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Open Source Databases "50% Cheaper"
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Nov 21, 2006 04:54 PM
from the when-forrester-speaks dept.
from the when-forrester-speaks dept.
pete314 writes, "Open source databases can cut the total cost of ownership of a database by up to 60% compared to the cost of running proprietary databases from Oracle, Microsoft or IBM. According to data collected by Forrester Research, the savings average about 50%. Open source databases however still struggle to reach mission-critical enterprise applications because enterprises perceive them to be less secure and stable."
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enterprises also want (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:enterprises also want (Score:5, Insightful)
And before you say it, MySQL AG is still small potatoes compared to Oracle, Microsoft, or IBM.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1. He does not want to risk his job if there are problems... if there is an Oracle database, he can just use the Oracle support and tell the boss that they are using the best 2. There is no monetary incentive for the IT professional to switch. If the IT professional would see a benefit to himself that would outweigh the possible problems, there might be a switch,
Where are the test results? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you seriously think any CIO with a functioning brain cell is going to go with free unsupported software when they can't even find a single reference to such databases from any certified performance evaluation companies or organizations?
The downtime cost of one single failure in a five year period for a mission critical system can easily run 100 times the cost of a commercial product with support. Only bean counting fools risk their entire business without properly assessed risks and disaster recovery plans.
Not having someone to source the recovery of the smouldering crater that was your data center is a huge issue.
Parent
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That's less about support and more about image.
The quality of the support (such as likelihood of getting someone to be able to fix your DB when it's fallen over
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product support is over-rated (Score:4, Insightful)
not when they suck - which they frequently do when working on product support teams.
yes, I'm glad that I'm working with supported products - but I also avoid calling them like the plague. It is very much a worst-case scenario.
Parent
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With the kind of dollars big DB companies charge, if you're a big fish and able to solve your business problems with Open Source instead, you could pretty much steer the course of the industry for a fraction of the cost to buy from a big vendor.
With the kind of money being tossed
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
One issue with comparing Oracle with Open Source solutions is the lack of feature parity. And By that, I'm not saying OSS isn't good. PostGres and MySQL are pretty good but they currently lack load-balancing and data replication across multiple data centers. Oracle also has PL/SQL [wikipedia.org]which is currently (AFAIK) has no (or short) equivalents in OSS DBs. (PostGRE hasPL/pgSQL but apparently is not feature parity.
When
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0% savings for me (Score:5, Insightful)
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No, they're my bitter enemies whom I cant yet kill because they still serve a purpose.
But one day... their uppance will come!
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The big boys are the only ones who need the big DB vendors, and even in that c
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I do value my time. Unfortunately, I do not have a large bank account to draw from. I can afford to invest time into my company, while I can't afford to invest the thousands necessary to support an Oracle infrastructure. Time I have.
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I don't think this holds true for database systems.
As far as I can see, the big databases like Oracle or Sybase are targeted at big corporations that don't have any second thoughts about hiring a full-time DBA - and as a consequence you will need one to use these products. Okay, maybe not a fulltime DBA, but at least a trained professional (trained for that particular application) to invest quite some time to even get stuff going.
For Postgres, OTOH, you'll just need someone smart with general knowledge of
Re:0% savings for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude, have you actually used both Postgres and Oracle? There is not an entity on this earth less respectful of my time than Oracle (well, maybe ClearCase) - the thing is an absolute nightmare to administer. Sure, it needs the complexity because of its advanced scaling capabilities; but most of us are not amazon.com, and never will be.
On the other hand, the administrative overhead of running Postgres is damn near 0% (MySQL is a different story entirely of course).
Sure we are a small company, and only have under a TB of data in our databases, but there are a lot of companies in the same position who shell out ridiculous amounts of money for Oracle (only for the name-brand, nothing else), and then someone ends up stabbing themselves in the eye in frustration (might be a slight exaggeration). Or else pay for a full time DBA; I've worked for a company with 3 developers and 1 full time Oracle DBA - that's just nuts.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Per Processor for the enterprise edition of SQL 2005 vs what you get with the Standard edition from Oracle which didn't require us to go per processor. With Oracle we could have a small number of named users and have access to all the 64bit addressing and processors we can shake a stick at. Plus we can cluster them which was the big fault for MS SQL. We caught Oracle at a good time, they came down a lot over the initial price quote they gave us.
