U.K. Government Seeking To End Reliance On Oracle 190
jfruh writes: The U.K. Cabinet Office has reportedly asked government departments and agencies to try to find ways to end their reliance on Oracle software, a move motivated by the truly shocking number of Oracle licenses currently being paid for by the British taxpayer. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs alone has paid £1.3 million (US$2 million) per year for some 2 million Oracle licenses, or about 200 licenses per staff member.
Incompetent contracting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Incompetent contracting (Score:5, Informative)
per-client licence is 1 per user usually, and then you have several applications, each of which need a licence.. and the number quickly rockets up.
Add to that old applications that people no longer use, but somewhere in the bowels of accounting are still being renewed and you can easily get 200 per user (well, easily if you're the kind of bureaucracy like a government organisation).
I imagine they'll rationalise these Oracle licences ... by buying 200 SQL Server licences per user.
Re:Incompetent contracting (Score:4, Interesting)
There's also enterprise licensing and site licensing.
On the other hand, if they are paying for something on an annual basis then it's more likely SUPPORT contracts rather than actual licenses.
Oracle is an expensive product and annual bills like that are not terribly unusual really. They may or may not be able to find a suitable cheaper option assuming that they don't just need to do better license accounting.
Other supported products don't tend to be cheap either.
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"There's also enterprise licensing"
This is the UK - they don't have Enterprise
They have Ark Royal and Invincible
Re:Incompetent contracting (Score:5, Informative)
Er, the British Royal Navy has been sailing ships under the name Enterprise longer than the US Navy has existed [wikipedia.org].
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Oracle is an expensive product and annual bills like that are not terribly unusual really. They may or may not be able to find a suitable cheaper option assuming that they don't just need to do better license accounting.
Yeah, it is expensive when you compare to cheaper products, although if I remember correctly, the OP said '$2M for 2M licenses" - ie. $1 per license, which isn't a lot of money. $2M isn't a lot either, if you compare to how much you would pay for developing and maintain your own SW. This isn't only for RDBMS - Oracle has an extensive suite of 'enterprise applications', whatever that means, all of which would have to be replaced as well, if one were to go for alternative products - which would then be less i
Re:Incompetent contracting (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is that it is not a Oracle == SQLServer, or Oracle == PostgresSQL equation
Oracle has expanded their offerings through acquisitions to sit on top of licensing for everything from operating systems, to middle ware, to user applications, all of which are well beyond the range of any competing database.
Not to mention that Oracle sales reps make zero attempt to lower the long term licensing costs when closing a deal. Your only real chance to modify your licensing agreements are during a true-up exercise, and very few people have the competency to understand and negotiate decent contracts.
It used to be worse. (Score:2)
About 10-15 years ago, the licensing model for enterprise was based on the hardware it was running on ... so if you had a 16 processor server, you had to pay for 16 licenses for that machine.
When the concept of 'cores' came around, you had to pay for each core per processor.
But the real kicker was if you had consolidated hardware to run VMs ... if you had a 32 processor machine w/ 2 cores per processor, running 8 VMs (and each one running an Oracle server, with 8 cores assigned to each VM) ... then the cost
Incompetent metrics (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering they are only paying $1 per license on average each year, framing the problem with a license per employee count is very misleading. The article should have focused on them spending $200 yearly on licenses per staff member. Or under $17 per month per staff member. Doesn't sound nearly as bad in this context, but then again the true point of the article was to get page views. This shows why I'm not in marketing.
Re:Incompetent metrics (Score:5, Funny)
WHAT! Are you suggesting that /. readers would leap at a chance to rip into Oracle?
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I read it as $2 million per license * 2 million licenses. I can't imagine Oracle is charging anyone $1 per license. This is Oracle we are talking about.
They would charge 6 figures for a batch file written by an intern on Friday afternoon between foozball games 30 years ago.
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I don't think the UK is paying Oracle £4Trillion for licensing...
Re: Incompetent metrics (Score:2)
A complete rewrite of a number of UK government systems. What could be simpler!
Re:Incompetent contracting (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is in how Oracle defines the need for licenses.
Got 200 systems, and all of your users could in theory touch those systems ... whammo, they want full licensing for each instance for each user. Oracle makes it into a technical concern.
