News
11G Features Cost Extra
Oracle Corp.’s new database involves some a la carte pricing.
Oracle Corp.'s long-awaited 11g database shipped as expected in August, but the release came with a pricey twist-certain highly touted features must be purchased on an a la carte basis.
Real Application Testing (RAT), which will cost $10,000 per processor or $200 per named user, consists of two components. RAT's Database Replay lets DBAs test, capture and run actual production workloads when executing such tasks as patches and changes to schemas, configuration, storage, network and operating systems. RAT also includes a SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) for testing the impact of environmental changes.
Also, the Advanced Compression feature-designed to reduce database storage requirements by two or three times-is priced at $10,000 per processor or $200 per named user; Oracle Total Recall, which lets DBAs maintain archives of changed data for compliance, is $5,000 per processor or $100 per named user; and Active Data Guard, a module that provides monitoring, management and automation for data protection and disaster recovery, costs $5,000 per processor.
Only the Linux version has been released to manufacturing, but Oracle has indicated the Windows version-which is now in beta-will arrive by year's end.
Oracle 11g for Windows will boast major new hooks into Visual Studio, will employ a native, thread-based Windows service model and have tighter integration with the operating system. It will also offer support for large-memory and grid computing, and support both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows.
Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition is priced at $8,800 for 800 named users.
About the Author
Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.