Re: Which product?

"Mark Townsend" <markbtownsend_at_home.com> wrote in message news:B7E7BA58.19159%markbtownsend_at_home.com...
> in article Nxmw7.8759$sI1.48760_at_NewsReader, Neil Truby at
> neil.truby_at_ardenta.com wrote on 10/8/01 11:43 AM:
>
> > the answer's obvious, or posted somewhere obvious.
>
> Neil - see http://otn.oracle.com/products/oracle8i/pdf/8i_fam.pdf for the
> differences between Standard and Enterprise.
>
> I'd guess that for the DW, you would want Enterprise (especially if it's
an
> SMP box), for the Financials, you may get away with Standard. Note that if
> it's Oracle Financials, the price already includes the database (subject
to
> usage rules).

Mark is probably correct about this. Things that may bite you in a data warehouse environment that aren't available in standard edition include

Materialized Views
Function Based Indexes
Star Joins (I think)
BitMapped Indices

Things that may bite you in a financials situation

Standby database
Multiple archive log destinations.
and maybe some of the above for things like lookup tables.

In addition you thrid party supplier may *require* one or other version of Oracle.

> In all cases (but especially the DW) you probably want to look at named
user
> pricing.

I'm not at all sure that this is the case. If you plan on having more than 50 users per processor in your setup then processor based licensing is more appropriate. Our core financial application works quite well on a 4 processor NT box for 2500 end users. This is because we have a very low concurrency. Named user applies to every machine that is capable of connecting to the database. For this reason named user is also unlikely to be appropriate for e-commerce based applications - though admittedly that doesn't seem to be your current need. Finally there is a minimum number of named users per processor for the machine that the database runs on. so if you have a DW accessed by 5 people in accounts but it is an 8 processor box you'd still have to pay (as I read the license) for 80 named user licenses.

You also stated that Oracle UK don't seem to be especially interested in either talking you through the differences or helping you on price. I'd say that that was par for the course. (things may get better if you are paying multi-million license fees I guess). If you can try and negotiate a deal close to a quarter end. Sales folk at Oracle have quarterly targets and in my experience will offer bigger discounts to make those sales. You will probably have to do the maths on which license is best for you however.

In short my opinion - and it is mine not necessarily that of my employer - is that Oracle is a great product with reasonable support at an excessive price with an uninterested sales force.

--
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
Audit Commission UK