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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

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?
  - slantyyz 16y ago
    No joke: When it comes to enterprise software licensing and pricing, a lot of the time I find that even the vendor's salespeople don't know how it works.

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?
- slantyyz 16y ago
  No joke: When it comes to enterprise software licensing and pricing, a lot of the time I find that even the vendor's salespeople don't know how it works.