Oracle Performance and Engineering
Random notes on database features, code, practice, optimization and techniques.Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Wasted Work by your app. and licensing model for Oracle
This is how it went -
- Call with an European client (pretty big ;)) to assist him in budgeting for Oracle databases
- Webex-ed with a Texas customer to trace a severe performance issue. There was a nasty query on two views - and as it happens, we figured out both the views had issue! One was written badly. Another? Was fine. Except the data model changed between the releases and no one looked at the view to 'update' it.
Thus, where they were trying to "select project and if the project has a "notes" field" so that they highlight the "notes" icon on the UI - they actually were trying to read "select the project AND the LATEST notes that project has"!
Wow! Talk to me of "wasted" work. I would be happy to see a survey that points out at the % of cases where the application is slow because it was doing "throwaway work". It was reading data or computing stuff that it NEVER ever used!
You find out the "LATEST" movie you've seen just to figure out if you've seen a movie at all in your life!!! And guess what? Some people actually have seen over 10,000 movies. You sort all of them on time order and find out the latest. "Conspiracy Theory". Hey! That's pretty old. So what? You just go back and say "Guess what. I actually have seen a movie". Folks, use EXISTS. Use ANY. Use stuff like that. Sometimes JOINs are NOT necessary.
The above example with movies was a simplified one. In reality, they were actually computing "Last movie you watched wearing a yellow cloth when it was not raining"!
I have an easy advice. If you're lactose intolerant - don't buy milk from Costco!
- Then had to capacity plan for another client who's going to license a certain software. Moore's law is going to celebrate its 40'th anniversary. Thankfully, things are cheap. At least hardware is. A decade back I would cross check 5 times if I'd calculated the disk requirements to be 125GB for next 2 years (including archive logs and flash recovery area). Today, I just shoot the email!
Here's the extract from my mail to my European client on what Oracle licensing he should use. His initial worries, in his language -
"** is having problems because his cost for Oracle licenses is through the roof. He could not disclose the cost, but said it was over €100 per user. If he can free up that cost I think that € will become part of his new budget. We have decommissioned Planview which required a huge amount of Oracle licencees. So we freed up licencees in this area. We need a description latest Thursday this week due to upcoming meetings with Oracle."
So, basically, the client was so far paying "per user" license. Wanted to deploy a huge Enterprise Apps running on Oracle and now is concerned that his Oracle cost will shoot "through the roof".
My reply -
"Oracle *database* has two licensing models, namely -
(1) ‘Named User Plus’ that counts, according to Oracle, “human users and non-human operated devices” that access a database.
Listed price for Oracle database Standard Edition is $300 per user.
For Oracle database Enterprise Edition - $800 per user.
(2) Processor based – self-explanatory.
Standard Edition: $15,000 per CPU
Enterprise Edition: $40,000 per CPU.
The only catch is there could be a maximum number of FOUR physical CPUs for standard edition.
Thus the ‘which type of license to buy’ should be based on –
-- Is the user base countable?
-- From above, if the number of users per CPU exceeds 50 then “processor” license becomes cheaper.
It’s hard for me to say without knowing the scale of **** implementation there, but our biggest implementations do usually have more than 50 users per processor. For example, XXXXX has a pretty big module licensed for 6000+ named **** users implemented over a four-CPU database server. I don’t know if any **** site purchased ‘named user plus’ licensing from Oracle (doesn’t mean there’s none!) since ‘processor’ based license makes more sense for ****.
**** should also run fine, up to a certain scale, on Standard Edition. The decision to upgrade to Enterprise Edition should be driven by scalability concerns (say, do they need to implement RAC) and not by **** usability issues.**** is fully functional on Oracle Standard Edition.
Does XXX have Oracle E-business suite deployed there? E-business suite licenses, I checked out, are per-user based (median Euro 99 per user per month).
In their case, they don’t have to pay Oracle for annual support and upgrades ($3000 to $8000) exclusively for **** since it must have been covered by the existing installs. I also found Oracle has a published discount of 25% for million-dollar plus customers."
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