A while ago, my business partner and I did some researching into databases.
The only one we could find (although we didn't speak to Oracle) was IBM's DB2.

IIRC, they priced the DB based on the number of processors that the server
machine had. I think the figure for a single processor model was of the
order of US$ 2 000 or so at the time.

The price for a dual processor DB was of the order of US$ 16 000. I think
the next step was US$ 35 000 ...

It's REAL difficult -and expensive - to make a database engine that can
handle multiple CPUs ...


Regards

Tim