OEM "standard": What's included ???

Sorry for the repost, but the subject of my previous post probably did not ring a bell for anyone. I am pretty convicend a lot of experienced DBA out there are very familiar with OEM and I need to know if it's really worth it, and if I need to buy licences for specific needs, or if it's included in the basic product. Oracle's product features documentation is not really helpful.

Right now, we are monitoring our instances with Savant (Formerly Q-Diagnostics from Savant, then precise, now from Veritas) and SQL scriptd. By the way, veritas support for this product REALLY sucks.

Savant has got very BIG as it now comes bundled with precise i3. You need to install about 280Mb Gb of useless junk on every node to get it working and it does not work in a firewalled environment out of the box.

Incredible what precise, then veritas did with such a great product, they simply destroyed it ! Is there an end to all this software bloat ?

We never really took the time to install and play with OEM in the past. It was quite buggy at times, and now that it matured, we might be interested in playing with it. I already use DBA studio and I also have the OEM 2.2 repository and can successfully use the OEM console.

We use the standard version of the database.

What is included in the basic package of OEM ? (Eg: Is there a lock manager)

Is OEM the same package with the STD or enterprise edition of the database ? I mean, do you have more options in OEM that you can use free of charge, depending on the edition ot the RDBMS you're running ?

It looks like you need to install aditional OEM modules to get something like a good lock manager or some nice performance monitoring but I don't know if you need a licence for that. If I look at the basic OEM console, I don't see much more options than I have in the much simpler DBA studio stand alone application.

Savant has a really good lock manager where it is really easy to see who blocks who and identify the problem. For performance monitoring, it is really good at spotting current problems. But it has gone too big.

I am looking at a cheap (ideally free) solution. I don't think OEM basic package has enough features. It's really hard from oracle store or oracle.com to find what is included in a particular product. Also, I really don't understand why performance/monitoring packages are not part of the database. You should not have to pay for them.

Thanks in advance for your input.

---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.616 / Virus Database: 395 - Release Date: 2004-03-08