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IBM creates 24-core Power chip so customers can exploit Oracle database license

jerryjerryjerry 4y ago
I like the subtitle LOL: "Big Red doesn't charge more when users add cores, so Big Blue plans to triple the count. Because why not?"
- bayindirh 4y ago
  This is classic The Register tone, which I like a lot. Also, I missed these kinds of moves between vendors... BTW, BOFH[0] is a great The Register series if you want more of it. [0]: https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/ https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/
  - bitwize 4y ago
    Kind of reminds me of tech Variety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egpWCC2svVo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egpWCC2svVo
  - e3bc54b2 4y ago
    Thanks for BOFH. Whole series is genius!
    - qubex 4y ago
      To this day I still chortle about “big, chunky volts” delivered down innocent-looking connectors. The younglins know not what I speaketh of.
  - chasil 4y ago
    BOFH is older than the Register. "The BOFH stories were originally posted in 1992 to Usenet..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell "The Register was founded in London as an email newsletter called Chip Connection. In 1998 The Register became a daily online news source." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Register https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Register
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      > BOFH is older than the Register. I knew that BOFH is old, yet... > "The BOFH stories were originally posted in 1992 to Usenet..." I didn't know that it was that old. Amazing. Thanks for sharing.
      - chasil 4y ago
        That's not really old. My IBM Model M keyboard is from 1985. That's probably the oldest piece of equipment that I actively use.
        bayindirh 4y ago
        Of course it's not that old, but considering 1992 is the year I started to play with computers as a kid, that's older than I expected, at least for me. I've used internet for the first time when the The Register became an online publication.
ggm 4y ago
If the sell works well enough, Oracle will alter the licence terms.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  IBM must have felt that there is a market, and one that would be able to justify the upgrade. Some spreadsheet must have the number that says "This is how how many core at this price point, where this product makes more sense than dealing with Oracles licensing". The article does conclude with this interesting observation: Be aware that the SE2 license does not offer access to all Oracle database features. Oracle's EE license offers access to more, and more powerful, features. Which makes IBM's statement of general direction a little odd: why create a powerful CPU for a low-end database? Big Blue still has not responded to our inquiry...
taspeotis 4y ago
I assume Oracle will just fix this the same way Microsoft did … newer on-prem version of SQL Server are licensed by pair of CPU cores.
selcuka 4y ago
Tomorrow's headline: "Oracle Changes Database SE2 Licensing Terms"
- pulse7 4y ago
  You can do this for new license purchases, but not for already purchased ones...
  - einpoklum 4y ago
    Q: Hello, Oracle support? I'm seeing this bug after your latest update... A: Ah, yes, we are already offering a fix for that bug. Q: Great! How can I get it? A: It's in our new upgraded product, Oracle same-as-yesterday(TM). And we are offering it to our trusted existing customers - free of charge. Q: Free of charge? That's quite generous of you, how unusual. A: Yes, the customer is king here at Oracle. You just need to sign the license agreement and we can deploy it right away.
    - pulse7 4y ago
      We will get all money from you - for free! ;)
    - IncRnd 4y ago
      That seems like something that happens with ad-hoc customers not so much with enterprise customers who have purchased support plans (for this reason among others).
      - selcuka 4y ago
        SE2 (Standard Edition) is their cheapest offering. Enterprise customers are probably using their EE (Enterprise Edition) license.
      - ilyt 4y ago
        Do you really think Oracle lawyers didn't put a clause that allows them to do what they want ?
iamflimflam1 4y ago
I remember the old joke about oracle pricing spreadsheets. Lots of sliders to adjust the parameters. But no matter what you did the price would always increase.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  I think i saw a flash cartoon with something like that... turn the slider right, price goes up, move the slider back left, price goes even higher :)
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    Flash cartoon? That's the front-end for Oracle Cloud.
- bionsystem 4y ago
  We've had a bunch of VMWare clusters consisting of 5-6 servers each, maybe something like 2x16 cores or 2x32 cores for each server and 384 to 768Go of RAM, I'm not sure about the specifics. We had VMs running a few Oracle databases, nothing much more than 2 cores 16Gb or 4 cores 32Gb, the vast majority (90%+) of our databases were running Sybase, and half the resources were for the app, so something like 5% of those clusters were Oracle dbs. We were paying Sybase maybe 100k a year for the entire datacenter, and so we expected to pay something between 10k and 100k for Oracle (remember, for 1/20th of the compute and with a developer license because we were not hosting client production). We asked for a quote to Oracle, they came back a week later with a 520 million dollar bill, more than the revenue of our entire company. It was never paid of course but this shows how absolutely ridiculous their template is for billing. The reasoning is well known now, a 2 core database can run on potentially 6 servers * 32 cores * 2 threads per core = 384 possible cores, so if you have 2 or 3 databases you can potentially get billed a license for 1000 cores (and actually running 6 non-production database = 0 service on their part because if it breaks you just redeploy it, it's faster than opening a support ticket).
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Part of that is playing the game; Oracle knows to come in high on the quote so the CTO can negotiate them down from batshit insane to simply eye wateringly painful. Looks great on the year end report!
imwillofficial 4y ago
Remember when people used Oracle for databases? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
- swarnie 4y ago
  I still do for almost everything, a lot of middleware applications too. Good PL/SQL devs are getting a little rarer these days but its manageable.
  - beachy 4y ago
    Same, it all depends on your costs, if you are SaaS and have a dev team that knows Oracle then why not use it, it's not going anywhere, it's hugely reliable and it will definitely scale up vertically as high as anyone. And plsql is a much underrated technology. On the other hand if your product involves on-site deployment then Oracle is most likely not going to stack up.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Probably the same people still do, but the tech industry has expanded, and most of the new things (startups) are better served with a Postgres cluster.
- tnolet 4y ago
