You’re most welcome!

I was sloppy in that, if one pays maintenance, there indeed is always another version one can upgrade to w/o additional license fee. But there’s no assurance that all new functionality will be in that version; it could also come in the form of chargeable options.

E.g., a free upgrade to 11g would hardly inoculate one against paying new license fees for all the server-tier stuff in Exadata.

Sorry Guys, I agree 100% with Curt on the paying for Oracle Upgrades.

Paying for Oracle support does not give you free upgrades. You are paying for it. And if you look at the cost breakdown for an oracle licence renewal, you will see that is consists of 2 items: Technical Support and Upgrade Fee.

So you are indeed very much paying for an upgrade to a new release. And this is before you start adding in the cost of new options.

Of course, if you don’t pay an annual licence renewal, then if you want to upgrade to a later version of Oracle, then you will need to pay for a whole new software licence. Or if you are in good with Oracle, they may let you pay back maintenance on your existing licence.

Also note, that you have excluded the cost of traditional hardware replacement in your upgrade costs. We usually upgrade our database server hardware at around the same time as we upgrade the software version. So even though Netezza may require a full hardware upgrade, wouldn’t you be doing that with a traditional platform, or exadata anyway?

@Curt
My company is currently reviewing options of improving performance of our existing traditional EDW (which happens to run Oracle on PA_RISC HP-UX). And we are considering an appliance as part of our hardware LCM which requires a hardware replacement. Your price/performance comparison is very helpful. Thanks.

This is 100% false. As long as you pay support, you get upgrades, for free, forever.

The zdnet.com article definitely puts it better than you as it isn’t misleading. It makes it clear that any charges are for the use of new features and not just for upgrading. Your article suggests that Oracle charges for upgrades alone which simply isn’t true.

I would imagine that one of the reasons why Oracle claims a more benign long-term pricing model is because unlike Netezza (or Teradata) they do not force customers to repurchase software they have already bought during upgrades.

Netezza spends 50% of its time on disk read as it is brute force read type machine, and I am pretty sure that 3x compression means about 50% increase in performance for them with FPGA in the background. Also the rumor is that they are introducing intel chips in the SPUs along with the FPGAs to do more complex stuffs more efficiently. I don’t know about the price performance, but from their sales guys I heard first hand that just performance would improve anywhere from 5-15 times.

If I have 100K to spend per TB, I will always ask myself why should I go for Oracle/Exadata, when Teradata is there!
Aniruddha

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=5942 probably puts it better than I did.

I’m interested in your claim that ‘Oracle likes to charge for a new major release every few years’. My understanding is that Oracle licenses migrate to new releases without charge and that this is actually a key benefit compared to the likes of Netezza who force customers to repurchase both hardware AND software.

Have I misunderstood the different licensing models?

If so, under what scenarios would Oracle charge customers to upgrade to a new major release? (besides, of course, purchasing additional options)

The production Exadata Database Machine sites that I am aware of are very index-light to use a term you are familiar with.

This should really be no surprise if you understand the physics behind single block/page table access via an index versus parallel large multi block/page table access via full table scans.