RE: oracle EE pricing

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_at_freelists.org on behalf of Mark Brinsmead Sent: Mon 1/18/2010 11:51 PM
To: barb.baker_at_gmail.com
Cc: vit.spinka_at_vitspinka.cz; oracle-l_at_freelists.org 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_at_gmail.com> 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_at_vitspinka.cz> 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



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