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]

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.

[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.

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!)

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.