Oracle Offers Custom Intel Chips and Unanticipated Costs 97
jfruh (300774) writes "For some time, Intel has been offering custom-tweaked chips to big customers. While most of the companies that have taken them up on this offer, like Facebook and eBay, put the chips into servers meant for internal use, Oracle will now be selling systems running on custom Xeons directly to end users. Those customers need to be careful about how they configure those systems, though: in the new Oracle 12c, the in-memory database option, which costs $23,000 per processor, is turned on by default."
Re:Sales flow chart. (Score:3, Informative)
There are two RDBMS products [1] for the top end. One is Oracle, the other is DB/2. Neither is cheap.
Oracle is more tunable, DB/2 tends to "just work" for the most part. Of course, IBM can hand you a decent DB/2 stackin one package. Not cheap, but DB/2 running on a zSeries or a POWER7 is going to take some work to bring to its knees.
As for MS SQL, it is getting better. There are tasks where I'd never think of using it in the past where it can easily handle today.
[1]: We are meaning ones that have some ACID compliance. NoSQL has its uses and some DB makers report "ACID compliance over time"... whatever that means.
Re:Sales flow chart. (Score:5, Informative)
I work at a large government department with stupidly large scientific datasets being thrown in and out of databases and we're migrating as fast as we can from Oracle to Postgres. The only thing we can't really shake is bloody Oracle financials and a few crufted old Java apps that we don't have the code to rewrite.
Postgres handles beautifully, and on some things even better although on some nasty multi-join type things Oracle will still beat it.
But it doesn't even matter because we can just throw more hardware at it infinitely cheaper than the extortion racket that Oracle pricing represents.
MariaDB is surprisingly competent too and in fact even has a surprisingly complete GIS implementation (Although PostGIS is the gold standard as far as we are concerned). Just avoid the Oracle branded one (MySQL), its not as well tuned, doesn't play nice with packaging systems and is generally posessed of the Oracle odour.