I noticed that one of the PostgreSQL community members who participated in my OSCON session mentioned it in his blog. He refers to my Oracle bashing slide and expresses relief that there wasn’t a Postgres bashing slide in my deck. To be honest, I really respect the PostgreSQL technology and the community that’s built it, and can’t imagine myself ever bashing them. Oracle on the other hand, well, that’s another story. As you’re no doubt aware, Oracle recently unleashed Oracle 11g on the world. The new software release has over four hundred (400!) new features! Some of the new features are inconsequential, and some of them are significant and quite interesting. There was a set of about ten or so new features that captured my imagination, and I commented during my OSCON session that the one thing that they all have in common is that they are either only available with Oracle Enterprise Edition, or have to be purchased as additional options on top of the Oracle Enterprise Edition. Over the past two years I’ve encountered a number of frustrated Oracle customers who stretched their IT budgets to buy Oracle Standard Edition licenses only to find that the features they need are available only in the budget busting Enterprise Edition or worse still in Enterprise Edition options that have to be purchased separately.

At Ingres we have really simple pricing; we charge a fixed price per CPU for an annual support subscription. We define a CPU as a socket e.g. if you’re using Sun’s new UltraSPARC T2 with 8 cores and 8 threads per core we still charge for only a single CPU. The simplicity of our pricing model pays dividends for those taking advantage of virtualization technologies, too, e.g. if you’re running four virtual machines on a single CPU Linux box, you pay for a support subscription for only the one CPU. I love the simplicity and transparency of this pricing model. I also take great joy in the fact that we haven’t polluted the Ingres database engine with features that didn’t truly belong in the engine and that are now pretty much defunct. More on that topic in a future blog.

On a totally unrelated topic, my buddy Roy Hann wasn’t too pleased with the UK IUA photo that I pointed you to back May, so when I discovered the following photo in an old archive I thought I’d post it. Can anyone name the complete cast of characters in this photo, taken during an Ingres Product Advisory Council meeting back in May 2003? I’ll send a framed copy of the photo to the winner!

 

  Posted in Open Source Value Prop

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