Want to add more cores? Give us more money. Want to make something accessible via the internet? Give us more money. Want another instance? Start from scratch on that instance, give us more money, then give us more money, and finally we'll tack a little more money on.
There really is no limit to the amount of money Oracle feels entitled to, and if you don't have one central entity handling all of your licenses, you're screwed. And, really, having one central entity doesn't guarantee you a damned thing.
As far as Oracle is concerned, it's # of cores x # of theoretical users x # of instances x how much they can get away with.
Oracle's price gouging is pretty much legendary. And most anybody who has it has gone through this has seen it.
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Yes, I am confused, in my experience 2 million Oracle licenses should cost between $2 and $20 BILLION dollars
One Dollar. OK. No problem. (Score:3)
I'm confused by the units here. WTF is a dollar squared?
A dollar. /ducks
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IBM POWER7 and POWER8 have a feature called Turbo Cores. This turns off half the cores on the CPU, but allowed the cores that are on to use the caches of the ones not in use. It also allows for a higher clock speed to be used.
The reason for this feature is exactly as mentioned above -- Oracle (and Sybase) licensing. Say you have a box with 128 cores in it. You have to pay not just for what cores are in use, but what cores can -possibly- be used for the database. Turn off Turbo Cores... double your lice
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And because of that, the business folks will often just buy extras if there is any question of being out of compliance. Especially if they've been visited by the BSA or have ties to someone who has...
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And Oracle is fscking awful in this regard. Their licensing is so complex it's difficult to know what exactly you need.
We narrowly escaped having to use Oracle a while back - we were being dragged into a project with a dependency on Oracle. Oracle itself is very good - it's powerful, flexible and comprehensive, it scales well, there's lots of ways you can optimise the performance to your particular installation, but the licensing is something else. This was one of the reasons we canned the project (after a
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What was interesting to me was that it's apparently only 65 pence per license (£1.3 million for 2 million licenses). At 200 per staff member that means each staff member has approximately £130 worth of Oracle installed on their machines, which is $200 US given the exchange rate in the summary. I've never bought commercial database software, but $200 per user does not seem like that much.
It's not nothing, but in a department with a £2 Billion+ budget £1.3 Million is a rounding error.
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1] UK Government IT and procurement employees.
2] Given #1, definitely not.
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I suspect that some of it is incompetence, and some of it is the fact that there isn't a single 'they' here. For small orgs, or super-regimented big ones, there is indeed a single Ministry Of Central Procurement through which all external commerce flows. When that isn't the case, purchasing is usually a patchwork of confused individuals with budgets tied to specific things buying stuff in scattered tiny lots.
Yep, and Software Vendors are experts at identifying who in that patchwork has purchasing authority and what their procurement limits are. They will craft their software sale to stay within certain limits in order to avoid the next level of procurement approval.
Re:Incompetent contracting (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oh they know exactly what they're doing. They just don't care. It's the taxpayers' dime after all.
Most likely reason has less to do with government waste than with Oracle's VM licensing scheme:
The department likely parked one small RAC cluster on a VM farm, and Oracle's licensing (at least used to) demand that, no matter how many vCPU you assign the VM, you must license every last socket on every last hypervisor box on the entire VM farm for *each* production VM running Oracle RDBS. ...and *that* is why the majority of production Oracle RAC clusters still reside on discrete physical hardware.
And yes, if
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Oh they know exactly what they're doing. They just don't care. It's the taxpayers' dime after all.
Most likely reason has less to do with government waste than with Oracle's VM licensing scheme:
The department likely parked one small RAC cluster on a VM farm, and Oracle's licensing (at least used to) demand that, no matter how many vCPU you assign the VM, you must license every last socket on every last hypervisor box on the entire VM farm for *each* production VM running Oracle RDBS. ...and *that* is why the majority of production Oracle RAC clusters still reside on discrete physical hardware.
And yes, if Larry Ellison were to die painfully in a fire, half the tech world would cheer.
Yep, Oracle licensing is still that bad.
So much so that most people still use physical boxes for Oracle where everything else runs fantastically on virtual boxes.
As a sysadmin I'd love to see nothing but hypervisors and storage in the server room, but Oracle is determined to prevent that.
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I have been down that same pipe with leaders who come from HR and Accounting
They attend conferences where vendors show them all sorts of glittery toys and then get mad at the IT types who identify to them how the software that they own will not deliver all of the features that they were demoed.
