Re: Express Edition for Production
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2013 19:21:54 -0400
Message-ID: <CAJ7936y1BnQDcDtcDuFaeMx45vytccj0Atfs9KV9rJQYoEA03Q_at_mail.gmail.com>
I don't want to make this a religious war - I think Oracle has its place, and for sheer volume of features and advanced capabilities, Oracle has everyone in the dust. (And I'm definitely not enough of a GIS expert to be able to weigh in on PostGIS vs. anything else - just requoting what I'd heard).
And I have lots and lots of customers who love Oracle, and if you have an existing footprint of Oracle, are a large company, have internal expertise, and an enterprise license of Oracle, why wouldn't you use it? It's like you've got an unlimited supply of Cadillacs, plus you already have team of Cadillac mechanics on staff and forever warranties to keep them up and running - why would you go buy any other car?
But I'm going to object to:
> From the docs ... " Express Edition may only be used to support up to
11GB of user data (not including Express Edition system data); " which is
more than 20 years of pure accounting information (not counting scanned
receipts) for a typical SME.
I just read the marketing docs - which still say 4GB. But fine, 11GB of data, thanks for correcting It's still almost nothing by today's standards. A friend of mine has a pre-launch startup whose data set goes up by 1GB a day. A startup customer of mine has a data warehouse that grows by 1TB/day. They ran on Oracle for a while using standard edition until they just couldn't take the (2 node? I don't remember) limitations, and got a quote for EE - and fell over laughing. Ported to a combination of PostgreSQL and Greenplum (I think), which was expensive and time-consuming, *but still 1/4 the cost of Oracle*. I have example after example of small companies that would be absolutely bankrupted by trying to run Oracle.
Of course, it's all about the tool - if you need a very small database with good rapid application database support and doesn't require more than 1GB of RAM or replication or partitioning, *and you already know Oracle*, then XE is a fine option.
Then if you want to get some of those features back, and you feel confident your requirements aren't going to scale dramatically, and you've got some money running around, fine, go buy Standard Edition (though even with a 50% discount you're looking at $40-something K for four processors worth of compute).
But when you're starting a company from scratch, you're very uncertain about where it's going to go - heck, you might not have any idea how much data you *might* need - why would you put yourself on a path where potentially you could be on the hook for hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars?
My point wasn't that Oracle isn't ever worth it, nor would I ever suggest that - just that if you're a small company, with unpredictable data requirements and limited monies, it seems far better to start with the cheap options that have the fewest limitations - and then scale them with the business.
Thanks,
Matt
On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 6:34 PM, Hans Forbrich <fuzzy.graybeard_at_gmail.com>wrote:
> On 17/03/2013 3:44 PM, Matthew Zito wrote:
>
>> Postgres has PostGIS - http://postgis.net/ - which is pretty highly
>> regarded, at least amongst GIS people I know.
>>
>> APEX, though - I guess the closest you'd come is some rapid development
>> framework like Rails.
>>
>> Personally, I'd *never* base a startup on Oracle - given today's trends
>> for data collection (i.e. more is better), 4GB of data isn't going to get
>> you very far, and then the pricing for Oracle is enough to bankrupt anyone
>> with a decent compute footprint (not to mention licensing terms that are
>> very unfriendly for on-demand compute infrastructure like EC2).
>>
>> Hmmmmm ... where to start
>
> From the docs ... " Express Edition may only be used to support up to 11GB
> of user data (not including Express Edition system data); " which is more
> than 20 years of pure accounting information (not counting scanned
> receipts) for a typical SME.
>
> And SE1 is a fairly reasonable price for a SME, and usually covers all of
> a typical small business requirements.
>
> And SE comes in pretty much in line price and feature-wise to SQL Server
> Enterprise
>
> And Locator is free with every edition and version of Oracle RDBMS, and is
> more mature than postgis (which has it's own good and negative points)
>
> And ...
>
> But Postgres has it's points as well.
>
> These are all tools. And a professional understands the tools in hos toll
> belt, including costs and capabilities.
>
> /Hans
>
-- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Mon Mar 18 2013 - 00:21:54 CET