  When I was a bit younger I worked on quite some high profile (for my country) web apps. Think e-commerce, travel. Couple million users. We used Oracle on big fat metal server stacks for this. I honestly thought this was needed because RAC and some other stuff. Uptime! Now, a little older and wiser, I know all of these projects would have been fine on Postgres on some hosted provider.
  - pmontra 4y ago
    When companies were moving to the internet in my part of the world, second half of the 90s, their preferred stack was a Windows NT 3.5 server, Java and an Oracle DB communicating by file exports/imports with some AS 400 or an actual IBM mainframe.
evilotto 4y ago
Oracle's real pricing model is to sell consulting services.
steve1977 4y ago
Are there many customers running Oracle on POWER systems? My gut feeling would have been these are typically DB2 customers.
- ido 4y ago
  I'm surprised anyone is even use POWER at all still, I assumed it's all x64 or custom ARM (like Amazon's) by now!
  - jimnotgym 4y ago
    I would say you would find a significant number of Oracle DBs still running on SPARC, so why not POWER!
    - steve1977 4y ago
      Because SPARC is kind of home turf for Oracle. POWER is enemy territory ;)
      - dagw 4y ago
        IBM at least used to be the second biggest Oracle reseller/consulting/support shop, after Oracle itself. IBM just wants your money and will give you anything you ask for.
  - yourapostasy 4y ago
    It isn't the chip architecture that people are buying. It is the hardware that gets asymptotically close to Tandem- and System z-like features that you cannot yet get on x86- and ARM-based gear. Lots of HN folks like to throw shade on AIX, but if you have someone who is dead serious on obtaining near-mainframe-grade RAS on "a Unix" and is willing to write the checks for it, the check is smaller on POWER systems running AIX than trying to effectively roll your own under x86 or ARM systems running whatever Linux distribution you care to choose. It just so happens that in the vast majority of use cases, x86 or ARM systems running Linux are good enough for the business purposes. The first few times you run into the situation, you'd be amazed what losses and risks business will tolerate when faced with the costs to mitigate that last 0.1% of profit optimization. In absolute numbers there are way more commas than the average HN'er retirement portfolio in that last 0.1%. But when it will cost almost the same in the first 3-5 years of migrating to AIX than that number, the IRR payout timeline is way longer than most businesses will tolerate. And most managers are savvy enough to understand the teething pains in the meantime are a career-limiting move.
userbinator 4y ago
This reminds me of the QDI TwinMagic, an adapter that would let you use two CPUs in a single-socket motherboard: http://www.hardware-one.com/img1/mb7.jpg http://www.hardware-one.com/img1/mb7.jpg
abridgett 4y ago
IIRC they did something related a long time ago when you could get a 8 CPU box which was physically restricted to 6 CPUs purely so that it didn't fit into the "can have 8 CPU" Oracle license. About 2/3rds of the servers we sold at the time probably went to run Oracle and it gave us a massive TCO (total cost of ownership) advantage compared with other vendors, especially as the POWER chips were faster than the competition too. When most of the cost is in the software, the choice of hardware can still make a big difference.
- paulmd 4y ago
  Wide SMT/CMT is also favored by Oracle's billing system - you aren't billed (afaik) per-thread but actually per-core, so 4-wide SMT or 8-wide SMT gives you an advantage over x86's 2-wide SMT. In theory the "core multipliers" are supposed to offset this, so a "core multiplier" for POWER or SPARC should be higher - but Oracle also likes to push you towards their own products, so there is a bit of a "bundle discount" particularly on SPARC's core multiplier.
jimnotgym 4y ago
The last SUN/SPARC server I bought (maybe 5 years ago?) had the same thing going on. 1 cpu, huge number of cores. Sun was already owned by Oracle at this point, so I would guess they are not as concerned about IBM's move as you might imagine!
- rconti 4y ago
  Yeah, I seem to recall the machines we were buying 6 years ago (Oracle-branded machines, that is!) were 288 threads... out of something like 6 processors.
kkz 4y ago
„why create a powerful CPU for a low-end database? Big Blue still has not responded to our inquiry...“ Bahaha, savage :)
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Bahaha, savage :) Is it really "savage?" The article was posted long after business hours at IBM. You posted your comment long before business hours at IBM. It might amaze certain types of people to believe that IBM doesn't have a fleet of PR people sitting around at midnight the week before Christmas to respond to rando online articles. It's entirely possible that El Reg submitted its query to IBM a week ago and waited for a response that never arrived. But considering the state of internet "journalism" these days, usually they send a Twitter DM and if they don't get a response in the time it takes to finish a Starbucks, they consider it unanswered.
  - mathgorges 4y ago
    I believe the comment you’re responding to was saying that the dig at Oracle[1] was savage, not IBM’s lack of response. [1] “why create a powerful CPU for a low-end database?”
    - tssva 4y ago
      I believe "low-end database" wasn't a knock at Oracle either. The pricing advantage you get with multiple cores for a single socket applies to standard edition which is their low-end database product. I have never seen it used in production.
fb03 4y ago
Serious question: Can someone explain to me why would someone still be using Oracle in 2022 when we have equally capable or even superior open source alternatives like PostgreSQL, which have none of these shenanigans? Maybe legacy software that would be expensive to rewrite? I'm a backend developer and I regularly kickstart systems (and get to choose which components we are going to use in the stack) and I fail to grasp in what kind of project I'd need to be to even consider "this might need us to bring Oracle to the table". Again, honest to goodness question, looking to learn. Is there some edge to Oracle compared to the FOSS stuff that I'm not aware?
- plantain 4y ago
  Oracle has a much more effective sales team than PostgreSQL. A few basketball tickets to the right managers makes all the difference.
  - fb03 4y ago
    I see. I guess you are right. The endless Samsara of people with a MBA and their churn to keep plates spinning.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    I know why Oracle does this, but I can't comprehend why the customer's senior leadership and the owners tolerate this embezzlement, which hurts the company and is criminal.
  - lazyfanatic 4y ago
    This answer contains more truth in it than any technical answer ever will.
  - sprayk 4y ago
    We can all be so blind sometimes to the 8th layer of the OSI model.
- ch_123 4y ago
  While there may be reasons to pick Oracle for greenfield projects in 2022, I suspect most of the business comes from companies which have been on Oracle for a very long time and have huge amounts of critical data in it. Oracle has likely calibrated their pricing so that it's always slightly cheaper to stay on Oracle than to move elsewhere.
