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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
The problem is in how Oracle defines the need for licenses.
Got 200 systems, and all of your users could in theory touch those systems ... whammo, they want full licensing for each instance for each user. Oracle makes it into a technical concern.
Want to add more cores? Give us more money. Want to make something accessible via the internet? Give us more money. Want another instance? Start from scratch on that instance, give us more money, then give us more money, and finally we'll tack a little more money on.
There really is no limit to the amount of money Oracle feels entitled to, and if you don't have one central entity handling all of your licenses, you're screwed. And, really, having one central entity doesn't guarantee you a damned thing.
As far as Oracle is concerned, it's # of cores x # of theoretical users x # of instances x how much they can get away with.
Oracle's price gouging is pretty much legendary. And most anybody who has it has gone through this has seen it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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!
They should replace it with a nice free, open source solution like MySQL Enterprise Edition to get paid support. Then they'll never have to pay Oracle another penny (Or pence or whatever they call it in the UK)
I manage a team of database developers and database administrators. We live Big Data. We breathe Big Data. Big Data is everything to us. If the data isn't Big, we don't touch it.
We only use the best tools of the trade, and those are NoSQL tools. I know some people like to joke about NoSQL being "web scale", but it's no joke. In our experience, NoSQL is the only way to really work with Big Data.
A good rule of thumb is that if you're using SQL, you're working with Small Data. I was at a conference last year, and some schmuck started talking to me about his 2 peterbyte database. He said his team used Postgrass and SQL. It doesn't matter how big your database is! If you're using SQL then you aren't working with Big Data! 2 peterbytes of SQL data is way smaller than 2 peterbytes of NoSQL Big Data.
It makes no sense to me why anyone would use SQL databases. They are old tech. They aren't the latest and greatest, like NoSQL databases are. Like the CAP Theorem states, NoSQL databases are better because they're "Capable of handling Big Data", "Always the best choice for Big Data", and "Perfect for Big Data".
It's 2015 now. We have better tools available to us than we had in 1975. You don't need to use SQL databases any more. Use a NoSQL database, and get all of the benefits it gives you, including the CAP Theorem. Big Data is important, so you should only trust it to NoSQL databases.
You do realize that Oracle owns MySQL, right?
They should run it on Sun hardware to stay even farther away from Oracle.
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.