The only expensive part was paying for access to the metabase
DUH! (Score:2)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
SQL Server = Almost Free (Score:2, Informative)
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An experienced DBA can set up MySQL with many useful tools in a matter of minutes, too. And you can pay him more because you're not paying Microsoft.
The important question is whether you've bought an application that requires a specific database. As I look at various enterprise apps, they don't come stand-alone, but come in versions tailored for specific databases. If more people said "Do you support MySQL?" we'd see greater use. C
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In small businesses when you have one person who is your network admin / systems admin / dba / tech support it is important to have products that are easy for a (skilled) tech to figure out.
Sure, a MySQL expert can script and use the Open Source tools faster than a Microsoft Exper
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Let me introduce you to a friend of mine: phpmyadmin (cost: $0)
Then you even be sitting on your tractor out in the corn
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Second, unless you're doing something out of the ordinary, simply installing mysql or postgres in the same way you usually install programs (be that apt-get, rpm, MS Installer, etc). is all you need to get the database up and running. The same is true of the GUI tools to manage the database -- the Windows installer for postgres includes PgAdminIII in the same package as the database itself.
I'm not bashing
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What are you talking about. MySQL can be installed by a monkey and is well documented. Often you don't even have to do anything to install it but check a box on your Linux installer.
If you must have a GUI here http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/other/mysqlgui/ [mysql.com] is one of many.
I am glad that you like SQL Server. If it fits your needs more power to you. However MySQL really isn
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe it's more difficult to set up if you don't like to edit the pg_hba.conf and postgresql.conf files, but other than that...
Re:SQL Server = Almost Free (Score:4, Insightful)
The lack of command-line features meant that many operational activities that could be automated required a dba to manually do the job via the gui. And lets not even talk about how you had to completely recreate DTS packages when promoting them from dev to test to prod...
So, there are labor savings that you can get on sql server vs oracle, db2, postgresql, etc - but the lack of a command line interface wasn't a driver in my experience.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Um what do you mean about the lack of command-line features? SQL Server has only one interface and that interface is SQL text sent to it from a client. The only thing that all the GUI tools do is write SQL statements for you and send them to the SQL engine. Anything that the GUI tools can do, you can do as well from the command line (ISQL / OSQL / Query Analyze
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:SQL Server = Almost Free (Score:4, Informative)
SQL Server 7 & 2000
> SQL Server 2005 is MUCH cheaper than $80k for a 4 way server,
No, that depends on which version you need to use: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/default.msp
So, if you've got an internet-accessible search engine running sql server (wasn't my decision) then you can easily blow over $80k to license a four-way server. In fact the original estimates we got were over $100k.
Parent
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me = totally sorry (Score:2)
> Most open source database products, including MySQL, seem to require quite a bit of digging and cobbling together to set up and maintain.
Not on linux IMO. Of course if the windows port of postgres used to require, IIRC, cygwin it's not really a db fault is it? Never had problems with a couple of local and remote installation of Postgres. And the fcgi app connecting to it survives live updates of the OS and the db code.
>Microsoft SQL Server has fantastic tool support, no comm
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Actually, that's just MySQL, the others are comparable to SQL Server as far as the complexity of a "basic" setup goes. Of course one could say that the time needed for a new installation is just not important in the long run.
I've heard mostly good things about the newer SQL Server versions from people, unfortunately you can't use it alongside a free/open application
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Of those, SQL Server's the easiest to use. Followed by MySQL (with phpMyAdmin), Informix (with gui) and Ingres. SQL Server and MySQL are simple enough that even someone who's not too familiar with databases (they'd still need to understand the relational model, mind) can use them.
If you're using your database as a simple datastore, with all of the logic being
So in other words... (Score:2)
How is this a surprise? (Score:3, Insightful)
Therefore personnel costs probably don't vary that greatly. This only leaves two costs: the application and the database itself. Generally speaking, the business will choose the application first and the database second (or they certainly should do), which means the cost (if any) of the application falls under the heading of "we've got to have it so it really doesn't much matter how much it costs, within reason".
This leaves the backend database, assuming there's a choice in the matter (not all applications support all databases, despite SQL being nominally independent). In such a project, licensing that is about the only really variable item in the list.
Depends how you define business (lottery is not?) (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/news/article
And their application is not critical either, just win or lose.
CC.
60% of.. (Score:2, Funny)
Cost of OSS DB=$0 , which is 50% cheaper than commercial DBs.