ilyt 4y ago
Yeah Oracle will just change license if that would in any way impact their bottom line
tiffanyh 4y ago
How does this exploit Oracle database licensing? POWER has a 1x core multiple today (meaning, you have to license every core). https://www.oracle.com/assets/processor-core-factor-table-070634.pdf https://www.oracle.com/assets/processor-core-factor-table-07... EDIT: Note, I just re-read the article. This is for the Standard Edition of the database, which basically has no extra features. I've never heard of anyone running Standard Edition except for doing local development.
- cduzz 4y ago
  Yeah, reading that table, the "hack" would be to use "Intel® Xeon® Platinum 92XX" (or similar high throughput intel offering) with an 0.5 multiple. Does an oracle license pay attention to partial core things like hyperthreading or other speculative execution things? If so, you'd want to turn that off for the intel offerings. And run one socket to maximize memory bandwidth.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  I always wondered, what is the rationale behind pricing certain software as "per-CPU"? Why not per machine? I'm guessing it's something to do with the size of datacenters and their use of virtualization?
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    The idea is to extract more money from people who can afford it. If someone has a 128-core AMD EPYC, they probably have more money that can be extracted than a person with a 16-core EPYC.
    - tiffanyh 4y ago
      > The idea is to extract more money I'm not sure it should be characterized that way. It's pricing based on value. Clearly, someone running a database on a 128-core server is realizing way more value than someone running a 4-core server. So how do you charge where it's far pricing for both the 4-core server person and the 128-core server person.
cratermoon 4y ago
> why create a powerful CPU for a low-end database? Oh Register, never change.
benreesman 4y ago
I think it’s less interesting that a bunch of people hate Oracle and more interesting that IBM is still making good chips.
- sprayk 4y ago
  Indeed. They are pretty big into cutting edge CPU design. I've seen some pretty cool system architecture coming from them as well. e.g. their cache setups on z mainframes[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6u_oNIXFuU&t=577s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6u_oNIXFuU&t=577s
- systems_glitch 4y ago
  Indeed, if I had the time to run two workstations side-by-side, I'd be looking at building a POWER9 workstation.
thomasfl 4y ago
I'd rather prefer to use the IvorySQL open source Oracle compatible PostgreSQL distribution.
rubyist5eva 4y ago
Just use Postgres lol
bogomipz 4y ago
Can someone say why the Power chips have seemed to not really gain traction outside of IBM? There was a moment a few years back where it seemed that Google might be getting behind the Power9 chips but then we heard very little outside of some press releases. [1] I remember there was speculation that this was little more than ploy to use as a negotiation tactic with Intel. I'm not sure if that was true or not. [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3052811/ibms-power-chips-hit-the-big-time-at-google.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3052811/ibms-power-chi...
jdsully 4y ago
After AMD's 96 core processor, a 24 core chip just doesn't sound all that impressive. The article doesn't address why you wouldn't run Oracle on X86 with more cores.
- bogwog 4y ago
  I'd guess that some software is stuck on Power, so a bigger multi-core chip for those cases is probably cheaper than both porting to x86, or buying a higher tier Oracle license.
  - dillab2 4y ago
    If POWER LPARs are the same as Z LPARs then a lot of it comes down to the difference in licensing between hard and soft partitioned VMs. On a typical VM Oracle will charge for the entire cost of the machine, even if the DB is only running on a VM with a fraction of the resources, due to it being considered a soft partition. At least on Z series mainframes, LPARs are considered hard partitions (handled by PR/SM, not the OS like a KVM situation) and are actually treated as different machines. I am not sure if this is the case with POWER. I've never heard of this website and don't know if they are a decent resource, but they seem to cover the issue the way I remember it. Looks like they are offering a license management product that tries to warn Oracle customers about this consideration. I'm sure Oracle slaps people pretty hard over this during their first audits, maybe even hard enough to get a company to shell out for IBM hardware :). https://bluemedora.com/the-hard-and-the-soft-of-oracle-licensing/ https://bluemedora.com/the-hard-and-the-soft-of-oracle-licen...
- Symmetry 4y ago
  It's a little known fact that IBM creates its SMT-8 cores by taking two of its SMT-4 cores, having one stand on the other's shoulders, and draping a trenchcoat over them so they count as one core for Oracle licensing. The trenchcoat being a de minimis ability to reschedule work from one half to the other. Seriously the per-thread performance you get from 1 thread on an SMT-4 core, 1 thread on a SMT-8 core, and 2 threads on an SMT-8 core are all extremely close together.
matja 4y ago
I hoped this would explain the anomaly in AMD EPYC 3rd gen Milan pricing for the 24 core "F" (frequency optimized) parts being cheaper than the 16 core ones, but I still can't see any hint to the reason: model | cores | price | 73F3 | 16 | $3521 | 74F3 | 24 | $2900 | <- cheapest 75F3 | 32 | $4860 | Same for 4th gen Genoa : model | cores | price | 9174F | 16 | $3850 | 9274F | 24 | $3060 | <- cheapest 9374F | 32 | $4850 | The 24-core parts have the same number of CCDs, and thus same total L3 cache, and a higher turbo than the 32-core parts.
- layer8 4y ago
  It’s to upsell you to the 32s by letting you think that something must be wrong with the 24s at that price.
mattpallissard 4y ago
Exploit is a really, really strong word. The way oracle refuses to acknowledge any software processor boundaries other than their own is more exploitative. It's been several years, but if I remember correctly if you wanted to run an Oracle DB on a 2vcpu VM you couldn't just license 2 cores, you had to license every core on every hypervisor the VM could run on. It basically means you have to get off oracle or buy oracle hardware. For large enterprises with old hardware running decades worth of business logic captured in stored procedures it's becomes a rock and a hard place situation.
- dillab2 4y ago
  This is a key part of IBMs strategy, since it seems that LPARs on mainframes are treated as hard partitions and do not incur the same "whole machine" cost as VMs. At least that is what IBM themselves say when asked what the target audience is for their Linux only mainframes, which seems to be over 50% just for Oracle. I only have experience with Z and not as much with POWER systems, so I'm not sure if LPARs on POWER are similar technology or if they are just VMs. But if they are the same that would go a long way in explaining how companies plan to reduce cost by going with IBM despite the increased core multiple licensing cost.