Of course it is IT's fault in their minds and they go about yanking all authority away from IT because they figure that they can do it better themselves
Wow!!! (Score:2)
I'm still walking funny from the last time we negotiated with Oracle.
If you really want to save money fire employees (Score:2, Insightful)
DEFRA is apparently paying $2M for 2M licenses, which if my math is correct, works out to $1/license. Sounds much less reasonable when you see it as 200 licenses per employee, but not that bad when you think of it as $200/year per employee in licensing fees. If this is completely unreasonable, then save money by firing employees who cost at least 2 orders of magnitude more than $200/annum and are not productive. At a minimum, if there really is no need for 200 licenses per employee, the first heads on th
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"and are not productive."
Fact not in evidence
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It is government, so I would think this is being as close to self evident as it can get.
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Are you deliberately failing to see the politics of this? There is a political reason to say 200 licenses per employee rather than saying $200 per employee. The first is inflammatory and seems to indicate significant "over-licensing" of product while the second would probably be considered reasonable by most people (about the cost of windows). By failing to talk about cost per employee they are politically directing the conversation towards an outcome they already want.
This isn't much different than the ann
bananarama republic, in the original sense (Score:2)
U.K. Government overthrown by Oracle
There, FTFY.
Good Luck Leaving Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)
Oracle products are specifically designed to make it very difficult and costly to leave the platform given all their proprietary extensions to SQL and supported programming language and development tools.
If your application was designed with Oracle development tools you are likely completely S**t Outta Luck. But if all you did was use Oracle as an RDMBS and avoided all their lock-in traps you should be able to port to PostgreSQL.
But in most situations, Oracle is the Hotel California of platforms: "you can check in anytime you want, but you can never leave.." at least not without significant costs in porting which will be more painful and risky than to simply keep paying.....
Because of this the best option is usually to specify and enforce that Oracle *NOT* be used on any new or replacement projects while the organization just keeps paying and paying and paying on the systems that require Oracle.
There are a number of very good reasons that few Internet startups run out and buy Oracle for infrastructure use.
Re:Good Luck Leaving Oracle (Score:4, Insightful)
ALL of the RDBMS platforms have their little quirks and proprietary features. The more you swallow the kool-aid, the more difficult it is to migrate away.
Oracle is no better or no worse than anyone else in this respect.
Although chances are that this will end up being all about what the 3rd party app vendors will support.
Replace it with MySQL (Score:5, Funny)
They should replace it with a nice free, open source solution like MySQL Enterprise Edition [mysql.com] to get paid support. Then they'll never have to pay Oracle another penny (Or pence or whatever they call it in the UK)
Re:Replace it with MySQL... which Oracle owns! (Score:2)
Re:Replace it with MySQL... which Oracle owns! (Score:5, Funny)
You do realize that Oracle owns MySQL, right?
They should run it on Sun [sun.com] hardware to stay even farther away from Oracle.
Re:Replace it with MySQL... which Oracle owns! (Score:5, Funny)
yeah you can even save more by putting it on VirtualBox too.
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Uh you mean MariaDB [mariadb.org] #FTFY
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Then they'll never have to pay Oracle another penny (Or pence or whatever they call it in the UK)
Penny is the singular. Pence is the plural.
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Differs from the US in that in, the US, the penny is a coin, not a monetary unit (the monetary unit is the cent--a pound is 100 pence, a penny is 1/100 of a pound, but a dollar is 100 cents and a cent is 1/100 of a dollar) and is pluralized as "pennies".
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Depends what it refers to here in the UK. 1p is a penny, 1/10 of £1 is ten pence, but 10 1p coins is ten pennies if referring to the coins, or ten pence if referring to the monetary amount.
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They call it a penny, that's it's actual name and it says "One penny" on the coin.
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...never mind the fact that it would be considered entirely inappropriate for production use by even a SQL Server DBA.
Oracle has abused their customers (Score:2)
They over charge for things like crazy. Its abusive.
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But.. But.. Larry has to buy his Hawaiian island. [forbes.com]. He needs money bad.
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Buy an island... just don't charge uncompetitive rates for your goods and services.
You can get stinking rich without fucking over your customer. I can cite a lot of very very very rich people that are feared by their COMPETITORS not their customers.
