Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Oracle Licencing IV: The Carnage Continues!

The Register in its delightfully sarcastic way breaks the news of the latest refinement to the Oracle licencing model. Basically,
Sun's UltraSPARC T1 chip will be multiplied by a factor of .25...the dual-core x86 chips from Intel and AMD will be multiplied by a factor of .50, whilst "all other" multi-core servers - mostly the Unix crowd - will follow the .75 rule.
Contrary to the their normal high journalistic standards El Reg don't provide a source for this story but the press release is on the Oracle Corporate site.

This is not quite the revolutionary new pricing strategy Larry hinted at in his OOW2K5 keynote. Instead it further muddies the waters when it comes to costing a server installation without helping those customers for whom none of the current pricing models are suitable. Since you ask, yes, my current client is one such case. They have lots of database applications but almost no Oracle installations. Looking at the roll-out of my current project, the Oracle licensing costs are a substantial part of the problem. The per user model doesn't work with web-based systems. The per employee model doesn't work with a workforce of forty thousand most of whom will use the system maybe once a week. Which only leaves the complex, expensive and - yes - unfair per processor model.

Upgrade your server and pay more to Oracle for the privilege? Hmm, it's a toughie.

3 comments:

Laurent Schneider said...

upgrade to oracle database express edition? or maybe write a mail to larry...

Justin said...

I'm curious-- other than a concurrent user licensing model, can you think of other licensing options that are more fair without becoming a record-keeping nightmare?

Anonymous said...

Upgrade to PostgreSQL or MySQL.
Send Larry a postcard, thanking him for driving you away with his arcane pricing structure