RE: Oracle alternatives
- From: "Goulet, Dick" <DGoulet@xxxxxxxx>
- To: <cmarquez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Oracle-L Freelists" <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 10:36:19 -0400
Chris,
You did a wonderful job of zeroing in on one portion of the
article & missed the main point by a country mile. If you'll re-read
the article you'll see:
"Of course there's more to licensing Oracle than that and I could go on
and on about that"=20
And:
"Now I'm not saying that PostGreSql is a replacement for Oracle, but
it's gotten to the point where one really needs to take a careful look"
Yes acquisition cost, or sticker shock, is a reality with the closed
source world and that is driving a lot of folks to alternatives, and yes
I probably ranted too much on that point. But that one sticky point is
having an enormous impact on my working life at the moment. The key
point is "True, Oracle has a lot more to it, but open source is catching
up". And their catching up FAST. So fast that to not consider them is
no longer becoming an option. Also the cost of hardware is dropping
equally as fast such that the initial cost of software is now popping
out as a greater significant factor. Oh yes, you can acquire Standard
Edition One for the same cost as the server, but now your restricted to
2 cpu's. or cores, when even the commodity priced Intel boxes are
sporting more than 2. Sorry you can't use Standard Edition One any
more. Nor can you CPU license it for deployment to the Internet. And
Yes Support is becoming everyone's, save for MicroSlop, cash cow. We're
paying over $100K per year to Oracle for support. Support for
PostGreSql is going to cost us about $10K no matter how many servers and
data bases there are. And there is a mailing list with the developers
of PostGreSql on it who are just as helpful as OTS, even more so in some
cases not to mention that LazyDba has added MySql, FireBird, and
PostGreSql to their discussions. And patches/upgrades are readily
available from www.postgresql.org. All in all a better, though I'll
give not idyllic equivalent.
As my CIO has said, we're coming into a time when software will become a
commodity item. And commodity items do not command the large dollars in
either acquisition or support costs. Take a serious look at that laptop
or PC your working at. It's a commodity nowadays. Software is just
around the corner & I'm afraid that Open Source is leading the way.
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