I like the subtitle LOL: "Big Red doesn't charge more when users add cores, so Big Blue plans to triple the count. Because why not?"

bayindirh 4y ago
This is classic The Register tone, which I like a lot. Also, I missed these kinds of moves between vendors... BTW, BOFH[0] is a great The Register series if you want more of it. [0]: https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/ https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/
- bitwize 4y ago
  Kind of reminds me of tech Variety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egpWCC2svVo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egpWCC2svVo
- e3bc54b2 4y ago
  Thanks for BOFH. Whole series is genius!
  - qubex 4y ago
    To this day I still chortle about “big, chunky volts” delivered down innocent-looking connectors. The younglins know not what I speaketh of.
- chasil 4y ago
  BOFH is older than the Register. "The BOFH stories were originally posted in 1992 to Usenet..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell "The Register was founded in London as an email newsletter called Chip Connection. In 1998 The Register became a daily online news source." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Register https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Register
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    > BOFH is older than the Register. I knew that BOFH is old, yet... > "The BOFH stories were originally posted in 1992 to Usenet..." I didn't know that it was that old. Amazing. Thanks for sharing.
    - chasil 4y ago
      That's not really old. My IBM Model M keyboard is from 1985. That's probably the oldest piece of equipment that I actively use.
      - bayindirh 4y ago
        Of course it's not that old, but considering 1992 is the year I started to play with computers as a kid, that's older than I expected, at least for me. I've used internet for the first time when the The Register became an online publication.