Oracle has been sucking people into their products and then nickle and diming for basic shit for ages. Its not competitive.
They need a pricing model that better reflects the market, better addresses their competitors products which are often radically cheaper, an
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Buy an island... just don't charge uncompetitive rates for your goods and services.
You can get stinking rich without fucking over your customer. I can cite a lot of very very very rich people that are feared by their COMPETITORS not their customers.
Larry Says:
We're Oracle Corporation and I'm Larry Ellison and I'll charge whatever I want to charge. I've made a ton of cash in my lifetime, I've pissed off airports because I want to fly my jumbo jet in at all hours of the night and yet everybody goes "whaaaahhh" when I overcharge them. Nobody is twisting your arm, besides my island I've had to buy a big yacht and oh they tanker to refuel that yacht in mid-ocean but still I think you should pay as much as I charge. After all it's not like you can go and
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Pretty much... Still Oracle does do some things very well. Their product is not bad... its just over priced.
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Pretty much... Still Oracle does do some things very well. Their product is not bad... its just over priced.
Larry says:
So? Didn't I tell you that I'm Larry Ellison and I can charge whatever I want to charge? I need to fill up my tanker so I can sail my yachts around the ocean you insensitive clod. Now, give me your money!
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the same can be said of any business model before it eats shit and dies... or even as it eats shit and dies.
The record industry was saying similar things. Your argument basically boils down to "we're okay now so what we're doing will continue to be okay."
Its not... we're seeing massive defections from their products, many cheaper competitors are entering the field with the SAME core features. I mean... Oracle has a lot of bells and whistles but no one actually needs most of them. What people want is a very
Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had the fortune (or misfortune depending on your definiton) to work on a lot of companies' systems and have had a very "cross platform" career. Oracle's licesning, which has gotten worse in recent years, is just now starting to send most companies looking for other ways to do the same thing. The problem is that Oracle is still the de facto standard for "enterprisey" software projects. A lot of this is legacy -- for quite some time the only mainstream database systems were DB2 on AIX or pSeries/zSeries, and Oracle on Solaris. You might say that's ancient history and you're right -- SQL Server is good enough for most workloads that need a "fully supported" DB and Linux is a viable alternative to Solaris. But I can tell you that these applications don't just die -- they're alive and more functionality is being built on top of them. Most big enterprise applications (SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and so on) are either Oracle products or are integrated to run on Oracle middleware/databases. Most of the big outsourcing firms' "standard stacks" revolve around Oracle DB running on Linux or Solaris, and J2EE running WebLogic. This makes perfect sense; outsourcers can pick up CS grads who know Java for cheap, and J2EE's nature lets you parcel out and offshore pieces to whoever is cheapest that week.
Since most government IT is outsourced both in the UK and the US, I would say that it would be very difficult to replace Oracle without re-architecting whole applications. Some stuff is easy - you don't need a Solaris license to run Apache for example. Some is not -- just like SQL Server, Oracle makes it very easy to slip into "Oracle-only" development mode when interacting with databases and middleware. Once that dependency is in place, it either has to be identified and pulled out, or it just keeps chugging along. And since systems like this are not sexy (customs processing, DMV records, tax collection, etc.) they don't get seen by the public very much.
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I just question who the guy who ultimately makes the decision is. Where there's a per-seat licence, okay fair enough? But 200 licences PER USER? That's just fucking insane. Someone knew that. Someone let that creep from one licence to two. From two to four. Each time adding MULTITUDES of Oracle licences to the deal for every single user all over again.
That's just ridiculous, stupid, bad planning. There should be fingers pointed, legacy or not. You just shouldn't not be paying more than per-seat for
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Even with their 200 licenses per user, they're still only paying $200 per seat. Compared to MS SQL, it's competitive.
The number of licenses isn't relevant for large organizations.
The total *price* is relevant, and at $2 million per year, the UK is either not using Oracle very much or getting a very good deal on it.
Seriously, $2,000,000 to license Oracle for 10,000 employees is way better (on a per-seat basis) than what my employer is paying. Maybe they can negotiate a little harder next year.
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While your analysis is very much spot on, you've missed the biggest barrier to moving off of Oracle. In many instances, those Oracle instances (and the various Oracle or Oracle-partnered apps running on them) are guarded and tended by Oracle consultants. And an Oracle consultant's primary job is to own and control the client's management.
