Cross pollination of ideas is essential. There is a lot to learn from the ORACLE camp.

Oracle DBAs tend to be at the upper end of the DBA scale in much the same way as C/C++ programmers tend to be at the higher end of the programming ability scale.

Unfortunately with SQL Server 2012 what Microsoft has learnt is how to charge like ORACLE.

I can understand why licencing has gone to per core but Microsoft are being much more strict on their interpretation of multi-plexing and therefore what comes under CAL vs Per Core licencing.

Basically, if you are running a web based system virtually everything in your stack now has to be "per core".