
MySQL price hikes  - olefoo
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/08/oracle_jacking_up_mysql_prices/
======
teilo
"More recently, my own conversations with EnterpriseDB sales executives
indicate an acceleration of commercial interest in Postgres, including from
MySQL customers who are anxious that Oracle may ruin MySQL for them."

The silver lining. Hopefully, this will mean that more projects will target
Postgres as a primary deployment platform.

~~~
lkrubner
It is a little sad to rewind the tape and go back to 1999, when both MySql and
PostGres were talked about as being roughly equal. MySql had not yet taken
over open source databases yet. MySql was greatly helped by the rise of PHP -
I think those 2 technologies grew up together, and leaned on each other. But I
also recall, when I was learning PHP in 1999, most PHP books devoted some time
to Postgres. And PHP supported Postgres from the beginning. It wasn't till a
few years later that I started to see book titles like "PHP/MySql development
for beginners" as if those 2 technologies just naturally belonged together.

I recall when Tim Perdue published this article in 2000, and the strong
impression it made on me that PostGres was the much better database:

<http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000705.php3>

Tim found that PostGres could scale:

"The most interesting thing about my test results was to see how much of a
load Postgres could withstand before giving any errors. In fact, Postgres
seemed to scale 3 times higher than MySQL before giving any errors at all.
MySQL begins collapsing at about 40-50 concurrent connections, whereas
Postgres handily scaled to 120 before balking. My guess is, that Postgres
could have gone far past 120 connections with enough memory and CPU."

At that time, circa 2000, developers often claimed that they could live
without ACID reliability, in exchange for speed. Thus, there preference was
for MySql. There is something to that argument of course. In recent years, the
NoSql movement has gone much further, throwing out integrity as a concern, in
exchange for massive scaling and fast speed.

Somehow, lost in the shuffle was the fact Postgres is, in most ways,
technologically superior to MySql. It may not be as fast as MySql, in some
situations, but for a wide range of purposes, it should be really be preferred
to MySql. And I think, somehow, developers have often forgotten that, for a
wide range of purposes, the best choice would be Postgres.

~~~
seldo
Back in 1997, my decision between postgres and MySQL was made for me by the
fact that Postgres was pretty much impossible to install on my Windows box,
while MySQL had a sexy InstallShield.

When you are trying to make your technology attractive to a broad base, it's
important to remember that newbie developers will always take the simplest
path, and that 95% of all computers are Windows boxes. If your software is not
very, very Windows-friendly, you will lose first-timers to technologies that
are. This was also one of the big, big factors in PHP's success.

Obviously, running a website or a database on Windows is a bad idea, but you
need to learn how to code before you need to learn that fact.

~~~
wazoox
> and that 95% of all computers are Windows boxes.

According to reddit statistics, this is no longer the case (68% only). And
back in 2000, I knew almost nobody in the web dev business using windows, but
Macs instead.

~~~
pan69
Hmmm. That's like getting browser stats from w3schools.com. And back in 2000,
I knew absolutely nobody on a Mac, zero.

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slantyyz
The letter in the article reminds me of an engagement I had during the dot.com
boom. Oracle told my client they had to buy their license right away before
some imminent price hikes, so they did. The next week, Oracle dropped their
price by 100K for my client's equivalent licensing level. Needless to say, I
had one --pissed-- customer on my hands.

~~~
thaumaturgy
One of my corporate clients needed to choose between either MSSQL or Oracle
for an in-house system, and this sort of garbage is exactly why I pushed them
hard towards MSSQL. I'm not a fan of Microsoft's licensing schemes in general,
but they look positively saintly compared to Oracle.

~~~
cturner
I had a look at Oracle prices the other day just out of curiosity. Back in the
day driver support used to be solid for Oracle and touchy for everything else
I used so that's the context in which I know it.

I went to the store, then clicked oracle database, and found myself looking at
licenses of Oracle database _Enterprise_ for just six hundred pounds. That's a
lot cheaper than I remember it being. I added to cart to see what would
happen. When you do this, it adds a "first year support" line as well that's
not quoted on the page but does contribute to your bottom line. I found that
deceptive.

My link is here, it may not work for you:
[https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:2:0::NO:RP,2:P...](https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:2:0::NO:RP,2:PROD_HIER_ID:4509958287721805720011)

Then I had an idea about what might be going on. I dug further to find the
yearly cost of support for the database. It's far more expensive, and back to
the prices of the old days. So I assume that you buy it at a merely expensive
price, and then if you want fixes to their bugs, you'll have to keep paying
money for it at a higher rate on a per-year basis.

Digging further, I found a link for Oracle database _standard_ edition that
was far more expensive and quoted on a per-processor basis. £11,730.00 per
processor. Ouch.

[https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:product:144910...](https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:product:144910682649690::NO:RP,3:P3_LPI,P3_PROD_HIER_ID:4508925239811805719874,4509958287721805720011)

I must have missed something. Does anyone know how this works?

~~~
slantyyz
No joke: When it comes to enterprise software licensing and pricing, a lot of
the time I find that even the vendor's salespeople don't know how it works.

------
esponapule
I think MySQL needs to follow the path of Libre Office (the document
foundation) and fork. The project should be run by the community and not
controlled by Oracle. Oracle, like Sun did not create the database (Sun bought
it in 2008) and are trying to profit off the community MySQL has created. This
is open source and should remain open source.

~~~
dkoch
MariaDB is one viable fork: <http://mariadb.org/>

~~~
p0ppe
The fact that it's run by Monty Widenius is definitely a plus.

------
sammcd
I approached this article thinking about how evil oracle is. But I left it
hoping oracle does this well. They had a good point about no price increases
in the last 6 years.

I'm not a fan of monetizing software through support, but I would love see
some people hitting it big and proving me wrong.

~~~
kjksf
It's a highly misleading statement. Oracle didn't own MySQL for 6 years so
they couldn't have raised MySQL prices even if they wanted to.

What it really means is that MySQL price was the same for past 6 years, when
it was owned by MySQL, AB and then Sun, but as soon as ink dried on Sun
acquisition, the first thing that Oracle did was to rise the prices.

Have they even released any new, improved version?

------
wheaties
PostgreSQL couldn't have matured to the point it is at such a more fortuitous
time. Thank you open source community. Good luck Oracle.

------
metageek
From the article:

 _The generosity or Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison knows no bounds._

Correction: no _lower_ bounds.

------
asnyder
Seems like the perfect time for those considering switching to read my
Demystifying PostgreSQL article from this month's php|architect Databases
issue. <http://www.phparch.com/magazine/2010/september/>.

Unfortunately, I can't post it on the web outside the magazine for 3 months.

------
cagenut
As the drizzle guys have pointed out in detail there are really two mysql
customer bases. One wants to treat it as a sellable/supportable component of
ISV packages, i.e. as a cheaper replacement for MSSQL/Oracle. The other wants
to use it for "internet scale" things (high traffic websites, saas providers,
etc). This price hike really only affects the former, and frankly, who cares,
those guys have controlled the feature roadmap for 3+ years anyway they're
welcome to pay for the mess they've created.

Those of us who build websites will be just fine with Percona until drizzle is
ready (or maybe even forever).

------
8ren
if customers did leave in mass exodus, wouldn't Oracle get the benefit of
effectively closing down mySQL, without the adverse publicty, while also
increasing revenue?

Sounds like win-win (where both wins are for oracle, rather than the
conventional meaning of both parties winning.)

------
seiji
Who buys mysql support from Sun/Oracle? If you are brain dead enough to use
mysql in the first place your support should be coming from Percona.