ggm 4y ago

If the sell works well enough, Oracle will alter the licence terms.

mrweasel 4y ago
IBM must have felt that there is a market, and one that would be able to justify the upgrade. Some spreadsheet must have the number that says "This is how how many core at this price point, where this product makes more sense than dealing with Oracles licensing". The article does conclude with this interesting observation: Be aware that the SE2 license does not offer access to all Oracle database features. Oracle's EE license offers access to more, and more powerful, features. Which makes IBM's statement of general direction a little odd: why create a powerful CPU for a low-end database? Big Blue still has not responded to our inquiry...

taspeotis 4y ago

I assume Oracle will just fix this the same way Microsoft did … newer on-prem version of SQL Server are licensed by pair of CPU cores.

selcuka 4y ago

Tomorrow's headline: "Oracle Changes Database SE2 Licensing Terms"

pulse7 4y ago
You can do this for new license purchases, but not for already purchased ones...
- einpoklum 4y ago
  Q: Hello, Oracle support? I'm seeing this bug after your latest update... A: Ah, yes, we are already offering a fix for that bug. Q: Great! How can I get it? A: It's in our new upgraded product, Oracle same-as-yesterday(TM). And we are offering it to our trusted existing customers - free of charge. Q: Free of charge? That's quite generous of you, how unusual. A: Yes, the customer is king here at Oracle. You just need to sign the license agreement and we can deploy it right away.
  - pulse7 4y ago
    We will get all money from you - for free! ;)
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    That seems like something that happens with ad-hoc customers not so much with enterprise customers who have purchased support plans (for this reason among others).
    - selcuka 4y ago
      SE2 (Standard Edition) is their cheapest offering. Enterprise customers are probably using their EE (Enterprise Edition) license.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      Do you really think Oracle lawyers didn't put a clause that allows them to do what they want ?

iamflimflam1 4y ago

I remember the old joke about oracle pricing spreadsheets. Lots of sliders to adjust the parameters. But no matter what you did the price would always increase.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
I think i saw a flash cartoon with something like that... turn the slider right, price goes up, move the slider back left, price goes even higher :)
- intelVISA 4y ago
  Flash cartoon? That's the front-end for Oracle Cloud.
bionsystem 4y ago
We've had a bunch of VMWare clusters consisting of 5-6 servers each, maybe something like 2x16 cores or 2x32 cores for each server and 384 to 768Go of RAM, I'm not sure about the specifics. We had VMs running a few Oracle databases, nothing much more than 2 cores 16Gb or 4 cores 32Gb, the vast majority (90%+) of our databases were running Sybase, and half the resources were for the app, so something like 5% of those clusters were Oracle dbs. We were paying Sybase maybe 100k a year for the entire datacenter, and so we expected to pay something between 10k and 100k for Oracle (remember, for 1/20th of the compute and with a developer license because we were not hosting client production). We asked for a quote to Oracle, they came back a week later with a 520 million dollar bill, more than the revenue of our entire company. It was never paid of course but this shows how absolutely ridiculous their template is for billing. The reasoning is well known now, a 2 core database can run on potentially 6 servers * 32 cores * 2 threads per core = 384 possible cores, so if you have 2 or 3 databases you can potentially get billed a license for 1000 cores (and actually running 6 non-production database = 0 service on their part because if it breaks you just redeploy it, it's faster than opening a support ticket).
- bombcar 4y ago
  Part of that is playing the game; Oracle knows to come in high on the quote so the CTO can negotiate them down from batshit insane to simply eye wateringly painful. Looks great on the year end report!

