Archive for February, 2008
Oracle Standard Edition
Recently a question came up on Oracle-L, but to tell you the truth it might have been anywhere about how on earth one justified Oracle’s licensing. The question was
To get an idea of how much it would cost to license a point of sale database on Oracle and commodity hardware/software, we requested a quote for a 2-node RAC on Dell 2950′s 2 Dual core’s per server. Quote was $306k.
Well if I were the business I’d choke as well. That’s an indefensible software cost for that sort of install. I costed up a quad-core E5430 version of the above hardware, complete with, RHEL5, 16gb RAM and redundant SAN connections. Total cost of the hardware (but excluding the SAN/NFS storage that you’d use for RAC) just about $20,000. That’s for the two servers. So the questioner was being quoted 15x the cost of the hardware (and 3 years worth or so of DBA time at US rates last time I looked) for the Oracle software. Any time you see the software costing more than dedicated admins and an order of magnitude higher than the hardware/OS then you have to work very hard to justify the cost.
There is an alternative though Oracle Standard Edition will do all of the above for you on that hardware. The Oracle store quote for the dual quad-core machines I listed above was $65k Now that’s a much more defensible – though still high cost. Now it may be that the EE only features (DataGuard, Flashback Table (not query), block level recovery, the pl/sql function result cache in 11 and so on) are worth nearly $250k for the questioners business, but you do have to wonder. Of course on my quad-core based install the EE license fee would be $468,000
Update following Herod’s comment and to make my quote clear. This is the oracle store quote for 8 processor licenses for both EE and RAC based on 50% of the total number of cores in the system. Next to it is the US pricing for the hardware
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Possibly Related Posts:
OFA – Whats that all about then
Cary Millsap of OFA, Optimising Oracle and OakTable fame has written the first part of one of those series (he’ll finish before me) on how OFA got started. You can find it here. I don’t have much to say on OFA itself – except that for my Apps readers I’m not talking about Oracle Financial Analyser - but this quote did jump out at me.
I don’t know about you, but when I practice some task over and over again, I do tend to get better at it. For a while. Then I start to get bored, and when I get bored, I get sloppy. It’s why I became a programmer in the first place: so I can do something a few times, get pretty good at it, explain to a machine how to do it, and then perform the task perfectly, over and over again for the rest of my life. It’s a good formula.
I can so relate to this. In fact my work laptop now has over 3000 scripts going back to the late 90′s. All because I didn’t want to do it manually again. And because i’d learned that when a customer says
Can you just update this data for me – it’ll help immensely just this once
You’ll run it at least 3 times.
One of those small private stories that may or may not have a place on Oracle blogs. In my last place of employment we had two Senior level DBAs (I was one and a colleague was, obviously, the other) I wrote scripts for everything , he maintained a whole slew of manual processes – think loading data from spreadsheets. Neither approach was obviously worse than the other in terms of results (well his probably wouldn’t work for manual standby, mine would be a disaster for loading spreadhseet data when the colour of the text has significance) but it did betray a cultural and philosphical difference between us. For the vast majority of the time we worked together neither of us managed each other, now I’ve gone we both manage pretty successful teams. The lesson I’d draw – commonality of approach is as important to team success as the purity or otherwise of the approach.
–disclaimer if you need one – I’m a member of the OakTable