RE: oracle EE pricing

  • From: "Matthew Zito" <mzito@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <pythianbrinsmead@xxxxxxxxx>, <barb.baker@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 23:55:26 -0500


Mark,

I agree 100% - lots of people have started to think that Oracle == Oracle EE 
when there are other options.

However, it's a real trade-off - for example, if you use SE, no data guard, no 
partitioning, no parallel query, no spatial support, no encryption.

With MySQL, you get all of those things.  I think the consideration is 
sometimes not "do we need these things today" but "will we need them in the 
future".  That's huge, as we all know, porting across database platforms is 
hugely complicated.  Oracle has used this to their advantage many times.

So, people opt for the free/cheap option with more features than the Oracle 
equivalent.

Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Mark Brinsmead
Sent: Mon 1/18/2010 11:51 PM
To: barb.baker@xxxxxxxxx
Cc: vit.spinka@xxxxxxxxxxxx; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: oracle EE pricing
 
Purchasing new SE-1 licenses versus EE Support pays off in the first 6 months 
or so, I think.  With Standard Edition (proper), the payback is probably about 
2 years.

Providing you can live with the loss of features (many sites cannot), it looks 
like simple arithmetic.  The math should be simple enough for even a manager to 
understand.  :-)

If declining revenue makes a (short-term) capital outlays difficult, there are 
other strategies -- for example, cancel support for a year, and then apply the 
savings to new licenses.  (In fact, if you tell your sales rep that this is 
what you plan to do, you might find them suddenly more flexible.)  
Alternatively, consider term licenses for a year or two -- this allows you to 
start realising immediate savings on support costs, and use those savings in 
the future to purchase perpetual SE (SE-1) licenses and step off the 
term-license treadmill.

What drives me nuts is when people fail to consider SE-1 (versus EE) when 
making the decision of Oracle versus MySQL.  Yeah, $10K to license Oracle SE-1 
on a 12-core database server is more than "free", but it is a miniscule cost in 
most development budgets.  Especially if you are starting with something that 
already runs on Oracle or if you already have Oracle skills in-house.

It is saddening to see the number of people who abandon Oracle -- or refuse to 
even consider it -- apparently based on the cost of EE licenses without even 
considering the far more modest SE-1.  (And you can build a pretty darned 
powerful database server on SE-1 these days!)



On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 9:57 AM, Barbara Baker <barb.baker@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


        OK to spec SE for new projects, but what about those of us with 
declining revenues?  We would love to downgrade our licenses from EE to SE, and 
keep oracle,  but oracle will have none of it.  We are asked to shelve all of 
our EE licenses and buy new SE licenses.  All of that money for our EE licenses 
in the trash can.
        
        At that juncture, Postgre/MySQL or even SQL Server start looking mighty 
attractive.




        On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 7:55 AM, vit.spinka <vit.spinka@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 
wrote:
        

                > 


                I think the Standard Edition is underrated, and could save the 
day quite often. It's just that most of us are used to EE and don't even think 
about SE when thinking about new projects... True, you get RAC, you loose all 
the packs, partitioning...
                But quite often you can get around those limitations, there is 
even a product emulating DataGuard for SE (after all, SE has all the recovery 
stuff too, it's just missing the automation).
                
                Vit
                





-- 
Cheers,
-- Mark Brinsmead
  Senior DBA,
  The Pythian Group
  http://www.pythian.com/blogs

Other related posts:

  1. Home
  2. oracle-l
  3. Archive
  4. 01-2010