Re: Pricing question?

> But, essentially, you are saying that it doesn't matter how many licences
> you (as a VAR) "sell", Oracle's going to charge the price that they charge
> regardless if you sell 10 systems per annum or 1000?

That, I can't tell you. We don't sell a huge number of units, so it's quite possible that Oracle didn't deign to give us a deal. Your mileage may vary.

> > I'm a big fan of Oracle, but for both political & technical reasons,
> Technical I understand, would you care to expand on the "political" bit?

"Political", meaning, "not technical, but I'm going to give you a hard time about it any way". I tried to give examples in my previous post, but basically it just boils down to the fact that Oracle is a large, well known piece of software with lots of support requirements & knowledge needed to make it function. Some companies fear this - they don't want to be "on the hook" to keep an Oracle instance running. Others might be the opposite - they'll be busybodies who think they know more about your product than you do because they took some Oracle tuning classes ("We've been monitoring your system - you're cache hit ratio should be way higher"), or because they have standards ("All Oracle instances on our site need to have a schema that follows these naming conventions"). Most of this stuff is crazy nonsense, but it's a something you will have to deal with once you start using a well known entity like Oracle.

You also can't underestimate simple product partisanship. Some places may have some middle manager who made a big case a few years back why Database X was better than Oracle in every way, and now that they're buying your product, suddenly this guy needs to back up his assertations. Trashing your system before the fact may be easier than defending his own.

> But, as I pointed out, he also asked what would look best
> on his own c.v. and the answer had to be Oracle.

True.

> Don't go for EE, but rather Standard?

If it makes the per unit price point come in at what you want, and still does everything you need, then go for it. When I say "high availability", though, I'm bending the Oracle lexicon a bit - what I really mean is flexibility &scalability, which even Standard will give you compared to a product like MySQL. One factor that traditionally was a hassle for Oracle compared to a lot of others was the huge client footprint required to connect to it - they pretty much depended on you using their Oracle Client installation utility on every user's machine & taking 100MB of space on disk. With 10, there's a much more svelte client option available ("Instant Client"), which solves this.

> I'm also thinking of saying that to him (this being dependent on a
> "translation" of the C/C++ of the original programme and whether much
> processing is needed on the db side, or whether it's all done in code,
> in which case, they might be able to use the fact that they can point
> their system at any db a selling point.

Yeah, I was thinking of that in your original post - given that their old system was C/C++ system written by one guy, it's probably not the most sophisticated thing in terms of features & flexibility. I'm sure just about any modern rdbms out there would be up to the task of taking its place. Received on Tue May 31 2005 - 15:50:42 CDT