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Comment by matdrewin | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much it would cost in licensing to run an Oracle DB on that kind of hardware.

Oracle are increasingly moving to hugely punative licensing schemes for running their DB on non-Oracle platforms, up and down the stack; run a single vCPU guest on a VMware farm? Fuck you, license all your hypervisors. Unless you want to buy SPARC, the you can do sub-capacity licensing.

Time will tell whether customers will prefer to get reamed for Oracle hardware to avoid some Oracle software costs, or simply switch to DBs with less tied pricing models.

Switch to what? We send a seven figure number every year to Oracle but we currently see no alternative.

SQLServer only runs Windows, their licensing model gets more and more Oracle like every year (for us currently "buying" SQLServer from internal IT isn't much cheaper than Oracle anymore). And you have to maintain you own JDBC driver.

DB2 is just the same thing as Oracle.

PostgreS does not compare.

Then there's the migration itself. Firstly your application will be "tuned for Oracle" over several years. So you'll use every proprietary Oracle feature that gives you additional performance (subpartitions, parallel query execution, optimizer hints, manual column statistics, connect by, listagg, …). Which makes porting fun. You can't assess the performance of your application on the new database until you're done porting. Likely the most performance critical parts will have the most Oracle dependencies. You won't have any experience performance tuning the new database. And you won't have any experience operating the new database (monitoring, trouble shooting, backups, HA, failover, maintenance, …).

Take all this together and we're pretty much locked into Oracle. So I see us go with Oracle hardware rather than switch to some other database. Which has the additional benefit of getting rid of the "engineered" SAN by the internal IT which is slower than a single SSD.

> DB2 is just the same thing as Oracle.

DB2 supports sub-capacity licensing on a wide variety of virtualisation platforms, unlike Oracle. This may or may not matter to you. It does to me under a variety of circumstances.

DB2 also has much more granularity in licensing before you have to ramp up to ASE, which, again, may make a big difference to you (many equivalent features are available a significantly lower price points).

> So you'll use every proprietary Oracle feature that gives you additional performance (subpartitions, parallel query execution, optimizer hints, manual column statistics, connect by, listagg, …).

More than a few of these are trivial conversions to other DBs. CONNECT BY is hardly magic, neither's parallel query execution or listagg.

Operational concerns are probably the biggest one.

> Take all this together and we're pretty much locked into Oracle.

If you're in a business where running your company on whatever schedule Oracle chooses to offer you, that won't be a problem.

Tuning is one thing. What if you have a lot of business logic in a few ten or hundred thousands of lines of PL/SQL. What will it cost you to rewrite that in Pg/SQL or T-SQL?

I must say that my first reaction on reading the headline was, Gee, 32 cores * .75 * $40,000, and you're looking at most of a million in licensing per CPU up front, well over $100 thousand per year support. Oracle give away the machines and do very nicely on this one. (Calculations not guaranteed.)

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