32 ms·

MySQL price hikes

51 points by olefoo 16y ago

sammcd 16y ago
I approached this article thinking about how evil oracle is. But I left it hoping oracle does this well. They had a good point about no price increases in the last 6 years. I'm not a fan of monetizing software through support, but I would love see some people hitting it big and proving me wrong.
- nkassis 16y ago
  well, it all depends on how much they expect to charge, even half of an Oracle Enterprise license would be a HUGE increase for MySQL users.
- metageek 16y ago
  If they haven't raised prices in 6 years, that probably means that they thought customers would switch to Oracle if they did. MySQL didn't want that to happen; Oracle probably does.
- kjksf 16y ago
  It's a highly misleading statement. Oracle didn't own MySQL for 6 years so they couldn't have raised MySQL prices even if they wanted to. What it really means is that MySQL price was the same for past 6 years, when it was owned by MySQL, AB and then Sun, but as soon as ink dried on Sun acquisition, the first thing that Oracle did was to rise the prices. Have they even released any new, improved version?
teilo 16y ago
"More recently, my own conversations with EnterpriseDB sales executives indicate an acceleration of commercial interest in Postgres, including from MySQL customers who are anxious that Oracle may ruin MySQL for them." The silver lining. Hopefully, this will mean that more projects will target Postgres as a primary deployment platform.
- lkrubner 16y ago
  It is a little sad to rewind the tape and go back to 1999, when both MySql and PostGres were talked about as being roughly equal. MySql had not yet taken over open source databases yet. MySql was greatly helped by the rise of PHP - I think those 2 technologies grew up together, and leaned on each other. But I also recall, when I was learning PHP in 1999, most PHP books devoted some time to Postgres. And PHP supported Postgres from the beginning. It wasn't till a few years later that I started to see book titles like "PHP/MySql development for beginners" as if those 2 technologies just naturally belonged together. I recall when Tim Perdue published this article in 2000, and the strong impression it made on me that PostGres was the much better database: http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000705.php3 http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000705.php3 Tim found that PostGres could scale: "The most interesting thing about my test results was to see how much of a load Postgres could withstand before giving any errors. In fact, Postgres seemed to scale 3 times higher than MySQL before giving any errors at all. MySQL begins collapsing at about 40-50 concurrent connections, whereas Postgres handily scaled to 120 before balking. My guess is, that Postgres could have gone far past 120 connections with enough memory and CPU." At that time, circa 2000, developers often claimed that they could live without ACID reliability, in exchange for speed. Thus, there preference was for MySql. There is something to that argument of course. In recent years, the NoSql movement has gone much further, throwing out integrity as a concern, in exchange for massive scaling and fast speed. Somehow, lost in the shuffle was the fact Postgres is, in most ways, technologically superior to MySql. It may not be as fast as MySql, in some situations, but for a wide range of purposes, it should be really be preferred to MySql. And I think, somehow, developers have often forgotten that, for a wide range of purposes, the best choice would be Postgres.
  - gaius 16y ago
    MySQL already had the mindshare back then, Slashdot hyped it to the heavens. It was considered "sexy" to sacrifice safety for speed...
    - chipsy 16y ago
      At that time it was also considerably more expensive to get servers, so hardware scaling of any kind was less desirable. The cheap virtualization we enjoy now only came in around mid-decade.
esponapule 16y ago
I think MySQL needs to follow the path of Libre Office (the document foundation) and fork. The project should be run by the community and not controlled by Oracle. Oracle, like Sun did not create the database (Sun bought it in 2008) and are trying to profit off the community MySQL has created. This is open source and should remain open source.
- dkoch 16y ago
  MariaDB is one viable fork: http://mariadb.org/ http://mariadb.org/
  - p0ppe 16y ago
    The fact that it's run by Monty Widenius is definitely a plus.
- stuartloxton 16y ago
  There is a fork of MySQL called Drizzle which is run by the chief architect of MySQL before sun bought them. From what I remember reading a while ago it's being specifically targeted at being used for Web Backends. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzle_(database_server) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzle_(database_server))
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
slantyyz 16y ago
The letter in the article reminds me of an engagement I had during the dot.com boom. Oracle told my client they had to buy their license right away before some imminent price hikes, so they did. The next week, Oracle dropped their price by 100K for my client's equivalent licensing level. Needless to say, I had one --pissed-- customer on my hands.
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  One of my corporate clients needed to choose between either MSSQL or Oracle for an in-house system, and this sort of garbage is exactly why I pushed them hard towards MSSQL. I'm not a fan of Microsoft's licensing schemes in general, but they look positively saintly compared to Oracle.
  - cturner 16y ago
    I had a look at Oracle prices the other day just out of curiosity. Back in the day driver support used to be solid for Oracle and touchy for everything else I used so that's the context in which I know it. I went to the store, then clicked oracle database, and found myself looking at licenses of Oracle database Enterprise for just six hundred pounds. That's a lot cheaper than I remember it being. I added to cart to see what would happen. When you do this, it adds a "first year support" line as well that's not quoted on the page but does contribute to your bottom line. I found that deceptive. My link is here, it may not work for you: https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:2:0::NO:RP,2:PROD_HIER_ID:4509958287721805720011 https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:2:0::NO:RP,2:P... Then I had an idea about what might be going on. I dug further to find the yearly cost of support for the database. It's far more expensive, and back to the prices of the old days. So I assume that you buy it at a merely expensive price, and then if you want fixes to their bugs, you'll have to keep paying money for it at a higher rate on a per-year basis. Digging further, I found a link for Oracle database standard edition that was far more expensive and quoted on a per-processor basis. £11,730.00 per processor. Ouch. https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:product:144910682649690::NO:RP,3:P3_LPI,P3_PROD_HIER_ID:4508925239811805719874,4509958287721805720011 https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:product:144910... I must have missed something. Does anyone know how this works?
asnyder 16y ago
Seems like the perfect time for those considering switching to read my Demystifying PostgreSQL article from this month's php|architect Databases issue. http://www.phparch.com/magazine/2010/september/ http://www.phparch.com/magazine/2010/september/. Unfortunately, I can't post it on the web outside the magazine for 3 months.
wheaties 16y ago
PostgreSQL couldn't have matured to the point it is at such a more fortuitous time. Thank you open source community. Good luck Oracle.
seiji 16y ago
Who buys mysql support from Sun/Oracle? If you are brain dead enough to use mysql in the first place your support should be coming from Percona.
metageek 16y ago
From the article: The generosity or Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison knows no bounds. Correction: no lower bounds.
- startupgrrl 16y ago
  upper bounds
cagenut 16y ago
As the drizzle guys have pointed out in detail there are really two mysql customer bases. One wants to treat it as a sellable/supportable component of ISV packages, i.e. as a cheaper replacement for MSSQL/Oracle. The other wants to use it for "internet scale" things (high traffic websites, saas providers, etc). This price hike really only affects the former, and frankly, who cares, those guys have controlled the feature roadmap for 3+ years anyway they're welcome to pay for the mess they've created. Those of us who build websites will be just fine with Percona until drizzle is ready (or maybe even forever).
8ren 16y ago
if customers did leave in mass exodus, wouldn't Oracle get the benefit of effectively closing down mySQL, without the adverse publicty, while also increasing revenue? Sounds like win-win (where both wins are for oracle, rather than the conventional meaning of both parties winning.)

