Oracle Standard Edition
Recently a question came up on Oracle-L, but to tell you the truth it might have been anywhere about how on earth one justified Oracle's licensing. The question was
To get an idea of how much it would cost to license a point of sale database on Oracle and commodity hardware/software, we requested a quote for a 2-node RAC on Dell 2950's 2 Dual core's per server. Quote was $306k.
Well if I were the business I'd choke as well. That's an indefensible software cost for that sort of install. I costed up a quad-core E5430 version of the above hardware, complete with, RHEL5, 16gb RAM and redundant SAN connections. Total cost of the hardware (but excluding the SAN/NFS storage that you'd use for RAC) just about $20,000. That's for the two servers. So the questioner was being quoted 15x the cost of the hardware (and 3 years worth or so of DBA time at US rates last time I looked) for the Oracle software. Any time you see the software costing more than dedicated admins and an order of magnitude higher than the hardware/OS then you have to work very hard to justify the cost.
There is an alternative though Oracle Standard Edition will do all of the above for you on that hardware. The Oracle store quote for the dual quad-core machines I listed above was $65k Now that's a much more defensible - though still high cost. Now it may be that the EE only features (DataGuard, Flashback Table (not query), block level recovery, the pl/sql function result cache in 11 and so on) are worth nearly $250k for the questioners business, but you do have to wonder. Of course on my quad-core based install the EE license fee would be $468,000
Update following Herod's comment and to make my quote clear. This is the oracle store quote for 8 processor licenses for both EE and RAC based on 50% of the total number of cores in the system. Next to it is the US pricing for the hardware
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CPU math
Nobody seems to have taken into account the CPU math for the Intel hardware.
Oracle pricing guide
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/sig.pdf
says
"
For the purposes of counting the number of processors which require licensing for
AMD and Intel multicore chips, “n” cores shall be determined by multiplying the
total number of cores by a core processor licensing factor of .50.
"
So if I read the above correct, that means that to CPU license both servers would require a total of 4 CPU licenses 8 cores * .5 .
So according to orace store, the cost of 4 Enterprise Edition CPU licenses is
$180,703.47
Which includes your first year of support. Still expensive when compared with the hardware.
my maths.
I couldn't get the 306k quote exactly - we didn't get to see if any options were included or if it came from a sales guy. As for mine
2 dual quad-core boxes = 16 cores to license at 50% each, i.e 8 cores not 4. I also added the RAC option to EE at list price.
Niall
other options.
standard edition is available for rac up to four sockets so you can get away with that up to a point if you don't need the enterprise edition stuff. one alternatrive is if you have a small user base you can use named user licencing for 200 users (minuimum on 8 processors) you get $234,240, processor licencing is cheaper after you get to 50 users per processor (as defined by oracles wierd scalling). of course this is no use if your application is web based and you are goign to have thousands of users or be unable to count them.
Don't forget you also need to licence your development and test databases the OTN licence doesn't extend as far as some people seem to think, and if your serious then your going to want a grid control server (OK thats free as far as the software but what about the magment packs?) and a recovery catalogue is nice to have.
in the words of our last financial controller 'You mean oracle has a licencing division? I thought they just turned you upsidedown and shook you until all the money fell out'.
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