Blog Aggregator - Amardeep Sidhu

Recently a question came up on Oracle-L, but to tell you the truth it might have been anywhere about how on earth  one justified Oracle’s licensing.  The question was

To get an idea of how much it would cost to license a point of sale database on Oracle and commodity hardware/software, we requested a quote for a 2-node RAC on Dell 2950’s 2 Dual core’s per server.  Quote was $306k.

Well if I were the business I’d choke as well. That’s an indefensible software cost for that sort of install. I costed up a quad-core E5430 version of the above hardware, complete with, RHEL5, 16gb RAM and redundant SAN connections. Total cost of the hardware (but excluding the SAN/NFS storage that you’d use for RAC) just about $20,000. That’s for the two servers. So the questioner was being quoted 15x the cost of the hardware (and 3 years worth or so of DBA time at US rates last time I looked) for the Oracle software. Any time you see the software costing more than dedicated admins and an order of magnitude higher than the hardware/OS then you have to work very hard to justify the cost.

There is an alternative though Oracle Standard Edition will do all of the above for you on that hardware. The Oracle store quote for the dual quad-core machines I listed above was $65k Now that’s a much more defensible - though still high cost. Now it may be that the EE only features (DataGuard, Flashback Table (not query), block level recovery, the pl/sql function result cache in 11 and so on) are worth nearly $250k for the questioners business, but you do have to wonder. Of course on my quad-core based install the EE license fee would be $468,000

Update following Herod’s comment and to make my quote clear. This is the oracle store quote for 8 processor licenses for both EE and RAC based on 50% of the total number of cores in the system. Next to it is the US pricing for the hardware

I’ve just released an article covering the Miscellaneous New Features section of the OCP upgrade exam. It contains a rather random assortment of stuff including:

Online Table Redefinition Enhancements
Enhanced Finer Grained Dependency Management
DDL With the WAIT Option (DDL_LOCK_TIMEOUT)
Invisible Indexes
Query Result Cache
Adaptive Cursor Sharing
Temporary Tablespace Enhancements

I was toying with the idea of putting each section out as […]

I went round and round with Oracle Support creating spin-off TARs and transferring it from one group to another. I finally found an article that said one of the 11.5.x versions was really executing fnd_web_sec.validate_login() under the covers.

Might as well give that a try, SINCE I’M STILL WAITING.

So I ran the function on my GUEST user and sure enough, it came back with a “Y” which indicated

In a very clear way: I hate to say this.

But,

I TOLD YOU SO, a long time ago!

I’ve been saying precisely this for more than 5 years now.

Chris has finally put the finger on the dot and said what almost everyone else has already figured out for years!

Amazing it’s taken this long for it to dawn into the minds of Oracle’s marketing that the whole thing is overly complex, a horrible

It’s been a few years since I last read this (pdf) article from Connie Dialeris Green of Oracle about how to use Statspack - and I’d forgotten how good it was.
You are bound to find a couple of details which are now outdated - it was published in 2001 and there’s a point (for example) […]