Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

> 2. Support costs.
>
> This, with #1, is what you pay to the vendor, and often significantly
> outweighs the purchase cost. Sure, Ingres may be free to "purchase",
> but what about support costs if/when something goes wrong?
>
> At one time, support came free with purchase. Nowadays, it is swinging
> heavily in the other direction, especially with commodity (read: open
> source) software. The cost of 24/7 within-the-hour support is
> significant, but so is its peace of mind.

I agree support costs money.
But this is not product dependent.
It depends on the support you need.

Mature products give you peace of mind, and Ingres has a long history.

> 3. Development costs.
>
> This is what the purchaser spends to integrate the software into their
> infrastructure. This may be a lonely IT tech in a closet somewhere
> figuring out how to get the software installed, or it may be an entire
> software development engineering team with a few DBAs trying to
> architect their business model inside the database. Generally
> speaking, this outweighs both #1 and #2 together.
>
> If, then, the database product provides functions, stored procedures,
> and other database-isms ("Oracle-isms" or "DB2-isms" for the newsgroups
> getting this cross-posted) which save you 2 weeks of development time
> in the pursuit of your business goals, right there you've saved a
> significant portion of your purchase cost of any of the "expensive"
> database vendors. I know that 2 weeks of my time is worth way more
> than $400 - although I suspect most DB2 or Oracle deployments cost more
> than $400 in purchase costs. Even with $20,000 in purchase costs, if
> it saves me 4 weeks in development time, and a corresponding 1-2 weeks
> in testing time (since I shouldn't need to debug that function - IBM or
> Oracle have already done that for me), I've saved a significant portion
> of that purchase cost... at least if I'm contracting. And we get to
> market (deployment) 5-6 weeks earlier. If this new database
> application is supposed to save the whole corporation 1 hour of work
> per person per month, and there are 1000 employees, that's 1250-1500
> hours saved in those extra 5-6 weeks, and it only takes an average of
> $10/hour to pay for the rest of the purchase price of $20,000. In
> other words, the "purchase price" is FREE at the point where the
> application would be deployed if I didn't have those extra built-in
> functions.
>
> And it's this last area that you seem to keep ignoring. I don't think
> it's me who is having trouble with the thread...

Again, these costs are entirely dependent on people, not product.

More importantly OpenSource software is yours to change. Received on Fri Oct 29 2004 - 10:07:08 CEST