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Database Business Problems at Oracle?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the good-but-not-good-enough dept.

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."

5 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. I don't know about open source... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But my company is looking closely at SqlServer right now. We just went through an Oracle license Inquisition and like the article said, it's about $40k a license or just under $1000 per named user. OTOH we can buy a SqlServer license for around $5k and have as many users as we want. T-Sql is a poor replacement for PL/SQL, but money talks.

    Before you go all Slashbot on me, realize that my company is very conservative with respect to technology, so Open Source is unfortunately not an option here...

  2. Postgresql vs. Oracle flame-war.... GO! by shilad · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've heard a lot of debate about Postgresql vs. MySql that doesn't need to be re-hashed for the 1000'th time. On the other hand, I haven't heard much on Oracle vs. Postgresql. I have used Postgresql quite a bit, and think it's wonderful.

    What is Postgresql missing that Oracle has? What does Oracle have that Postgres is missing? When do these features matter?

    Let the flaming begin...

    1. Re:Postgresql vs. Oracle flame-war.... GO! by archen · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Postgresql doesn't have some enterprise level features that Oracle has. I mean if you have a bazillion terabyte database and require clustering and other uber-features, then Postgresql isn't even in the same ballpark. And that's where the biggest margins are which is why Oracle does okay for itself.

      Since 90% of database needs don't even approach that, Posgresql acts as a fine replacement, and 70% of installs could do fine with Mysql as well.

      The thing I wonder most is the fact that between MySQL,Postgres, and MS SQL Server is how bad will Oracle be marginalized. This is the same situation Sun is finding itself in. You're one of the few who can play at the top end and do okay for yourself only to find the bottom end eroded and the middle ground a losing battle. As time wears on, your R&D becomes weaker and weaker and more applications don't even bother with supporting your stuff.

      Where does that leave Oracle? Hard to say, but if Sun can't pull out and follows SGI - then I'd say the path to Oracle will be quite clear. Perhaps that's why Oracle is trying to cut off MySQL right now while it still can. Wouldn't surprise me if Oracle gains a compatability layer to emulate MySQL though.

  3. Re:It's about sales, not technology or open source by captain_craptacular · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They may be effective, but Oracles sales organization is annoying as hell. I've downloaded many things from Oracles web site, and unfortunately my account *HAD* my real contact information on it. Invariably within 48 hours of any download I would get a call from an Oracle "Technician" asking in broken English if I needed any assistance with whatever I downloaded. The conversation would quickly turn into a mini-license audit, where the "Technician" was more interested in our existing installs and what our licensing was like than how the downloaded product was working. One the rare occasion that I actually could have used some help, the "technician" wouldn't be able to answer the simplest question. It got so bad that the corporate office sent a memo around saying don't talk to anyone from oracle for any reason, just forward them to someone at the home office whos job it is to deal with them.

    It's almost like Oracle is doing everything they possibly can to promote MS Sql. They just went gestapo on us about licensing and decided that every person who walks up to a kiosk running an app with an oracle back end needs to be a named user, that or we need to buy per processor licensing. $80,000 for our dual proc backend box buys a lot developer time to port to a different database.

    --
    They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
  4. A little perspective on Oracle pricing... by CatOne · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Oracle has a couple initiatives going on... RAC and ASM. Here's about how it works (these are BROAD numbers, mind you).

    6 years ago, before the .com crash, your average back-end IT infrastructure had a few main pieces:

    Cisco networking gear. Sun servers. EMC disks. Oracle database.

    So you paid a few mil for the network. A few mil for the servers. A few mil for the EMC disks. And a mil or two for Oracle at $10K/cpu (list)

    NOW, Oracle says "we have 10g RAC, use us to replicate across CPUs. Don't pay $3M + $1M/year for Sun support... buy a rack of Linux servers (or blades) and hardware costs $250K versus $3M... support is nearly free because if a machine fails, just pull it from the rack, throw it in the trash, and swap a new one in there.'

    And lo, they promoted "Linux is unbreakable" and charged an extra $10K/cpu for this service. Total end cost to customer is LESS than the old solution, and it's way FASTER.

    Then, they have another initiative... use ASM and the low-cost storage initiative... use the database to span multiple disks, and handle all the replication/redundancy. Don't pay EMC $3M + $1M/year for Symmetrix support. Put it on lower cost gear (Clariion, Nexsan ATAboy, or *gasp* Apple Xserve RAID even). Spindle speeds are slower, so you buy 2x as many spindles and get the same IOPS. Hey, you save a couple million and pay more per CPU (say $40K/cpu list) for the whole shootin' match.

    So your cost goes from (again, broad numbers)

    $2M Cisco + $3M Sun + $3M EMC + $2M Oracle = $10M + maintenance

    to:

    $2M Cisco + $500K Dell + $500K Dell or Apple + $4M Oracle = $7M + maintenance

    You save $3M a year! Of course Oracle gets a bigger cut. But it's "win-win."

    Of course, there is the one subtlety here -- you are now using Oracle's RAC and ASM so you can use cheap hardware and storage. This stuff is totally proprietary, so if Oracle comes back come renewal time and doubles your per-CPU cost for the software, it's a helluva lot harder to rip it out than just porting stored-procedure code.