Mike Schiff, an analyst at Reston, Va.-based consultancy MAS Strategies , said the new pricing model does offer customers more options, but he also suggested that it could steer them toward specific hardware systems.

"I suspect that Oracle will be adjusting these factors over time and that given Oracle's position as the relational database king, multicore-processor vendors will lobby to have the factor for their chips as low as possible," he said.

-- Tom Krazit of the IDG News Service contributed to this story.