Saved Him $72,000, at a minimum…
Oracle is the easiest vendor to deal with when it comes to free, trial and development software. You can download just about any piece or purchase any line of Oracle software for a few dollars. None of the CDs require a key to unlock. There are a few questions on export restrictions, and of course there is a statement that you click through that says you are “developing” your product and understand you will be charged when you no longer meet the terms of the license.
A typical installation should select or deselect components very carefully so that the users do not have components to develop with that will cost big bucks later, if and when a product goes production. The number changes between versions; but there are approximately twelve extra cost options.
These extra
cost options typically require custom code to take advantage of, and often
require new structures in the database, and/or logic in the code. You would have to guess that Oracle
Corporation loves developers who use new features – features that cost
companies more money if the application is successful enough to become
“production”. And
features which are too difficult to remove.
Okay,
we’ve established that extra cost options in Oracle are expensive.
At one customer
site, a senior scientist with budget and a head full of ideas came to me and
said “I need two options, spatial and partitioning, on my two
machines”. He went on to
explain that he knew they were expensive and asked that I negotiate especially
hard for him. He had six CPUs, and
each of these options was $10,000 per, or $120,000 minus whatever discount we
could get.
He gave me
“two weeks”, at which time, if I had not gotten his options to an
“acceptable” price, he was going to add a new Linux server with
PostgreSQL, replicate his data from the Sun V-880 to a Dell, complete his
computations in PostgreSQL, and who knows how he might have replicated the data
back into the master database. Part
of one of his databases consumed 1.2 TB within six months… moving data is
not “easy”, nor is storage “cheap”.
Now, I have
nothing against PostgreSQL, and if you have work for a database consultant in
PostgreSQL, let’s talk; but from the perspective of IT supporting a
company with product they know nothing about, instead of creating a kludge of
data flowing from machine to machine, and black boxes operating on data, and
storage not being on established SANs, etc., the best idea was to stop any move
from Oracle to PostgreSQL.
The
“best” way to satisfy this scientist was to get him the software at
a fabulous price. We talked, we
negotiated, and we got involved with the application, which really did not take
much more than providing an interested ear to listen carefully. What components in PostgreSQL were so
common yet cost one hundred twenty thousand dollars in Oracle?
Four or five days into the “two weeks” we determined that the scientist needed a box or rectangle data type and an r-tree index. Both of these features are standard in an uninstalled, unused component of Oracle. With CDROM in hand and an hour of time we were able to load Oracle Text and…
Satisfy the scientist’s request
Save $70K or more
Reduce complexity
Keep PostgreSQL out of the data center
Last Revised: April 2007