Average CPU utilization oracle database I'm interested in understanding how DBAs think about the balance between Oracle's strict licensing requirements and the growing compute capacity of today's machines.  Oracle's insistence that customers must license all physical cores on a box for Oracle EE if any of Oracle EE is installed on the box, seems to be, at first blush, at odds with the fact that with larger, more powerful machines, customers can do more (beyond just Oracle) on those boxes (e.g. with virtualization, etc.). 

Ultimately, I'm interested in assessing how much license over provisioning typically occurs for most customers.  Here's an example: If I am a large customer running Oracle EE on a machine with two high frequency Intel Xeon E5-2670 (Sandy Bridge) Processors and 20 physical cores, would I typically be using 100% of those cores 100% of the time to run Oracle DBs (in which case there is no overprovisioning, since the whole box utilization is 100%) or would a more likely scenario be running 50% of those cores 50% of the time for Oracle DBs (in which case the whole box utilization is 25%, so I've effectively paid for 3x more licenses than i actually need.

Would appreciate any insights on the typical utilization rates that you see on the servers that run your Oracle DBs, and whether you think this notion of overprovisioning is a real issue that you would avoid if you could (say by buying DB capacity on-demand).
Start using your licenses in a smart way. Many customers buy EE licenses, only using SE features. Don't underestimate the power of SE. You can use SE with a max of 4 sockets and with modern CPU's that's a lot of power. SE1 has a max of 2 sockets. See Database Licensing - Oracle

Next to that, consider consolidating your smaller applications into 1 serious database, often leading to much better CPU and license utilization. For one customer I saved 800.000,-/year doing so.

The question about how to size for over provisioning is really a business question. How does the business get hurt when it can't process every request immediately? Some will lose a lot of money for lost sales, others can handle it.