Re: Do Petabyte storage solutions exist?

Tom Lane wrote:
> I'm fairly sure that Oracle's pricing scales with the iron you plan to
> use: the more or faster CPUs you want to run it on, the more you pay.
> A large shop can easily get into the $100K license range, but Oracle
> figures that they will have spent way more than that on their hardware.
>
> The trouble with this theory is that as hardware prices fall, Oracle is
> collecting a larger and larger share of people's IT budgets.  That's why
> we are seeing more and more interest in open-source DBs ...

That's exactly correct. The last time I looked, Oracles pricing was
$40K/CPU for the base license, $10K/CPU for table partitioning, $20K/CPU
for RAC (clustering). It is no longer tied to CPU speed, just the number
of CPUs. See:
http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=10167
http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=11221
http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=10183

If you want OLAP and Data Mining, it's another $20K/CPU each. Spatial
(think PostGIS) is a mere $10K/CPU.
http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=11222
http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=11223
http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=10184

So for a pair of quad servers, using RAC, partitioning, OLAP, and data
mining, you're talking
40 + 20 + 10 + 20 + 20 = $110K/CPU
8 x $110K/CPU = $880K
*plus* annual support (roughly 20% of purchase price).

Joe