Re: PostgreSQL vs. Oracle vs. Microsoft

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