imwillofficial 4y ago

Remember when people used Oracle for databases? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

swarnie 4y ago
I still do for almost everything, a lot of middleware applications too. Good PL/SQL devs are getting a little rarer these days but its manageable.
- beachy 4y ago
  Same, it all depends on your costs, if you are SaaS and have a dev team that knows Oracle then why not use it, it's not going anywhere, it's hugely reliable and it will definitely scale up vertically as high as anyone. And plsql is a much underrated technology. On the other hand if your product involves on-site deployment then Oracle is most likely not going to stack up.
phendrenad2 4y ago
Probably the same people still do, but the tech industry has expanded, and most of the new things (startups) are better served with a Postgres cluster.
tnolet 4y ago
When I was a bit younger I worked on quite some high profile (for my country) web apps. Think e-commerce, travel. Couple million users. We used Oracle on big fat metal server stacks for this. I honestly thought this was needed because RAC and some other stuff. Uptime! Now, a little older and wiser, I know all of these projects would have been fine on Postgres on some hosted provider.
- pmontra 4y ago
  When companies were moving to the internet in my part of the world, second half of the 90s, their preferred stack was a Windows NT 3.5 server, Java and an Oracle DB communicating by file exports/imports with some AS 400 or an actual IBM mainframe.

evilotto 4y ago

Oracle's real pricing model is to sell consulting services.

steve1977 4y ago

Are there many customers running Oracle on POWER systems? My gut feeling would have been these are typically DB2 customers.

ido 4y ago
I'm surprised anyone is even use POWER at all still, I assumed it's all x64 or custom ARM (like Amazon's) by now!
- jimnotgym 4y ago
  I would say you would find a significant number of Oracle DBs still running on SPARC, so why not POWER!
  - steve1977 4y ago
    Because SPARC is kind of home turf for Oracle. POWER is enemy territory ;)
    - dagw 4y ago
      IBM at least used to be the second biggest Oracle reseller/consulting/support shop, after Oracle itself. IBM just wants your money and will give you anything you ask for.
- yourapostasy 4y ago
  It isn't the chip architecture that people are buying. It is the hardware that gets asymptotically close to Tandem- and System z-like features that you cannot yet get on x86- and ARM-based gear. Lots of HN folks like to throw shade on AIX, but if you have someone who is dead serious on obtaining near-mainframe-grade RAS on "a Unix" and is willing to write the checks for it, the check is smaller on POWER systems running AIX than trying to effectively roll your own under x86 or ARM systems running whatever Linux distribution you care to choose. It just so happens that in the vast majority of use cases, x86 or ARM systems running Linux are good enough for the business purposes. The first few times you run into the situation, you'd be amazed what losses and risks business will tolerate when faced with the costs to mitigate that last 0.1% of profit optimization. In absolute numbers there are way more commas than the average HN'er retirement portfolio in that last 0.1%. But when it will cost almost the same in the first 3-5 years of migrating to AIX than that number, the IRR payout timeline is way longer than most businesses will tolerate. And most managers are savvy enough to understand the teething pains in the meantime are a career-limiting move.

userbinator 4y ago

This reminds me of the QDI TwinMagic, an adapter that would let you use two CPUs in a single-socket motherboard: http://www.hardware-one.com/img1/mb7.jpg http://www.hardware-one.com/img1/mb7.jpg

abridgett 4y ago

IIRC they did something related a long time ago when you could get a 8 CPU box which was physically restricted to 6 CPUs purely so that it didn't fit into the "can have 8 CPU" Oracle license. About 2/3rds of the servers we sold at the time probably went to run Oracle and it gave us a massive TCO (total cost of ownership) advantage compared with other vendors, especially as the POWER chips were faster than the competition too. When most of the cost is in the software, the choice of hardware can still make a big difference.

paulmd 4y ago
Wide SMT/CMT is also favored by Oracle's billing system - you aren't billed (afaik) per-thread but actually per-core, so 4-wide SMT or 8-wide SMT gives you an advantage over x86's 2-wide SMT. In theory the "core multipliers" are supposed to offset this, so a "core multiplier" for POWER or SPARC should be higher - but Oracle also likes to push you towards their own products, so there is a bit of a "bundle discount" particularly on SPARC's core multiplier.