In the distant past, I worked at a major aerospace firm that was trying to move away from Oracle (due to the inability to provide analytics on very large data volumes).
It's difficult but possible (Score:2)
Oracle is the king of vendor lock in and if they even have the slightest hint that revenue will diminish from say, license consolidation they'll increase the license renewal and maintenance fees on your remaining systems. If you've allowed your developers to build things in PL/SQL you're doubly screwed so you may as well think about a system replacement rather than just the database in that case. It's a horrible practice but there are alternatives and for most organizations migration will be almost as exp
Oracle (Score:2)
Solution... (Score:4, Funny)
To use a car analogy ... (Score:2)
I heard they were trying to find a solution provided by a UK-based company, but none of the vendors could figure out how to make a database engine that would leak oil.
(Adapted from a friend's joke)
totally called it (Score:2)
just as predicted! The End of Oracle: Unhappy Customers Jumping Ship In Droves [slashdot.org]
MongoDB (Score:2)
Just switch it to MongoDB. I hear rumor it is "webscale." ;)
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Why do they have 200 Oracle licenses per person? (Score:2)
What licensing model are they using? 200 per staff member seems extraordinarily excessive.I am no fan of Oracle. I work with their Identity Management software all day. But it seems like the U.K. could benefit from auditing its actual license needs.
UK are all Oracle cows! (Score:2)
You are all Oracle cows, say mooo! They fenced you all in with sneaky licensing. Say moo, Oracle cow, mooo mooo.
Larry Ellison milks you and your wallet, moo moo!
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Enjoying PostGreSQL myself ... (Score:2)
Sovereign immunity (Score:2)
It's a default (Score:2)
Oracle DB is a default in many cases, sure there are some advanced features that are probably missing in the free alternatives like Postgres, but there are only a few times when you really need those. Most of the time people are just looking for a way to store some tables and then run sql querries against them. Hell, in a lot of cases even sqlite would suffice, but in a lot of cases devs are required to use oracle because company standard or other nonsense.
The portfolio of oracle is big, and contains other
Re:simple and cheap solution (Score:4, Funny)
Conveniently located next to the Ministry of Silly Walks....
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You mean the Ministry of Silly Databases...
Actually that's the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs...
Re:simple and cheap solution (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm fairly certain that, if a major government like the UK were to go to PostgreSQL, the maintainers of the project would soon find themselves in court over some nebulous IP claim about how some obscure library uses the same call declarations as Oracle's code.
We're in the age where the big software companies have essentially become robber barons.
Re: simple and cheap solution (Score:2)
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Postgres was started from The guy that received and ACM Turing awards for his works database :
Michael Stonebraker has made fundamental contributions to database systems, which are one of the critical applications of computers today and contain much of the world's important data. He is the inventor of many concepts that were crucial to making databases a reality and that are used in almost all modern database systems. His work on Ingres introduced the notion of query modification, used for integrity constraints and views. His later work on Postgres introduced the object-relational model, effectively merging databases with abstract data types while keeping the database separate from the programming language. Stonebraker's implementations of Ingres and Postgres demonstrated how to engineer database systems that support these concepts; he released these systems as open software, which allowed their widespread adoption and their code bases have been incorporated into many modern database systems. Since the pathbreaking work on Ingres and Postgres, Stonebraker has continued to be a thought leader in the database community and has had a number of other influential ideas including implementation techniques for column stores and scientific databases and for supporting on-line transaction processing and stream processing.
Does the UK recognise software patents? (Score:2)
NoSQL is the solution. (Score:5, Funny)
I manage a team of database developers and database administrators. We live Big Data. We breathe Big Data. Big Data is everything to us. If the data isn't Big, we don't touch it.
We only use the best tools of the trade, and those are NoSQL tools. I know some people like to joke about NoSQL being "web scale", but it's no joke. In our experience, NoSQL is the only way to really work with Big Data.
A good rule of thumb is that if you're using SQL, you're working with Small Data. I was at a conference last year, and some schmuck started talking to me about his 2 peterbyte database. He said his team used Postgrass and SQL. It doesn't matter how big your database is! If you're using SQL then you aren't working with Big Data! 2 peterbytes of SQL data is way smaller than 2 peterbytes of NoSQL Big Data.
