Re: tough choices

Daniel Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> wrote in message news:<1087748956.675560_at_yasure>...  

> I am having a hard time believing that based on the pricing I've seen.
> Do you have any actual quotes on equivalent systems, priced within the
> last year, that support this contention?
>
> What I mean by equivalent systems is that you include ALL costs. Not
> just the base database.
>
> Because every time I have done the pricing DB2 has been more expensive.

Really? How do you configure db2 to get it more expensive than oracle? The only time db2 really seems to become expensive is when a project specifies UDB ESE and should be using workgroup. Then you can find folks spending $25k+ / CPU when they only really need about $7k+ / CPU. Man, I remember the bad old days of the oracle power unit - when a theoretical 4x1000 mhz smp server could cost you $400,000! At the time I was reselling oracle and our solutions were all twisted up by the database licensing costs - which forced us to come up with ways to use minimum licensing even if we wanted additional boxes, etc. At that time the equiv db2 solution was something like $80,000. Of course, I liked oracle 8i quite a bit more than db2 5-6. But now that we're comparing db2 8 to oracle 9-10, it seems that db2's simplicity and cost structure is giving it an edge on some projects.

I know oracle was forced to really drop its prices - probably due to dot-com collapses, and competition from db2. Any chance that the oracle folks would "meet or beat" db2 prices? Maybe that's a good strategy to get better pricing on my oracle projects?

Also - think we're going to see database prices continually dropping now? I'm seeing a heck of a lot of projects shifting from oracle & db2 to mysql & postrgesql. Now, the majority of these projects are small & non-critical - but still, at the end of the day it has to be a loss of revenue for the database players... Received on Sun Jun 20 2004 - 17:59:12 CDT