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Oracle Effectively Doubles Licence Fees To Run Its Stuff in AWS (theregister.co.uk)
Oracle has changed the way it charges users to run its software in Amazon Web Services, effectively doubling the cost along the way. From a report: Big Red's previous licensing regime recognised that AWS's virtual CPUs were a single thread of a core that runs two threads. Each virtual CPU therefore counted as half a core. That's changed: Oracle's new cloud licensing policy says an AWS vCPU is now treated as a full core if hyperthreading is not enabled. A user hiring two AWS vCPUS therefore needs to pay full freight for both, effectively doubling the number of Oracle licences required to run Big Red inside AWS. And therefore doubling the cost as well. The new policy also says: "When counting Oracle Processor license requirements in Authorized Cloud Environments, the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table is not applicable." That table says Xeons cores count as half a licence. Making the Table inapplicable to the cloud again doubles the licence count required.
But if you're already planning on rewriting your software to work "in the cloud", migrating to a different database engine is not that much additional work.
It's nowhere near enough work to make their closed ecosystem an effective deterrent.
They've been doing this for at least 20 years. Morons line up to buy more licenses.
"Eureka! I got it! We'll just charge our customers twice as much!"
Oracle doesn't have customers, they have hostages.
Is there a technical reason for using Oracle over something else?
Frankly, no, except in some specialized instances. I'd wager that 99% of the supposedly "mission critical" things that currently run on Oracle could safely be run on other databases.
Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL are capable alternatives, as are DB2 and MariaDB. Even much-maligned MySQL can be used for many (perhaps most) of the applications that are using Oracle right now. All of these databases scale into the 100s of millions of rows and most include the transactional reliability that used to be exclusive to Oracle.
Oracle used to be the only choice for serious database work, but those days are gone. Unless you're doing a Moon shot or international banking you can almost certainly use an alternative DB and get the same functionality, robustness, and security (or better, in some cases).
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
if you don't like how an open source system works then you can always modify the program. sure, you might have to pay someone with the knowledge to make it happen but it's still possible. the same is not true of closed source.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.