Should Dual Cores Require Dual Licenses?

sebFlyte writes "The multi-core debate continues. HP and Intel have laid into Oracle and (to a lesser extent) BEA over their their treatment of multi-core processers. Oracle's argument that 'a core is a CPU and therefore you should pay us all your money' isn't a popular one, it would seem. What does Oracle's stubbornness imply for the industry as a whole, with multicore chips coming to the fore so strongly?"

Comments

Re:Portable code solves this problem

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I also have strong abstraction from the database layer. We wrote an abstraction layer in 1997 when we were using a small-time RDBMS which subsequently went under. The switch to Oracle in 1999 was a piece of cake; write a new server, badda-bing, badda-boom: clients can talk oracle now, all apps work.

Fortunately, Oracle's still doing the job for us, but new installs are getting pricey. We are seriously looking at either PostgresSQL or MySQL for future work. Either will work, as long as they support the SELECT .. FOR UPDATE; UPDATE; ROLLBACK|COMMIT; paradigm. And easily support hot backup snapshots. Oracle almost does this for you with archive logs, although sanity requires coldsnapping it every six months or so.

I wish jdbc/odbc had been around in 1997 (on BSDI and Solaris). I'm thinking that maybe I should replace the client interface guts with an odbc abstraction.. Hmm.. I wonder what the performance hit would be?