jimnotgym 4y ago

The last SUN/SPARC server I bought (maybe 5 years ago?) had the same thing going on. 1 cpu, huge number of cores. Sun was already owned by Oracle at this point, so I would guess they are not as concerned about IBM's move as you might imagine!

rconti 4y ago
Yeah, I seem to recall the machines we were buying 6 years ago (Oracle-branded machines, that is!) were 288 threads... out of something like 6 processors.

kkz 4y ago

„why create a powerful CPU for a low-end database? Big Blue still has not responded to our inquiry...“ Bahaha, savage :)

reaperducer 4y ago
Bahaha, savage :) Is it really "savage?" The article was posted long after business hours at IBM. You posted your comment long before business hours at IBM. It might amaze certain types of people to believe that IBM doesn't have a fleet of PR people sitting around at midnight the week before Christmas to respond to rando online articles. It's entirely possible that El Reg submitted its query to IBM a week ago and waited for a response that never arrived. But considering the state of internet "journalism" these days, usually they send a Twitter DM and if they don't get a response in the time it takes to finish a Starbucks, they consider it unanswered.
- mathgorges 4y ago
  I believe the comment you’re responding to was saying that the dig at Oracle[1] was savage, not IBM’s lack of response. [1] “why create a powerful CPU for a low-end database?”
  - tssva 4y ago
    I believe "low-end database" wasn't a knock at Oracle either. The pricing advantage you get with multiple cores for a single socket applies to standard edition which is their low-end database product. I have never seen it used in production.

fb03 4y ago

Serious question: Can someone explain to me why would someone still be using Oracle in 2022 when we have equally capable or even superior open source alternatives like PostgreSQL, which have none of these shenanigans? Maybe legacy software that would be expensive to rewrite? I'm a backend developer and I regularly kickstart systems (and get to choose which components we are going to use in the stack) and I fail to grasp in what kind of project I'd need to be to even consider "this might need us to bring Oracle to the table". Again, honest to goodness question, looking to learn. Is there some edge to Oracle compared to the FOSS stuff that I'm not aware?

plantain 4y ago
Oracle has a much more effective sales team than PostgreSQL. A few basketball tickets to the right managers makes all the difference.
- fb03 4y ago
  I see. I guess you are right. The endless Samsara of people with a MBA and their churn to keep plates spinning.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  I know why Oracle does this, but I can't comprehend why the customer's senior leadership and the owners tolerate this embezzlement, which hurts the company and is criminal.
- lazyfanatic 4y ago
  This answer contains more truth in it than any technical answer ever will.
- sprayk 4y ago
  We can all be so blind sometimes to the 8th layer of the OSI model.
ch_123 4y ago
While there may be reasons to pick Oracle for greenfield projects in 2022, I suspect most of the business comes from companies which have been on Oracle for a very long time and have huge amounts of critical data in it. Oracle has likely calibrated their pricing so that it's always slightly cheaper to stay on Oracle than to move elsewhere.

ilyt 4y ago

Yeah Oracle will just change license if that would in any way impact their bottom line

tiffanyh 4y ago

How does this exploit Oracle database licensing? POWER has a 1x core multiple today (meaning, you have to license every core). https://www.oracle.com/assets/processor-core-factor-table-070634.pdf https://www.oracle.com/assets/processor-core-factor-table-07... EDIT: Note, I just re-read the article. This is for the Standard Edition of the database, which basically has no extra features. I've never heard of anyone running Standard Edition except for doing local development.

cduzz 4y ago
Yeah, reading that table, the "hack" would be to use "Intel® Xeon® Platinum 92XX" (or similar high throughput intel offering) with an 0.5 multiple. Does an oracle license pay attention to partial core things like hyperthreading or other speculative execution things? If so, you'd want to turn that off for the intel offerings. And run one socket to maximize memory bandwidth.
_fat_santa 4y ago
I always wondered, what is the rationale behind pricing certain software as "per-CPU"? Why not per machine? I'm guessing it's something to do with the size of datacenters and their use of virtualization?
- dragontamer 4y ago
  The idea is to extract more money from people who can afford it. If someone has a 128-core AMD EPYC, they probably have more money that can be extracted than a person with a 16-core EPYC.
  - tiffanyh 4y ago
    > The idea is to extract more money I'm not sure it should be characterized that way. It's pricing based on value. Clearly, someone running a database on a 128-core server is realizing way more value than someone running a 4-core server. So how do you charge where it's far pricing for both the 4-core server person and the 128-core server person.

cratermoon 4y ago

> why create a powerful CPU for a low-end database? Oh Register, never change.