0.5 * X = $0
X=$0
So, commercial databases really cost $0. I'm calling Oracle to get my copy.
(Yeah, yeah, TCO is not $0...)
Feature comparison (Score:2)
Is there a side-by-side comparison of major databases (including the open-source postgre, mysql) where one can see where in the featuresets each lacks/wins?
your mileage may vary (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyhow, a few things that I'd consider:
1. since as the author mentions the open source databases aren't ideal for mission critical applications (yet), then many organizations will find themselves supporting multiple databases. Say, oracle for financials & crm & the corporate warehouse and postgresql for a variety of smaller projects. Makes sense in many ways - except: oracle is already free for the small databases anyway, and now you need the dbas to support multiple products. This is going to increase your labor costs - not decrease it.
2. for many large analytical databases (data warehouses, etc) the cost of using open source are actually higher than closed source. This is because db2, oracle, etc are better at using the hardware than the open source alternatives. They've got better optimizers, parallelism, far better partitioning, better better pool management, automatic query rewrite, etc. So, a $100k oracle lisense running on a $100-200k 4-way (i know, assumes discount) will out-perform postgresql (free) on a 16-way ($1m) in many ways.
3. for some applications mysql could be more expensive than oracle. Ok, not just because you need to do far more testing with mysql to make sure that none of the wacky silent errors are affecting your code. But also because of the odd licensing - that requires its own faq and tips to just license the product if you can't figure it out. Then there's enterprise db - not very familiar with this one, but I doubt that it is free. Meanwhile, at the low-end the big-three database vendors all support free products. So, whether or not you pay more may very well depend on how you use the software.
Of course, if you're at a company like mine, and get to bypass purchasing and just review the license & install - you probably are saving a vast amount of money after all.
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2. Blatantly untrue. Oracle will scale better on multiple machines, but on a single machine Postgr
fluff piece. (Score:2)
"UP TO 50%". Ya, thats great, can you be a little more vague. Given that MS, Oracle, and IBM all have different prices, WHAT ONE WAS THE 50%? What conditions created that? We could include Centura SQL Base in that group and still keep the phrase up to 50%, but centura hardly breaks the 4 figure mark.
IBM and Oracle are way more expensive than SQL Server. You want to impress me,
Well its obvious... (Score:2, Interesting)
Being nearly there doesn't cut it at all. Being proven does. I wouldn't put my multi billion $ business on the line with some piece of free
Free versions from the "big guys" (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition [microsoft.com]
Only supports databases up to 4GB, and is lacking the built-in task scheduler, and most of the high-availability and business intelligence features, but is perfectly usable for small-to-mid-sized applications/web sites. Plus you can upgrade later to one of the fancier versions if necessary.
Oracle 10g Express Edition [oracle.com]
I haven't had a chance to play with this yet, but it looks similar to SQL Server Express in terms of features and limitations.
IBM DB2 Express-C [ibm.com]
I don't really know anything about this one. I just now found it in a fit of "I wonder..." The product comparison pages don't really say much about it, but they'll send it to you free on a DVD, so that's pretty neat.
Sybase ASE Express [sybase.com]
Never used this one either. It seems to be only for Linux.
Though honestly, from what I've seen of Postgre, I'd almost think that one would be worth looking into more so than these for small systems. One of these days I'll get around to experimenting with it. The advantage with the Express Editions is, however, that you don't have such a nasty learning curve if you can just jump right in with a database platform you're familiar with from at work. Why else would I do something insane like running php + MS SQL Server?
Re:This just in! (Score:5, Interesting)
But if you're starting from scratch on a new project and your current projections don't indicate you'll need a lot of those features, now the PHB's will have finally heard that free databases should be considered. We deployed on SQL Server and Oracle after developing on Postgres (because Postgres was about twice as fast when running the test suite). Postgres scaled better than Oracle on any single box configuration, and customer data sets never required more than 100GB databases in the worst case.
We were forced to deploy on Oracle and SQL Server because none of our customers thought that Postgres was enterprise qualified. Now, some of them might.
Regards,
Ross
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Except that if you chat to MySQL (the company) they'll tell you that they do have high performance scalability, fail-over clustering and all the other things. However, they're also keen to charge you a licence fee for that stuff, and support costs at the level you'd expect for qualified professional support staff.
So TCO pretty rapidly does become an issue.
Oracle lost a sale to us because despite having a product that would give us far better performance the TCO argument didn't work out. Frankly we'd rather