sign of the Standard Edition. This means that companies wanting to use new features such as Vector Search or the AI functionalities of Oracle 26 must either switch to the Enterprise Edition or get an Oracle Database Appliance, since that’s where the “Oracle AI Database 26ai Standard Edition 2” is available. Alternatively, one could switch to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), but that’s not necessarily the desired solution either. There’s even an SE2 beta program, which I’m also participating in, but even there, there are no indications whatsoever regarding features or availability.
Socket Licensing
Another problem when using SE2 is the limitation to two sockets. As seasoned Oracle experts know, the Standard Edition, unlike the Enterprise Edition, is not licensed per processor but per socket. The chip may then have any number of processors. This leads to an extreme price difference. While the Enterprise Edition costs about $47,500.00 * 0.5 per processor (see Oracle Technology Global Price List June 2026), the Standard Edition costs $17,500.00 per socket. When using an Intel Xeon Gold processor with 18 cores, this means:
Enterprise Edition (without options): $427,500.00;
Standard Edition: $17,500.00
(see Oracle Technology Global Pricelist June 2026).
What sounds at first like a clear advantage turns out to be a problem after all. For several years now, CPU manufacturers have been increasingly bringing so-called multi-die or multi-chip processors to market. AMD EPYC was one of the first, but Intel has long since caught up with its new Xeon processors.
According to the Oracle Technology Pricelist, however, every chip (die) is counted as one socket. Since these processors typically use more than 2 chips, they are therefore off-limits for SE2. This in turn means that there is essentially no future for Standard Edition 2. However, there are two exceptions here as well:
- Oracle Database Appliance. For the X10 and X11 with EPYC processors, Oracle makes an exception for SE2. Quote: “ODA is the only platform that allows Standard Edition 2 to run on servers that use CPU chips that are based on multi-chip modules.” (https://blogs.oracle.com/oda/oracle-database-appliance-x11)
- And, of course, OCI. Since there are no sockets at all in OCI, the limitation here still applies as 16 threads or 8 processors that can be used for SE2, regardless of how many OCPUs I use.
So before you think about buying new hardware to run a Standard Edition, make sure it isn’t a multi-die processor, such as almost all Xeon 6 or EPYC processors. However, it is difficult to find out which processors have this “problem.”
Feel free to contact us about this topic as well (info@ora2know.de).