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U.K. Government Seeking To End Reliance On Oracle
jfruh writes: The U.K. Cabinet Office has reportedly asked government departments and agencies to try to find ways to end their reliance on Oracle software, a move motivated by the truly shocking number of Oracle licenses currently being paid for by the British taxpayer. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs alone has paid £1.3 million (US$2 million) per year for some 2 million Oracle licenses, or about 200 licenses per staff member.
Considering they are only paying $1 per license on average each year, framing the problem with a license per employee count is very misleading. The article should have focused on them spending $200 yearly on licenses per staff member. Or under $17 per month per staff member. Doesn't sound nearly as bad in this context, but then again the true point of the article was to get page views. This shows why I'm not in marketing.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Oracle products are specifically designed to make it very difficult and costly to leave the platform given all their proprietary extensions to SQL and supported programming language and development tools.
If your application was designed with Oracle development tools you are likely completely S**t Outta Luck. But if all you did was use Oracle as an RDMBS and avoided all their lock-in traps you should be able to port to PostgreSQL.
But in most situations, Oracle is the Hotel California of platforms: "you can check in anytime you want, but you can never leave.." at least not without significant costs in porting which will be more painful and risky than to simply keep paying.....
Because of this the best option is usually to specify and enforce that Oracle *NOT* be used on any new or replacement projects while the organization just keeps paying and paying and paying on the systems that require Oracle.
There are a number of very good reasons that few Internet startups run out and buy Oracle for infrastructure use.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
There's also enterprise licensing and site licensing.
On the other hand, if they are paying for something on an annual basis then it's more likely SUPPORT contracts rather than actual licenses.
Oracle is an expensive product and annual bills like that are not terribly unusual really. They may or may not be able to find a suitable cheaper option assuming that they don't just need to do better license accounting.
Other supported products don't tend to be cheap either.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Postgres was started from The guy that received and ACM Turing awards for his works database :
Michael Stonebraker has made fundamental contributions to database systems, which are one of the critical applications of computers today and contain much of the world's important data. He is the inventor of many concepts that were crucial to making databases a reality and that are used in almost all modern database systems. His work on Ingres introduced the notion of query modification, used for integrity constraints and views. His later work on Postgres introduced the object-relational model, effectively merging databases with abstract data types while keeping the database separate from the programming language. Stonebraker's implementations of Ingres and Postgres demonstrated how to engineer database systems that support these concepts; he released these systems as open software, which allowed their widespread adoption and their code bases have been incorporated into many modern database systems. Since the pathbreaking work on Ingres and Postgres, Stonebraker has continued to be a thought leader in the database community and has had a number of other influential ideas including implementation techniques for column stores and scientific databases and for supporting on-line transaction processing and stream processing.
I wont say which one it was, because the walls have ears, but I worked at an Australian govt department and we where doing just that, moving what we could over to Postgres
The big problem was Financials. There just isn't a replacement that'll suffice at a government level, so theres still a bit of stickyness in that area.
Mostly though we where doing a lot of our stuff in modern MVC stuff and phasing out a lot of crufty java and oracle stuff, and thats a pretty good time to start reducing the oracle crackpipe addiction
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.