Oracle Power Unit pricing, Was: Oracle on Linux Anyone?

> >
> Obviously the license fees would be something to consider if this goes
> forward.
> Is Oracle priced on the instance, size of machine or number of users?

They have several approaches, depending on the size of Oracle customer and their requirements. Systems that can handle fixed user licensing can stick with that scheme. Unfortunately there is an area of Web server pricing where they have moved to this power unit pricing scheme. Essentially the plan seems to be: since it's difficult to measure how many users are logging in to Oracle over the Web in the course of the day, we will charge the server's owner for the full capacity of that server. This is fine if you're using close to the capacity of your server, but that is rarely the case. Most people buy a somewhat more powerful server than they need, if they have any have sense, in order to have some space for unexpected spurts of activity and to have some 'room to grow into'. Some buy overkill strength servers to avoid tuning performance on something smaller. These folks really get slammed if they don't have a fixed set of users.

Measuring all these factors is admittedly difficult, but paying for maximum capacity is a draconian solution that, in the long run, is not going to go over with the customer.

So now it's just a matter of seeing how this impacts the market and how stubborn Oracle is going to be about this pricing scheme. SQL Server is also apparently using this pricing scheme, so one small Web server escape route is cut off. I'm hoping this will produce a whole new, complex set of performance enhancements that will require performance expertise to implement. But since I'm a performance enhancement specialist I would wish that, wouldn't I? <g> And yes, I'm already writing up the first scheme to enhance I/O on weak servers to get more bang for the licensing buck.

Christopher Gait
Oracle DBA

(Semi)permanent address: cjgait_at_yahoo.com http://www.geocities.com/cjgait

"Death is nature's way of saying: NEXT!"

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Philip J. Tully [mailto:xaphil_at_vm.worldnet.ml.com]
> Sent: Monday, June 19, 2000 4:19 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> Subject: Re: Oracle on Linux Anyone?
Received on Mon Jun 19 2000 - 15:45:50 CDT