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Oracle Databases Government Software United Kingdom IT

U.K. Government Seeking To End Reliance On Oracle 190

Posted by timothy from the breathing-the-vapors dept.
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.
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U.K. Government Seeking To End Reliance On Oracle More

U.K. Government Seeking To End Reliance On Oracle

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  • Incompetent contracting (Score:5, Insightful)

    by captaindomon ( 870655 ) on Thursday August 06, 2015 @11:54AM (#50263651)
    200 licenses per year? If anything, that doesn't speak to technical concerns. It points towards incompetent legal / licensing / contracting. Who's negotiating those licenses with Oracle? Do they know what they are doing at all?

    • Re:Incompetent contracting (Score:5, Informative)

      by gbjbaanb ( 229885 ) on Thursday August 06, 2015 @11:58AM (#50263699)

      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)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 ) on Thursday August 06, 2015 @12:20PM (#50263865) Homepage

        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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rossdee ( 243626 )

          "There's also enterprise licensing"

          This is the UK - they don't have Enterprise
          They have Ark Royal and Invincible

        • 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)

        by garyisabusyguy ( 732330 ) on Thursday August 06, 2015 @12:22PM (#50263875)

        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.

      • 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)

      by ranton ( 36917 ) on Thursday August 06, 2015 @12:01PM (#50263719)

      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 contracting (Score:5, Informative)

      by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Thursday August 06, 2015 @12:01PM (#50263723) Homepage

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by garyisabusyguy ( 732330 )

        Yes, I am confused, in my experience 2 million Oracle licenses should cost between $2 and $20 BILLION dollars

      • Oracle shouldn't be charging people for their right to have a warm standby server.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mlts ( 1038732 )

        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

    • In their defense, it is not just incompetence on the part of the customer. Software Vendors love to come up with intricate and convoluted licensing terms. They are experts at obfuscation. Of course, just using 'open source' as an answer isn't necessarily the right thing. It should be a combination of closely monitored procurement practices along with select open sourcing when it make sense.

      • 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...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Alioth ( 221270 )

        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

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Afty0r ( 263037 )

      Who's negotiating those licenses with Oracle? Do they know what they are doing at all?

      1] UK Government IT and procurement employees.
      2] Given #1, definitely not.

  • $1USD per Oracle licence! How do we do it? Volume!

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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

    • "and are not productive."

      Fact not in evidence

    • 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

  • U.K. Government overthrown by Oracle

    There, FTFY.

  • Good Luck Leaving Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)

    by atrimtab ( 247656 ) on Thursday August 06, 2015 @12:11PM (#50263801)

    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)

      by jedidiah ( 1196 ) on Thursday August 06, 2015 @12:27PM (#50263925) Homepage

      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)

    by hawguy ( 1600213 ) on Thursday August 06, 2015 @12:13PM (#50263815)

    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)

  • They over charge for things like crazy. Its abusive.

    • But.. But.. Larry has to buy his Hawaiian island. [forbes.com]. He needs money bad.

      • 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

        • 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

          • Pretty much... Still Oracle does do some things very well. Their product is not bad... its just over priced.

            • 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!

        • You might be able to get stinking rich without screwing your customers.., but apparently to get rich enough to buy your own island, you need to force all your customers to take it all... without even any lube.

  • Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Thursday August 06, 2015 @12:34PM (#50263987)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      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

      • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kimanaw ( 795600 )

      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).

  • 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

  • More like Boracle. Amirite?!!

  • Solution... (Score:4, Funny)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Thursday August 06, 2015 @12:50PM (#50264133) Journal
    Pretty soon they'll just be able to move all their databases and schemas and stuff to systemd. Problem solved!

  • 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)

  • Just switch it to MongoDB. I hear rumor it is "webscale." ;)

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • My healthcare IT supplier switched from using Oracle to PostGreSQL a few releases back, and since then it has been so much easier to work with them. Previously if we needed a test environment, or a migration environment, or a pre-prod or post-prod or whatever there was a significant cost for licences. Now they are using PostGres on Linux, we can spawn sandboxes to work data without thinking too hard. Or paying much.
  • Wait... aren't the law against software copyright infringement in the UK enforced by the very same government that's getting screwed to the tune of 2 million a year? Here's an idea: just issue a proclamation stating all Oracle copyrights are invalid in the UK, and STOP PAYING! I also want somebody to explain how the heck they are paying for 200 licenses per employee...

  • 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

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