Oracle Cost Musings
This has been the first Oracle Openworld I’ve missed in six years. I’ve used Oracle since 1993 and have had some interesting encounters with the Redwood Shores folks over the years, so Larry’s recent Openworld comments about pricing caught my ear:
“In response to an audience question, Ellison reaffirmed his opposition to processor-based software pricing because it is difficult to verify how many processors or multicore processors a company is actually running.
Instead, he prefers to offer pricing based on the total number of employees, or based on revenue with the flexibility to address annual licensing and maintenance based on whether total headcount or revenue rises or falls during the period, he said. ”
Interesting. So if you’re successful - you pay Oracle more. This reminds me of their former hysterical model for licensing their monitoring and tuning technology. Some years ago, I was a senior DBA at an energy company and we were increasing our usage of Oracle. The rep wants to sell us their monitoring and tuning tools. So I ask how they’re licensed, expecting the normal stuff. Instead they tell me they license based on “benefited user”.
Huh?
They explain that when I tune a database for better performance, all the end users “benefit” from the increased performance, so they license their tuning tools based on that methodology. I nearly fell out of my seat laughing. But you want to know who had the last laugh? Oracle. They convinced the powers-that-be that we couldn’t live without the tools and so they bought them. Sigh.
That was some years ago and I know Oracle has completely revamped things since then, but wow, what can you say?