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Oracle Businesses Databases Intel Hardware

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."
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Oracle Offers Custom Intel Chips and Unanticipated Costs

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  • Sales flow chart. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @11:26AM (#47550695) Journal

    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.

    • Anyone who buys solutions deserved to be parted with their money.

    • by Charliemopps ( 1157495 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @12:25PM (#47551171)

      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.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    $23k is nothing but pennies to an oracle shop.

    Posting anon as I'm a unix sysadmin in an oracle shop.

    • by WhoBeI ( 3642741 )
      Eh... Why does that mean you need to post anonymously? Makes no sense to me...
      • by Anonymous Coward

        Any perceived slight against them by a customer invites an audit of epic proportions.

        My organization just wrote them a 7 figure check due to some sprawl in our environment that wasn't properly handled.

        We did it proactively, through a partner, and held off the 8 figure check we might have had to write.

        I'm not that guy, but I know his world.

    • So I used to be a DBA + sysadmin at an Oracle shop ~10 years ago.

      Someone even managed to talk Oracle into selling us a site license for *everything* for $1mil/year. (a steep education discount; this was a university).

      Unfortunately, they couldn't get the various schools and departments to agree to pool their money to buy the site license, so instead we paid more for restrictive licenses and were prone to auditing. The only reason I saw for not buying into the site license was if departments were planning o

      • by HornWumpus ( 783565 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @01:25PM (#47551551)

        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.

    • by Shoten ( 260439 )

      $23k is nothing but pennies to an oracle shop.

      Posting anon as I'm a unix sysadmin in an oracle shop.

      Yes, but after becoming an Oracle shop, you don't have any pennies left to spend. And $23K per processor isn't really pennies to anyone. If you're spending the big bucks already, you have tons of processors. If you aren't, then it's massive.

      But the real problem here is that it's done by default, regardless of if it's needed at all. So a client ends up spending that money, very likely on something they don't need and don't see any benefit from. Let's assume they have only two machines running Oracle, in

      • Good thing 'the guy' has a lucrative offer from Oracle...but in your case, unlikely. $100,000 isn't a lot of money to Oracle sales. Not enough for them to buy the purchasing agent.

      • by jbo5112 ( 154963 )

        I should point out that on multicore x86 machines Oracle counts 1 processor license needed per 2 processing cores. You're probably looking at 4-6+ CPU licenses for a dual processor system.

    • by tomhath ( 637240 )
      FTFA:

      The 8895 is used in the Exadata Database Machine X4-8,an 8-processor rack system with up to 12 TB of system memory 672 terabytes of disk, 44 terabytes of high-performance PCI Flash, 240 database CPU cores, and 168 CPU cores in storage to accelerate data-intensive SQL.

      The article implies it would be at least 8 processors (I hope they don't charge by CPU or CPU core). Anyway, it's at least $200k. But as you say, an Oracle shop is already in way deeper than that.

    • by gnupun ( 752725 )

      $23k/core pricing is stupid greedy. Cores are not getting much faster and therefore chip companies are adding more cores to increase performance. Oracle DB pricing should be constant per socket regardless of the number of cores and whether the CPU is implemented as a multichip module or single chip.

      For a AMD/Intel multi-core Linux boxes
      --------
      it can be a single quad-core CPU box (4x0.5=2 sockets -- but, paying twice the processor license - because it is now 2 sockets) or
      it can be a 2 dual-core CPU (2X2x0.5

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      Posting anon as I'm a unix sysadmin in an oracle shop.

      We'll try not to hold that against you :-)

  • The whole point of going in-memory inside the main 12c database is that sometimes the alternative to the $23k (list price; negotiate 60-90% off that) is buying a new CPU and licensing the whole database ( + options + OS + etc -> far far more than $23k) on that.

    So although normally I bemoan Oracle's exceedingly unfriendly licensing model on this occasion it's not terribly surprising.

  • by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @11:31AM (#47550739) Homepage
    If they really did mind about a $23k option enabled by default on each CPU, they would not be Oracle customers, would they?
  • I can only assume that 'failed to uncheck the checkbox' is exactly the sort of mutual agreement that contract law enjoys talking about the importance of, if not actually acting on it...
  • by Anonymous Coward

    This is what I'd expect from Oracle's "Well, how much ya got?" mafia-style pricing.

    Just turn a copy of your books to your sales contact Vinnie 'flat table' Malone and he'll let you know how much of your gross will be required to keep your data safe.

    (Such a nice data warehouse you have there. It would be terrible if something.. Unfortunate would happen to it)

  • by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @11:48AM (#47550899)
    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!)
    • In the dark days of computing history before AJAX was even conceived and Mad Men were still crazies, "in-memory databases" meant that the database INDEX was in RAM (ideally if you DB admin was worth their salary), but then people wanted to pretend their were the next Google, famous for their massive search index in the pentabytes of storage, so hipsters started the NoSQL fad to be awkward like middle-aged men in skinny jeans as a vain attempt to self-proclaim their importance.

      Now Oracle is making money by s

    • In-memory tables allow the indexes of database tables to reside in memory to speed up transactional updates. These in-memory indexes are typically hashed for unique versioning so queries can spread throughout all of the processors in a computer, which presents the problem of the table de-syncing as each processor/core makes a change.

      So, this Xeon model has special instruction set that helps keep the in-memory index synced across all cores in the server. Here is an Intel brief describing the technology and
  • Only 23,000? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nitehawk214 ( 222219 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @12:23PM (#47551157)

    This is like pennies to someone that can afford to run Oracle on custom hardware. Why is this even newsworthy?

  • So, basically, the "tuning" is just giving them a way to trade active cores for speed, changing on-the-fly without restarting. More cores active, slower speed each. Less cores active, faster speed each.

    Kinda nifty, I think. Not sure why it should be limited only to Oracle, though. Seems like a performance idea with broad appeal and utility.

    • So, basically, the "tuning" is just giving them a way to trade active cores for speed, changing on-the-fly without restarting. More cores active, slower speed each. Less cores active, faster speed each.

      Kinda nifty, I think. Not sure why it should be limited only to Oracle, though. Seems like a performance idea with broad appeal and utility.

      From where I sit, I can't tell what makes it ultimately different than "BLU" for DB/2. Although I don't have a whole lot of call to do column-level in-memory work anyway.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28, 2014 @01:20PM (#47551521)

    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!

    • 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!

      Not to mention most people who spending the amount of money required for a custom built solution will already know the licensing requirements. There won't some magical surprise you owe us another $100k because you have 4 processors instead of 1. It sounds more like the OP can't read.

  • Oracle's pricing is predatory nonsense. Anyone worth their salt has moved to MySQL, postgresql and most importantly NoSQL databases. Only old school IT is likely to put up with 23K per processor in today's multicore and highly distributed environment. And the last time I worked with Oracle RDBMS it still had a large number of the same warts I hated in their product way back in the 80s.

    Just say NO!

  • Our University uses it... Biggest money pit we have.

Dennis Ritchie is twice as bright as Steve Jobs, and only half wrong. -- Jim Gettys

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