Re: PostgreSQL vs. Oracle vs. Microsoft

This is somewhat correct, and somewhat unfair - bear in mind that
Postgresql doesn't have the equivalent features of Oracle enterprise
edition including RAC and Enterprise Manager.

You can use Oracle Personal edition for development, or pay a per
head cost of $149/user for your dev group for standard one, which if
you have a small team isn't really that much.

If you want commercial support for Postgresql, you must also pay for that too.

It's $5k/CPU for standard one edition, so $10k for a dual CPU box.

Upgrades are free - once you have an Oracle license it is pretty much
good for any version on your platform with your number of CPUs.

I'm not advocating that people switch to Oracle at all, It's still
much more expensive than Postgresql, and for most small and medium
applications Postgresql is much easier to manage and maintain. I
would just like to make sure people get their facts straight. I
worked for a company that selected MS SQL Server because it was
'cheaper' than Oracle, when infact with the correct Oracle pricing,
Oracle was cheaper, and had superior features. I would have prefered
that they use Postgresql, which for the project in question would have
been more appropriate and cost much less in hardware and software
requirements, but they had to have 'Industry Standard'. Oracle ended
up costing <$10k with licenses at $149 ea for 25 users, and the
support contract wasn't that much of a bear - I can't remember exactly
how much, I think it was around $1800/yr.

Alex Turner
NetEconomist
--
Remember, what most consider 'convential wisdom' is neither wise nor
the convention. Don't speculate, educate.

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 22:51:24 -0800, Joe Conway <mail(at)joeconway(dot)com> wrote:
> Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:
> > Don't forget your support contract cost, as well as licenses for each
> > of your servers: development, testing, QA, etc.
> >
> > Is it really as "cheap" as 5K? I've heard that for any fairly modern
> > system, it's much more, but that may be wrong.
> >
>
> Sort of -- see:
> http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=15105
> "It is available on single server systems supporting up to a maximum
> of 2 CPUs"
>
> Also note that most industrial strength features (like table
> partitioning, RAC, OLAP, Enterprise Manager plugins, etc, etc) are high
> priced options (mostly $10K to $20K per CPU) and they can only be used
> with the Enterprise edition (which is $40K/CPU *not* $2.5K/CPU).
> http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=10103
>
> And you are correct, they expect to be paid for each dev, test, and QA
> machine too.
>
> The $5K edition is just there to get you hooked ;-) By the time you add
> up what you really want/need, figure you'll spend a couple of orders of
> magnatude higher, and then > 20% per year for ongoing
> maintenance/upgrades/support.
>
> Joe
>
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