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."

Comments

Re:This just in!

[rossifer]

This just in, 0 is less than 100!

Seriously did someone really need to do a whole study to determine this and then write an article telling the world?

If you need clustering, failover, remote backup, separation of indices from data, you make heavy use of materialized views, and you need to retrain your DBA's on a new database, there are a lot of people who still say that it will cost you more to use Postgres than Oracle. Don't even think about MySQL.

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

your mileage may vary

[kpharmer]

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.