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Open Source Databases "50% Cheaper"
pete314 writes, "Open source databases can cut the total cost of ownership of a database by up to 60% compared to the cost of running proprietary databases from Oracle, Microsoft or IBM. According to data collected by Forrester Research, the savings average about 50%. Open source databases however still struggle to reach mission-critical enterprise applications because enterprises perceive them to be less secure and stable."
But if you're starting from scratch on a new project and your current projections don't indicate you'll need a lot of those features, now the PHB's will have finally heard that free databases should be considered. We deployed on SQL Server and Oracle after developing on Postgres (because Postgres was about twice as fast when running the test suite). Postgres scaled better than Oracle on any single box configuration, and customer data sets never required more than 100GB databases in the worst case.
We were forced to deploy on Oracle and SQL Server because none of our customers thought that Postgres was enterprise qualified. Now, some of them might.
Regards,
Ross
"German Lotto Company Plays it Safe with MySQL Cluster"
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http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/news/article
And their application is not critical either, just win or lose.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
This is a pretty trivial article which seems driven by ingres.
Anyhow, a few things that I'd consider:
1. since as the author mentions the open source databases aren't ideal for mission critical applications (yet), then many organizations will find themselves supporting multiple databases. Say, oracle for financials & crm & the corporate warehouse and postgresql for a variety of smaller projects. Makes sense in many ways - except: oracle is already free for the small databases anyway, and now you need the dbas to support multiple products. This is going to increase your labor costs - not decrease it.
2. for many large analytical databases (data warehouses, etc) the cost of using open source are actually higher than closed source. This is because db2, oracle, etc are better at using the hardware than the open source alternatives. They've got better optimizers, parallelism, far better partitioning, better better pool management, automatic query rewrite, etc. So, a $100k oracle lisense running on a $100-200k 4-way (i know, assumes discount) will out-perform postgresql (free) on a 16-way ($1m) in many ways.
3. for some applications mysql could be more expensive than oracle. Ok, not just because you need to do far more testing with mysql to make sure that none of the wacky silent errors are affecting your code. But also because of the odd licensing - that requires its own faq and tips to just license the product if you can't figure it out. Then there's enterprise db - not very familiar with this one, but I doubt that it is free. Meanwhile, at the low-end the big-three database vendors all support free products. So, whether or not you pay more may very well depend on how you use the software.
Of course, if you're at a company like mine, and get to bypass purchasing and just review the license & install - you probably are saving a vast amount of money after all.
The reason why enterprises don't like open source is because they HAVE been insecure and less feature laden. Anyone can write a database. It takes skill and $$$ however to write a secure database with enterprise features such as failover, 100% availabilty, hot backups, massive scalabilty over the planet, full support, and even more have had all these features PROVEN.
... I'll pay for something, and have support and a legal avenue if it falls over.
Being nearly there doesn't cut it at all. Being proven does. I wouldn't put my multi billion $ business on the line with some piece of free software developed by who knows with what agenda and debatable level of quality
The news is that someone has quantified how much cheaper the open source solutions are. Obviously, a free database costs 0% of a commercial database when you just look at buying/licensing the software, but that's not the only cost you have. This study factors in other costs of running a database, and then concludes that "open source databases" are 50% "cheaper". (Scare quotes, because I haven't RTFA, so I don't know what they are comparing with what)
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
A number of companies like CommandPrompt, EnterpriseDB, and even Sun Microsystems offer support contract for Postgres. The latter two even offer 24x7 enterprise class support. All three companies seem to be working hard with the community to advance and grow the postgres community. It rocks! The MySQL stuff seems to be a lot more closed. Yeah there are a lot more ISVs but I like the mailing lists, community and the environment around postgres. Also the comment about really low admin is spot on with the right contrib stuff it is way easier than both Oracle and MySQL.
Except that if you chat to MySQL (the company) they'll tell you that they do have high performance scalability, fail-over clustering and all the other things. However, they're also keen to charge you a licence fee for that stuff, and support costs at the level you'd expect for qualified professional support staff.
So TCO pretty rapidly does become an issue.
Oracle lost a sale to us because despite having a product that would give us far better performance the TCO argument didn't work out. Frankly we'd rather just chuck another CPU and a few gig of RAM at the problem than give the money to Oracle.
I like Oracle, I want to use Oracle, but if they're 40% more expensive than the alternative (taking into account licencing, support costs, hardware, training, recruitment, maintenance overhead, etc) then I'm not doing my job properly if I recommend we pay that premium ahead of an alternative open source database that still meets our technical requirements.
Of course, the same applies the other way. I wouldn't recommend we use Postgres because we have no skillsets in-house, and recruitment would hurt, and it just doesn't give us anything our existing DBMS lack.
If TCO wasn't a concern we'd all get a pay rise...
I've had experiece with MySQL, Informix and MS SQL Server as both DBA and developer. Recently I've dabbled a little with the free version of Ingres.
Of those, SQL Server's the easiest to use. Followed by MySQL (with phpMyAdmin), Informix (with gui) and Ingres. SQL Server and MySQL are simple enough that even someone who's not too familiar with databases (they'd still need to understand the relational model, mind) can use them.
If you're using your database as a simple datastore, with all of the logic being in a connected application then go with MySQL. It's a days work to install and learn all most people'll need to know. Which is massively cheaper than licencing of the other databases.
Overall, SQL server the most cost effective option when you require functionality over normal SQL, but under that provided by say building a java application. All thanks to the functionality provided by Transact-SQL. It's not perfect though, I'm of the opinion that Microsoft should move closer to VB/VBA here (C# would be nice, but too difficult for some MS DBAs).
An example would be DB warehousing: you can easily script everything you'd need to do to clean/import data from disparate sources in TSQL, without the expense of building an application and abstraction layer etc etc.
Oh, and SQL Server also has fantastic documentation out of the box, with two excellent books available that tell you everything you'll ever need to know (and make you an excellent DBA): Inside SQL 2000 and SQL Server 2000 Programming.