51 points by olefoo 16y ago

I approached this article thinking about how evil oracle is. But I left it hoping oracle does this well. They had a good point about no price increases in the last 6 years. I'm not a fan of monetizing software through support, but I would love see some people hitting it big and proving me wrong.

nkassis 16y ago
well, it all depends on how much they expect to charge, even half of an Oracle Enterprise license would be a HUGE increase for MySQL users.
metageek 16y ago
If they haven't raised prices in 6 years, that probably means that they thought customers would switch to Oracle if they did. MySQL didn't want that to happen; Oracle probably does.
kjksf 16y ago
It's a highly misleading statement. Oracle didn't own MySQL for 6 years so they couldn't have raised MySQL prices even if they wanted to. What it really means is that MySQL price was the same for past 6 years, when it was owned by MySQL, AB and then Sun, but as soon as ink dried on Sun acquisition, the first thing that Oracle did was to rise the prices. Have they even released any new, improved version?

teilo 16y ago

"More recently, my own conversations with EnterpriseDB sales executives indicate an acceleration of commercial interest in Postgres, including from MySQL customers who are anxious that Oracle may ruin MySQL for them." The silver lining. Hopefully, this will mean that more projects will target Postgres as a primary deployment platform.

lkrubner 16y ago
It is a little sad to rewind the tape and go back to 1999, when both MySql and PostGres were talked about as being roughly equal. MySql had not yet taken over open source databases yet. MySql was greatly helped by the rise of PHP - I think those 2 technologies grew up together, and leaned on each other. But I also recall, when I was learning PHP in 1999, most PHP books devoted some time to Postgres. And PHP supported Postgres from the beginning. It wasn't till a few years later that I started to see book titles like "PHP/MySql development for beginners" as if those 2 technologies just naturally belonged together. I recall when Tim Perdue published this article in 2000, and the strong impression it made on me that PostGres was the much better database: http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000705.php3 http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000705.php3 Tim found that PostGres could scale: "The most interesting thing about my test results was to see how much of a load Postgres could withstand before giving any errors. In fact, Postgres seemed to scale 3 times higher than MySQL before giving any errors at all. MySQL begins collapsing at about 40-50 concurrent connections, whereas Postgres handily scaled to 120 before balking. My guess is, that Postgres could have gone far past 120 connections with enough memory and CPU." At that time, circa 2000, developers often claimed that they could live without ACID reliability, in exchange for speed. Thus, there preference was for MySql. There is something to that argument of course. In recent years, the NoSql movement has gone much further, throwing out integrity as a concern, in exchange for massive scaling and fast speed. Somehow, lost in the shuffle was the fact Postgres is, in most ways, technologically superior to MySql. It may not be as fast as MySql, in some situations, but for a wide range of purposes, it should be really be preferred to MySql. And I think, somehow, developers have often forgotten that, for a wide range of purposes, the best choice would be Postgres.
- gaius 16y ago
  MySQL already had the mindshare back then, Slashdot hyped it to the heavens. It was considered "sexy" to sacrifice safety for speed...
  - chipsy 16y ago
    At that time it was also considerably more expensive to get servers, so hardware scaling of any kind was less desirable. The cheap virtualization we enjoy now only came in around mid-decade.

