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."
We are talking about Oracle customers (Score:5, Insightful)
Only 23,000? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is like pennies to someone that can afford to run Oracle on custom hardware. Why is this even newsworthy?
Re:Sales flow chart. (Score:4, Insightful)
Here is a flow chart to decide whether to buy Oracle products:
<Do you enjoy being utterly fucked over?> Yes--> Buy Oracle. No--> Run for the hills.
I've been at two places which have been Oracle'd. It's like being pwn3d except you end up $10,000,000 poorer. You also end up with less dignity than the inevitable tebagging you might get in Halo.
I'd just like to confirm... the OP is not exagerating at all here. Oracle is today, what Microsoft was 10yrs ago.
They're big.
Their customers are currently trapped.
Oracles Management think that this situation will last forever and can't imagine a time when customers would move to something else.
They are using that power in such a drastic and barbaric way that, as painful as it may be, there's just no way they are going to continue using them in the future.
In 10yrs we'll all have moved on, and Oracle Execs will be scratching their heads wondering what happened to the gravy train. Just like MSFT is doing now.
Re:Sales flow chart. (Score:5, Insightful)
DB/2? What about PostgreSQL?
Because PostgreSQL doesn't support shared-storage, active-active clusters. PostgreSQL "clusters" use replication to provide a warm standby using separate storage.
So you need twice the (high-speed) disk storage for a PostgreSQL solution.
That's just the database. Now you need to add clustering/HA to that, with pgpool. And pgpool is a turd. Yeah, it's better than NO standby/cluster. But set up a test PostgreSQL/pgpool cluster and really start beating on it - pull some plugs, shut down hardware, "kill -9" some database and/or pgpool processes. And watch pgpool piss all over itself.
In short, if you want a true clustered database solution, it's Oracle or DB2.
In-Memory is not "turned on by default"! (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, does anyone check their facts any more? By default it is turned off. You have to allocate some memory to the In-Memory Column Store by setting the INMEMORY_SIZE parameter and restarting the database. This is not going to happen by accident.
The parameter that is being discussed (INMEMORY_QUERY) which is enabled by default does nothing if no memory is allocated. You only get charged for the option if you turn it on by allocating the memory. This INMEMORY_QUERY parameter is not part of that issue.
Someone has taken something out of context and run with it. Now it has taken on a life of its own. Quality journalism!