Divining Oracle's TCO

Posted by cwright on 2007.04.13 @ 00:29

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There are many options in the database world. Many solutions for all kinds of work loads, and solutions for all kinds of financing models.

Oracle, a database vendor, is pretty tight-lipped about its financing. Nowhere on the website is price listed. Today, we managed to breach this obfuscation. We had to call them.

Licensing for Oracle is offered on a per-CPU basis for the database servers, and on a per-machine basis for the user clients. They weren’t clear as to what constitutes a CPU — does Hyperthreading count as 2 CPUs? does Dual-Core?

Either way, the price per CPU is $40,000.

Per client machine, the license cost is $800.

Plus a support contract.

So, instead of spending well over $200,000 on this…

We’re replacing one of Kosada’s consulting clients’ ancient Oracle servers with one running PostgreSQL.

Thats a helluva lot of money. I guess the rule “if you have to ask about price, you can’t afford it” applied.

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