Re: Do Petabyte storage solutions exist?

On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 10:42:28AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> I'm fairly sure that Oracle's pricing scales with the iron you plan to
> use: the more or faster CPUs you want to run it on, the more you pay.
> A large shop can easily get into the $100K license range, but Oracle
> figures that they will have spent way more than that on their hardware.

This is correct. For a system that I happen to know about, the
all-licenses-in (part of which was a large commercial database we may
or may not be discussing, part some other application server &c.)
price was US$8M (software only). This price was arrived at near the
end of the dotcom nonsense; I get the feeling that things are
somewhat better now. The license fees were that high because of
the number of processors, the amount of memory, and the number and
class of machines involved.

Something which is worth noting, however, is that (at least in my
experience) the curve of the license fees gets very steep near the
end. So, if you're working on 4-way machines and think you'll double
up by adding 4 more processors, you're sadly mistaken. This
investment is part of what causes the adoption rate for new systems
in large shops to be so low: if you're already spending several
millions on licenses for one product, the incremental cost of adding
another license is hardly noticable, and the savings to be realised
by moving to a competitor is usually relatively small; but the cost
of shifting is very large, because of knowlege, retraining, porting,
&c. For Postgres, however, it is a tremendous opportunity: if it can
make the last steps to be truly broadly competitive with Oracle and
DB2, the potential savings really is large enough to justify the
change. Postgres is already there for some kinds of use (I think it
provides my employer with a great advantage), but it likely needs a
few more features to take the last steps.

A

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Andrew Sullivan | ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca