Database Business Problems at Oracle?

abb_road writes "Wall Street responded to yesterday's report of a 42% rise in profits by pushing Oracle's stock down. Despite a 77% increase in applications business, investors are worried that Oracle's core database business remains comparatively stagnant. Though Ellison claims that the DB business will grow in double digits over the next few years, it seems that more companies are switching to open source rather than paying Oracle $40,000 a processor."

Comments

Prices listed wrong - some clarification

[Belgarath52]

Look - I'm as much an open source fan as anyone, but the fact is that the $40,000 figure is misleading. Oracle's so-called Standard Edition One is basically the full thing - it just can't do clustering, and can't do more than two processors.

I'm sure someone will point out another nitpick that it can't do, but the practical fact is that you can buy Standard Edition One for $5000/processor and get a fully functional database.

For the price-aware, you can even buy a 1, 2, or 3 year license for something like $2-3K.

And, no, Oracle isn't paying me to shill for them. I just work for a company that uses Oracle, and I hate to see the "Oracle costs $40,000" meme repeated here.

off-the-bat comparison

[^Z]

Oracle's strong points over PG:
- speed
- mutli-way replication
- multi-node clusters
- advanced SQL (cubes, trees, etc)
- finer details of physical data layout (cluster tables, partitioned tables, etc)
- stability (unless you use the bleeding edge, which is brittle, alas)

PG's strong points Oracle:
- price :) (probably including support)
- relative simplicity and lower resource consumption
- easier administration
- good compatibility with Oracle's SQL ;) (easier migration)
- source availability

Also, PG is perceived as less stable than Oracle, and even less than MySQL. It will take time to dispel this (if untrue).