Logic of Transportable Tablespace Support is confusing... Any ideas?

Question

Folks,
Oracle allows the import of transportable tablespaces on Oracle SE1, Oracle SE and Oracle EE. However, Oracle only allows the export of transportable tablespaces on Oracle EE. This seems like the exact opposite of what Oracle would want.
Export your Oracle SE tablespaces and import them into an Oracle EE database and you facilitate the moving from SE DB to EE DB... Export your tablespaces from DB EE and import them into DB SE and you facilitate what exactly? Downgrading your database from EE to SE?
Can anyone provide the logic for only supporting going 'down' with an exportable tablespace?
Thanks,
Rich

Answer 1

You'd have to talk with Oracle folks that are involved in pricing to know for sure. We're just regular users around here, but we can speculate.
My guess is that the concern Oracle would have is that if you could transport from a standard edition database to an enterprise edition database that people would design systems with the intention of circumventing the licensing metrics. For example, if I can figure out how to architect a data warehouse where much of my ETL processing is done on one or more standard edition databases where I can buy the minimum number of user licenses for my processor count and then transport the tablespaces I build to my enterprise edition database, I might be able to save substantially on licensing costs since I don't need the horsepower on my EE database to do all my ETL work.
Transportable tablespaces are also something that is generally much more important to large companies (with large data sets and small processing windows) than it is to small companies. Economics 101 says that companies will always want to price discriminate and if you have a feature that is much more desirable to organizations with relatively larger wallets and this is one (of many) cases where Oracle wants to steer large enterprises towards using the enterprise edition. It's the same principal by which airlines traditionally charge higher prices if you're not staying over a Saturday-- that is very valuable to businesses booking business travel and relatively unimportant to casual pleasure travelers so it allows the airlines to present different prices to different market segments.
Justin