Oracle Offers Custom Intel Chips and Unanticipated Costs

jfruh (300774) writes "For some time, Intel has been offering custom-tweaked chips to big customers. While most of the companies that have taken them up on this offer, like Facebook and eBay, put the chips into servers meant for internal use, Oracle will now be selling systems running on custom Xeons directly to end users. Those customers need to be careful about how they configure those systems, though: in the new Oracle 12c, the in-memory database option, which costs $23,000 per processor, is turned on by default."

Comments

Sales flow chart.

[serviscope_minor]

Here is a flow chart to decide whether to buy Oracle products:

<Do you enjoy being utterly fucked over?> Yes--> Buy Oracle. No--> Run for the hills.

I've been at two places which have been Oracle'd. It's like being pwn3d except you end up $10,000,000 poorer. You also end up with less dignity than the inevitable tebagging you might get in Halo.

Re:Sales flow chart.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two RDBMS products [1] for the top end. One is Oracle, the other is DB/2. Neither is cheap.

Oracle is more tunable, DB/2 tends to "just work" for the most part. Of course, IBM can hand you a decent DB/2 stackin one package. Not cheap, but DB/2 running on a zSeries or a POWER7 is going to take some work to bring to its knees.

As for MS SQL, it is getting better. There are tasks where I'd never think of using it in the past where it can easily handle today.

[1]: We are meaning ones that have some ACID compliance. NoSQL has its uses and some DB makers report "ACID compliance over time"... whatever that means.

Re:Sales flow chart.

[Anonymous Coward]

How does PostGreSQL compare? Pretty well. I used to be an Oracle DBA (between Oracle 6 and 10g) but now much prefer Postgres. At the very high end of things, Oracle may well perform better. But Postgres is much better to work with, has excellent support organisations (unlike Oracle who will charge you a fortune to mostly just waste your time), is very feature-rich, and is generally a pleasure to use. If you have such data and transaction volumes that Postgres simple won't cut it, you should probably question whether Relational is the right paradigm.

Give Postgres a try, it's pretty easy to get started. And if anyone tells you MySQL is faster, ignore them until they prove it using your application and realistic transaction volumes.

Frankly I wouldn't touch Oracle with someone else's 10 foot pole.

Re:Sales flow chart.

[Charliemopps]

Here is a flow chart to decide whether to buy Oracle products:

<Do you enjoy being utterly fucked over?> Yes--> Buy Oracle. No--> Run for the hills.

I've been at two places which have been Oracle'd. It's like being pwn3d except you end up $10,000,000 poorer. You also end up with less dignity than the inevitable tebagging you might get in Halo.

I'd just like to confirm... the OP is not exagerating at all here. Oracle is today, what Microsoft was 10yrs ago.
They're big.
Their customers are currently trapped.
Oracles Management think that this situation will last forever and can't imagine a time when customers would move to something else.
They are using that power in such a drastic and barbaric way that, as painful as it may be, there's just no way they are going to continue using them in the future.

In 10yrs we'll all have moved on, and Oracle Execs will be scratching their heads wondering what happened to the gravy train. Just like MSFT is doing now.

Re:Sales flow chart.

[Anonymous Coward]

DB/2? What about PostgreSQL?

Because PostgreSQL doesn't support shared-storage, active-active clusters. PostgreSQL "clusters" use replication to provide a warm standby using separate storage.

So you need twice the (high-speed) disk storage for a PostgreSQL solution.

That's just the database. Now you need to add clustering/HA to that, with pgpool. And pgpool is a turd. Yeah, it's better than NO standby/cluster. But set up a test PostgreSQL/pgpool cluster and really start beating on it - pull some plugs, shut down hardware, "kill -9" some database and/or pgpool processes. And watch pgpool piss all over itself.

In short, if you want a true clustered database solution, it's Oracle or DB2.

Re:Sales flow chart.

[sg_oneill]

How does PostGreSQL compare?

I work at a large government department with stupidly large scientific datasets being thrown in and out of databases and we're migrating as fast as we can from Oracle to Postgres. The only thing we can't really shake is bloody Oracle financials and a few crufted old Java apps that we don't have the code to rewrite.

Postgres handles beautifully, and on some things even better although on some nasty multi-join type things Oracle will still beat it.

But it doesn't even matter because we can just throw more hardware at it infinitely cheaper than the extortion racket that Oracle pricing represents.

MariaDB is surprisingly competent too and in fact even has a surprisingly complete GIS implementation (Although PostGIS is the gold standard as far as we are concerned). Just avoid the Oracle branded one (MySQL), its not as well tuned, doesn't play nice with packaging systems and is generally posessed of the Oracle odour.

Re:Sales flow chart.

[FlyingGuy]

PostGres compares ok on a lot of workloads, but when the rubber really hits the road that is when it starts to fall apart.

They must fix the TXID ID problem. It will now at least shut down when it is getting close to rolling over, but the vacuum process will just kill your performance in very high transaction workloads. Not that Oracle would not have the same problem if they were using a 32 bit number for the value, but with the size of the ID Oracle uses this won't happen for ~ 140 years.

Immovability... PostGres gets some great performance but it does so at the cost of the data files being so close to the metal that you can't move them to another host that is not exactly the same as it is moving from. If that is not true you have to do an SQLDUMP of the data. That is a fairly fatal flaw in my opinion.

So yes you can use PG in place of Oracle, to a point, but after that point it just does not perform as required.

I migrated a PG DB to Oracle 11g EE and it runs quite smoothly. The application would quickly overwhelm PG without some serious changes to the PG code.

We are talking about Oracle customers

[Ecuador]

If they really did mind about a $23k option enabled by default on each CPU, they would not be Oracle customers, would they?

So, what does the in-memory database option do?

[timeOday]

This being slashdot, it would be nice to have the article on "gotcha" licensing accompanied by at least as much information what it actually is, and when it would be worth paying for. (And not just some snarky comments about how cheaper databases already have in-memory tables, unless that's really all it is!)

Only 23,000?

[nitehawk214]

This is like pennies to someone that can afford to run Oracle on custom hardware. Why is this even newsworthy?

Re:Only 23,000?

[funwithBSD]

I was really surprised that Oracle did not build database optimization right into the M series SPARC chipset like SUN did for the T series and Java.

DB/2 on IBM hardware definitely gets a boost from software/hardware integration.

In-Memory is not "turned on by default"!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, does anyone check their facts any more? By default it is turned off. You have to allocate some memory to the In-Memory Column Store by setting the INMEMORY_SIZE parameter and restarting the database. This is not going to happen by accident.

The parameter that is being discussed (INMEMORY_QUERY) which is enabled by default does nothing if no memory is allocated. You only get charged for the option if you turn it on by allocating the memory. This INMEMORY_QUERY parameter is not part of that issue.

Someone has taken something out of context and run with it. Now it has taken on a life of its own. Quality journalism!

Re:$23k isn't crap to an oracle shop...

[HornWumpus]

It wasn't so much a kickback, as an offer of a highly paid, no show job at Oracle after the contract closes.

At least that's what I've personally witnessed.

The company involved was under rate base, so they added 15% and passed it on to the electric ratepayers.

That said, Oracle financials? At least in the case above it was the DB. Everything else Oracle sells has _negative_ utility. You could get it done faster and more accurately with a yellow pad and slide rule.