Re: oracle EE pricing

From: Mark Brinsmead <pythianbrinsmead_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:51:56 -0700
Message-ID: <cf3341711001182051w141563f9vd83911bd4970f15b_at_mail.gmail.com>

Purchasing new SE-1 licenses versus EE Support pays off in the first 6 months or so, I think. With Standard Edition (proper), the payback is probably about 2 years.

Providing you can live with the loss of features (many sites cannot), it looks like simple arithmetic. The math should be simple enough for even a manager to understand. :-)

If declining revenue makes a (short-term) capital outlays difficult, there are other strategies -- for example, cancel support for a year, and *then*apply the savings to new licenses. (In fact, if you tell your sales rep
that this is what you plan to do, you *might* find them suddenly more flexible.) Alternatively, consider *term* licenses for a year or two -- this allows you to start realising *immediate* savings on support costs, and use those savings in the future to purchase perpetual SE (SE-1) licenses and step off the term-license treadmill.

What drives me nuts is when people fail to consider SE-1 (versus EE) when making the decision of Oracle versus MySQL. Yeah, $10K to license Oracle SE-1 on a 12-core database server is more than "free", but it is a miniscule cost in most development budgets. Especially if you are starting with something that already runs on Oracle or if you already have Oracle skills in-house.

It is saddening to see the number of people who abandon Oracle -- or refuse to even consider it -- apparently based on the cost of EE licenses without even considering the far more modest SE-1. (And you can build a pretty darned powerful database server on SE-1 these days!)

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 9:57 AM, Barbara Baker <barb.baker_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> OK to spec SE for new projects, but what about those of us with declining
> revenues? We would love to downgrade our licenses from EE to SE, and keep
> oracle, but oracle will have none of it. We are asked to shelve all of our
> EE licenses and buy new SE licenses. All of that money for our EE licenses
> in the trash can.
>
> At that juncture, Postgre/MySQL or even SQL Server start looking mighty
> attractive.
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 7:55 AM, vit.spinka <vit.spinka_at_vitspinka.cz>wrote:
>
>> >
>>
>>
>> I think the Standard Edition is underrated, and could save the day quite
>> often. It's just that most of us are used to EE and don't even think about
>> SE when thinking about new projects... True, you get RAC, you loose all the
>> packs, partitioning...
>> But quite often you can get around those limitations, there is even a
>> product emulating DataGuard for SE (after all, SE has all the recovery stuff
>> too, it's just missing the automation).
>>
>> Vit
>>
>
>

-- 
Cheers,
-- Mark Brinsmead
  Senior DBA,
  The Pythian Group
  http://www.pythian.com/blogs

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l

Received on Mon Jan 18 2010 - 22:51:56 CST