Re: Oracle costs and requirements

Matt Bailey wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I risk sounding like an idiot here, but I'm a database newbie and I
> don't know the first thing about Oracle - not a jot!
>
> I'm currently doing a University assignment that requires me to cost
> out an Oracle database for a company, along with all its trimmings,
> but I've been unable to find any information on the web.

http://store.oracle.com will give you list prices which, in reality, are near meaningless except as a starting point for discussions.

> It's a small company and its data requirements are very small. I'm
> wondering if anyone here can help me out with my estimation. I need to
> know:
>
> A. What's required for an Oracle database?
>
> So far I'm assuming:
>
> A server (any particular kind?)

Depends? OLTP? OLAP? What transaction volume? What size transactions? What data? How many simultaneous users?

> The Oracle 10g software

This question gets you down to a list of say 100 or so products. What Oracle software? Just in databases alone Oracle sells Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, SE1, a few more variants, TimesTen, and Rdb.

> An Oracle license (don't have a clue about this)

Neither will anyone else given the sparsity of what you've posted.

> but is there anything else?

A huge amount. Your professor should be ashamed to have put you up to this with so little background. And if you would like to refer that person to me I would be happy to explain it to them. This is an assignment that has little value except if the point is to prove that you don't know as much as you should to do this properly.

> B. How much does all this stuff cost?

Depends on numerous factors.

> I hope someone's got some advice, cause I'm a bit clueless at the
> minute. Cheers,
>
> Matt

I wonder whether your professor is too? I'd suggest you go back and ask for clarification on the assignment.

For example ... what is the Service Level Agreement with the system's users? Does it need to support a 7x24 web site? Does it need to be able to failover to a secondary data center?

If the point is just to throw some garbage together and claim success then I'd suggest yougo to store.oracle.com and price out a minimum license on Oracle SE1, load it on WhiteBox Linux on the least expensive Dell or Gateway box you can find, perhaps 2.8MHz with a gig of RAM and declare success.

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)