benreesman 4y ago

I think it’s less interesting that a bunch of people hate Oracle and more interesting that IBM is still making good chips.

sprayk 4y ago
Indeed. They are pretty big into cutting edge CPU design. I've seen some pretty cool system architecture coming from them as well. e.g. their cache setups on z mainframes[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6u_oNIXFuU&t=577s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6u_oNIXFuU&t=577s
systems_glitch 4y ago
Indeed, if I had the time to run two workstations side-by-side, I'd be looking at building a POWER9 workstation.

thomasfl 4y ago

I'd rather prefer to use the IvorySQL open source Oracle compatible PostgreSQL distribution.

rubyist5eva 4y ago

Just use Postgres lol

bogomipz 4y ago

Can someone say why the Power chips have seemed to not really gain traction outside of IBM? There was a moment a few years back where it seemed that Google might be getting behind the Power9 chips but then we heard very little outside of some press releases. [1] I remember there was speculation that this was little more than ploy to use as a negotiation tactic with Intel. I'm not sure if that was true or not. [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3052811/ibms-power-chips-hit-the-big-time-at-google.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3052811/ibms-power-chi...

jdsully 4y ago

After AMD's 96 core processor, a 24 core chip just doesn't sound all that impressive. The article doesn't address why you wouldn't run Oracle on X86 with more cores.

bogwog 4y ago
I'd guess that some software is stuck on Power, so a bigger multi-core chip for those cases is probably cheaper than both porting to x86, or buying a higher tier Oracle license.
- dillab2 4y ago
  If POWER LPARs are the same as Z LPARs then a lot of it comes down to the difference in licensing between hard and soft partitioned VMs. On a typical VM Oracle will charge for the entire cost of the machine, even if the DB is only running on a VM with a fraction of the resources, due to it being considered a soft partition. At least on Z series mainframes, LPARs are considered hard partitions (handled by PR/SM, not the OS like a KVM situation) and are actually treated as different machines. I am not sure if this is the case with POWER. I've never heard of this website and don't know if they are a decent resource, but they seem to cover the issue the way I remember it. Looks like they are offering a license management product that tries to warn Oracle customers about this consideration. I'm sure Oracle slaps people pretty hard over this during their first audits, maybe even hard enough to get a company to shell out for IBM hardware :). https://bluemedora.com/the-hard-and-the-soft-of-oracle-licensing/ https://bluemedora.com/the-hard-and-the-soft-of-oracle-licen...
Symmetry 4y ago
It's a little known fact that IBM creates its SMT-8 cores by taking two of its SMT-4 cores, having one stand on the other's shoulders, and draping a trenchcoat over them so they count as one core for Oracle licensing. The trenchcoat being a de minimis ability to reschedule work from one half to the other. Seriously the per-thread performance you get from 1 thread on an SMT-4 core, 1 thread on a SMT-8 core, and 2 threads on an SMT-8 core are all extremely close together.

matja 4y ago

I hoped this would explain the anomaly in AMD EPYC 3rd gen Milan pricing for the 24 core "F" (frequency optimized) parts being cheaper than the 16 core ones, but I still can't see any hint to the reason: model | cores | price | 73F3 | 16 | $3521 | 74F3 | 24 | $2900 | <- cheapest 75F3 | 32 | $4860 | Same for 4th gen Genoa : model | cores | price | 9174F | 16 | $3850 | 9274F | 24 | $3060 | <- cheapest 9374F | 32 | $4850 | The 24-core parts have the same number of CCDs, and thus same total L3 cache, and a higher turbo than the 32-core parts.

layer8 4y ago
It’s to upsell you to the 32s by letting you think that something must be wrong with the 24s at that price.

mattpallissard 4y ago

Exploit is a really, really strong word. The way oracle refuses to acknowledge any software processor boundaries other than their own is more exploitative. It's been several years, but if I remember correctly if you wanted to run an Oracle DB on a 2vcpu VM you couldn't just license 2 cores, you had to license every core on every hypervisor the VM could run on. It basically means you have to get off oracle or buy oracle hardware. For large enterprises with old hardware running decades worth of business logic captured in stored procedures it's becomes a rock and a hard place situation.

dillab2 4y ago
This is a key part of IBMs strategy, since it seems that LPARs on mainframes are treated as hard partitions and do not incur the same "whole machine" cost as VMs. At least that is what IBM themselves say when asked what the target audience is for their Linux only mainframes, which seems to be over 50% just for Oracle. I only have experience with Z and not as much with POWER systems, so I'm not sure if LPARs on POWER are similar technology or if they are just VMs. But if they are the same that would go a long way in explaining how companies plan to reduce cost by going with IBM despite the increased core multiple licensing cost.