esponapule 16y ago

I think MySQL needs to follow the path of Libre Office (the document foundation) and fork. The project should be run by the community and not controlled by Oracle. Oracle, like Sun did not create the database (Sun bought it in 2008) and are trying to profit off the community MySQL has created. This is open source and should remain open source.

dkoch 16y ago
MariaDB is one viable fork: http://mariadb.org/ http://mariadb.org/
- p0ppe 16y ago
  The fact that it's run by Monty Widenius is definitely a plus.
stuartloxton 16y ago
There is a fork of MySQL called Drizzle which is run by the chief architect of MySQL before sun bought them. From what I remember reading a while ago it's being specifically targeted at being used for Web Backends. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzle_(database_server) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzle_(database_server))

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

slantyyz 16y ago

The letter in the article reminds me of an engagement I had during the dot.com boom. Oracle told my client they had to buy their license right away before some imminent price hikes, so they did. The next week, Oracle dropped their price by 100K for my client's equivalent licensing level. Needless to say, I had one --pissed-- customer on my hands.

thaumaturgy 16y ago
One of my corporate clients needed to choose between either MSSQL or Oracle for an in-house system, and this sort of garbage is exactly why I pushed them hard towards MSSQL. I'm not a fan of Microsoft's licensing schemes in general, but they look positively saintly compared to Oracle.
- cturner 16y ago
  I had a look at Oracle prices the other day just out of curiosity. Back in the day driver support used to be solid for Oracle and touchy for everything else I used so that's the context in which I know it. I went to the store, then clicked oracle database, and found myself looking at licenses of Oracle database Enterprise for just six hundred pounds. That's a lot cheaper than I remember it being. I added to cart to see what would happen. When you do this, it adds a "first year support" line as well that's not quoted on the page but does contribute to your bottom line. I found that deceptive. My link is here, it may not work for you: https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:2:0::NO:RP,2:PROD_HIER_ID:4509958287721805720011 https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:2:0::NO:RP,2:P... Then I had an idea about what might be going on. I dug further to find the yearly cost of support for the database. It's far more expensive, and back to the prices of the old days. So I assume that you buy it at a merely expensive price, and then if you want fixes to their bugs, you'll have to keep paying money for it at a higher rate on a per-year basis. Digging further, I found a link for Oracle database standard edition that was far more expensive and quoted on a per-processor basis. £11,730.00 per processor. Ouch. https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:product:144910682649690::NO:RP,3:P3_LPI,P3_PROD_HIER_ID:4508925239811805719874,4509958287721805720011 https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:product:144910... I must have missed something. Does anyone know how this works?

asnyder 16y ago

Seems like the perfect time for those considering switching to read my Demystifying PostgreSQL article from this month's php|architect Databases issue. http://www.phparch.com/magazine/2010/september/ http://www.phparch.com/magazine/2010/september/. Unfortunately, I can't post it on the web outside the magazine for 3 months.

wheaties 16y ago

PostgreSQL couldn't have matured to the point it is at such a more fortuitous time. Thank you open source community. Good luck Oracle.

seiji 16y ago

Who buys mysql support from Sun/Oracle? If you are brain dead enough to use mysql in the first place your support should be coming from Percona.

metageek 16y ago

From the article: The generosity or Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison knows no bounds. Correction: no lower bounds.

startupgrrl 16y ago
upper bounds

cagenut 16y ago

As the drizzle guys have pointed out in detail there are really two mysql customer bases. One wants to treat it as a sellable/supportable component of ISV packages, i.e. as a cheaper replacement for MSSQL/Oracle. The other wants to use it for "internet scale" things (high traffic websites, saas providers, etc). This price hike really only affects the former, and frankly, who cares, those guys have controlled the feature roadmap for 3+ years anyway they're welcome to pay for the mess they've created. Those of us who build websites will be just fine with Percona until drizzle is ready (or maybe even forever).

8ren 16y ago

if customers did leave in mass exodus, wouldn't Oracle get the benefit of effectively closing down mySQL, without the adverse publicty, while also increasing revenue? Sounds like win-win (where both wins are for oracle, rather than the conventional meaning of both parties winning.)