It makes no sense to me why anyone would use SQL databases. They are old tech. They aren't the latest and greatest, like NoSQL databases are. Like the CAP Theorem states, NoSQL databases are better because they're "Capable of handling Big Data", "Always the best choice for Big Data", and "Perfect for Big Data".
It's 2015 now. We have better tools available to us than we had in 1975. You don't need to use SQL databases any more. Use a NoSQL database, and get all of the benefits it gives you, including the CAP Theorem. Big Data is important, so you should only trust it to NoSQL databases.
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he said PETERbyte.... hehehehe
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Am I missing the irony here?
Big data is great - based on the assumption that you have so much data that the individual record hardly matters. Ergo consistency is a probability rather than guarantee.
However, if you want to hand out driving licenses, individual records do matter. And it is not big data: it easily fits onto a PC.
Yes, Oracle is small data. But it works, while treating it as big data doesn't.
(And I just got a Big Analog Data T-shirt...)
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*whoosh*...
The only thing GP missed to make it perfectly funny was that he should have touted MongoDB instead of NoSQL... ;)
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Re:simple and cheap solution (Score:5, Interesting)
I wont say which one it was, because the walls have ears, but I worked at an Australian govt department and we where doing just that, moving what we could over to Postgres
The big problem was Financials. There just isn't a replacement that'll suffice at a government level, so theres still a bit of stickyness in that area.
Mostly though we where doing a lot of our stuff in modern MVC stuff and phasing out a lot of crufty java and oracle stuff, and thats a pretty good time to start reducing the oracle crackpipe addiction
Re: simple and cheap solution (Score:2, Informative)
What you say was true for pgsql 8, in 9 you can have hotstandby www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/hot-standby.html. Also some application delivery controller can analyze sql statement on the wire to enable replication.
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I don't think the government needs to strictly use open source, but I do agree that anything they use should be an open standard as that allows for the most competition in terms of choice of support provider, contractor, etc. as well as ease of transitioning from one to another. Also, if they want
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever dealt with Oracle licensing, or are you just spouting off?
Because I can guarantee you, Oracle fucks over corporations and governments about the same.
Oracle is legendary for this stuff.
I can also tell you for a lot of applications, the choice is Oracle, and SQL server. And no matter what Microsoft tells you (who is also trying to fuck you over on licensing), for many applications SQL server just can't do the same job.
The vendor of the software needing the DB won't support your open source platform, or anything else.
If you haven't heard about Oracle's licensing practices or think this is inept governments, then you really have no idea of what you're talking about.
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It doesn't have to be that hard or that bad. Some companies manage this much better than others do despite the fact that Ellison is the devil incarnate.
This situation likely represents a nearly complete state of neglect.
No one cares because it's not their money and it's a government agency where saving money will only get your budget cut next year.
Re: Good (Score:2)
Except that most government departments in the UK have been told to find 22 billion in savings between them over the next 5 years so looking at the huge amounts being paid to IT companies are coming under scrutiny.
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In the case of the Oracle eBusiness Suite, you might get some chuckles if you tell people that you are going to run it on SQLServer, but it simply is not going to happen. Oracle eBS runs on Oracle database, and that is pretty much locked up
Re: Good (Score:2)
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Well said. That's exactly why I would never have my car repaired by someone who wasn't at least a 2nd dan in karate or eat a meal cooked by someone who can't fly a helicopter.
Re: Good (Score:2)
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$2 million for 2 million licenses? It means $1/yr for Oracle license? I have hard time believing it.
Indeed. If that is the real number, then I don't know where the complaint is? I suspect somewhere the numbers are wrong or what they represent has been miscommunicated?
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It can't be wrong. We keep a comprehensive database of all of our licenses right here ...... somewhere ......
Hey! Anyone know why the license on this database has expired? Better call our Oracle sales rep and buy a bunch more.
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I read it as $2,000,000 per license. This is Oracle we are talking about.
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EnterpriseDB nearly costs as much per server as Oracle does.
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The US has fixed that political loophole with trade deals. A US entity has to be considered and should be supported during all and any gov bidding.
If the US was shut of of the UK gov bids by expert domestic brands offering lower cost solutions, trade deals would fix that issue so cash would flow back to the US brand. US cloud commuting products faced the same issues with secure