Oracle Pricing [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Oracle Pricing [pdf]

oracle.com

22 pointslarrykubin19 comments

Oracle is a business that sells products which in turn have prices? Wake me up for the film at 11.

Agreed, not sure why this is getting up votes at all on the topic. If you're running a DB that processes $100M in transactions annually is paying $250k in licenses and $50k/yr in maintenance unreasonable? Of course that pricing for the software isn't for every use case but they aren't trying to sell to the entire market.

It's unreasonable if it doesn't give you $250k + $50k a year in benefits and there are free alternatives available. There are some cases where it makes sense, but I think it's good to have a discussion about what kind of benefits it provides to make it worth the extra money.

Walking: free. Car: not free. Therefore walk everywhere since a free alternative is available? The thing is, 250k of benefits as two and a half engineers. I don't know Oracle software at all, but I imagine there are a number of use cases where their advantage over mysql would be at least that much.

Walking isn't always better, but it can be a viable alternative and there are options in between. As far as I know there is no cheap alternative to Oracle RAC, but I know that there are cases where using a combination of Hadoop and PostgreSQL can replace an Oracle DB.

Seems like you agree with the existing point, "Walking (the free database alternative) isn't always better ... As far as I know there is no cheap alternative to Oracle RAC (the same point can be made to no cheap alternative for having a car which is better in some situations as you just agreed)."

This doesn't mean the open source community should just give up on making a database capable of meeting the needs RAC does today -- at the same time it also doesn't mean business should only use the free alternative when it is a more efficient use of resources for them to purchase RAC.

Yes, I agree with the existing point and was just adding some additional opinion.

It might be good to have a discussion like that, in theory, at least. But I rather doubt posting Oracle's price list, context-free is some attempt to have or start a discussion. More likely, it's impressively unimaginative karma-whoring.

at least they're up front about it rather than saying "type your contact information in so we can have a 'sales representative' spam your inbox and voice mail" like a lot of enterprise software companies do. cf. #10 in http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html

Oracle Database Enterprise Edition: $47,500 per processor, plus $10k yearly update/maintenance.

This explains that http://people.forbes.com/profile/larry-ellison/60466

Oracle's other database, MySQL, only cost's $0.1 in download costs, + ~$1 yearly download costs for updates.

Yes, but I've heard that it also doesn't work very well.

This list is incomplete - it only contains software that Oracle considers "off the shelf". Products in their lineup that are targeted at very specific niches are not listed.

Without naming specific products (I'm probably under some kind of NDA though I don't work for Uncle Larry), to give you an idea: products that are sold exclusively through RFPs and the like are less likely to be on a "this is what it costs" list.

Does anyone know what you get you buy the Berkeley DB products? I'm mostly curious if they've actually added new/cool things that aren't available in the open-source releases, or if you're purchasing licensing rights for commercial use, support, etc.

Oracle's standard operating procedure is to double each salesperson's quota every year.

How do you switch to the HTML5 version?

It takes a bit longer for the HTML5 version to be generated I've noticed.

If you want to view the Oracle price list in HTML5, you will need to fill this form first and an Oracle account manager will come back to you with a price quote for the HTML5 URLs, per CPU core.

If your organization deploys clusters of iOS devices for surfing HN, and enterprise knowledge acquisition; Oracle can provide an in-house demonstration of the URLs and their reachability. Our support staff can provide accurate support and trouble-shooting of rendering quality at the pixel level.

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