Oracle Offers Custom Intel Chips and Unanticipated Costs

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."

Sales flow chart.

[serviscope_minor]

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.

So, what does the in-memory database option do?

[timeOday]

This being slashdot, it would be nice to have the article on "gotcha" licensing accompanied by at least as much information what it actually is, and when it would be worth paying for. (And not just some snarky comments about how cheaper databases already have in-memory tables, unless that's really all it is!)

Re:Sales flow chart.

[Anonymous Coward]

How does PostGreSQL compare? Pretty well. I used to be an Oracle DBA (between Oracle 6 and 10g) but now much prefer Postgres. At the very high end of things, Oracle may well perform better. But Postgres is much better to work with, has excellent support organisations (unlike Oracle who will charge you a fortune to mostly just waste your time), is very feature-rich, and is generally a pleasure to use. If you have such data and transaction volumes that Postgres simple won't cut it, you should probably question whether Relational is the right paradigm.

Give Postgres a try, it's pretty easy to get started. And if anyone tells you MySQL is faster, ignore them until they prove it using your application and realistic transaction volumes.

Frankly I wouldn't touch Oracle with someone else's 10 foot pole.

Re:Only 23,000?

[funwithBSD]

I was really surprised that Oracle did not build database optimization right into the M series SPARC chipset like SUN did for the T series and Java.

DB/2 on IBM hardware definitely gets a boost from software/hardware integration.

Re:$23k isn't crap to an oracle shop...

[HornWumpus]

It wasn't so much a kickback, as an offer of a highly paid, no show job at Oracle after the contract closes.

At least that's what I've personally witnessed.

The company involved was under rate base, so they added 15% and passed it on to the electric ratepayers.

That said, Oracle financials? At least in the case above it was the DB. Everything else Oracle sells has _negative_ utility. You could get it done faster and more accurately with a yellow pad and slide rule.