Re: question about readonly instances

On 05/19/2011 03:25 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
>
>> I have no idea how expensive it is, but fortunately that's not my
>> problem :) I was only asked about the possibility of running Postgres
>> that way.
>> And by the way: how expensive is that?
>
> something like US$23000 per CPU core for the RAC option for Oracle
> Enterprise. so a 100 node cluster with dual quadcore cpus would be 800
> CPUs would be .... my head hurts. oh, thats on top of the oracle
> enterprise license ($47K/core), and features like Partitioning are extra
> too. support is about 25%/year additional.

Surely that has to be "marketing prices" ... you know, the ones they
offer to knock down to 25% early in negotiations to give you a "special
deal" and you land up paying about 5% of by the time you sign, so you're
convinced you're getting some amazingly good price when you're just
paying what everyone pays.

Surely. Please tell me it's so. Our government (Australia) uses lots of
Oracle, and while I knew it was expensive, it's a whole new level of
horror to think it's that kind of money.

Hopefully it turns out to be more like Microsoft. Here in Australia,
Windows 7 Pro OEM costs $149 and Office 2010 pro costs 395.00 (!!) . On
the Microsoft website, a windows 7 pro *upgrade* costs $399 and Office
2010 Pro costs 899.00. The pricing differences are jaw-droppingly
insane. Yet the OEM prices I listed are the _most_ that almost anybody
will pay; most people pay much less than that by buying Windows and
Office via a large tier-1 OEM vendor that will often pay $50 or less for
Windows. I'm not saying it's fair or reasonable, just that the list
price on the vendor website has nothing to do with the real price anyone
actually pays.

In addition to allowing people to feel like they're getting big
discounts, the other reason for insanely high list prices appears to be
tax ... er ... adjustment. If you "donate" 100 licenses of your software
to a school/non-profit/etc, you want to put the largest possible dollar
value on that donation to claim it as a tax write-off. So you publish
jaw-droppingly inflated RRPs, and use those to calculate your donation.
Wow, we just donated 100 * 899 = $89,000 of software to that school for
a real cost of - essentially nothing.

Health care pricing in the USA seems to be similarly affected by
list-price inflation to permit discounting. Insurers want to claim "95%
discounts!" so official list prices are massively, monsterously inflated
to make such discounts possible. Pity for you if you don't have insurance...

--
Craig Ringer