Desperate Measures? Oracle Prices Shoot Up 40%

Written by Steven Walling / July 17, 2009 3:00 PM / 8 Comments

Software giant Oracle has increased prices by a full 40% for some products. Specifically, the diagnostics and tuning packs for enterprise database management have swelled to $5,000 since December. The Spatial database also went up from $11,500 to $17,500.

No company spokesman has yet commented to ReadWriteWeb or other sources, and the full reasoning behind the price hike remains unexplained, officially anyway. Unofficially, it's clear that Oracle is looking to its most high-end products to raise the bottom line during lean times.

The last data sheet to show the lower price points is from December 2008, and current prices available are displaying the increase. However, it's still unclear exactly when the bump occurred.

The packs affected by the price increase are for monitoring and compliance of some of the largest and most high-value databases in the enterprise, and are used by administrators looking to find and deal with trouble spots. For especially high-risk industries like health care and banking, not using the packs for dealing with compliance issues and other mission critical activities is not realistically an option.

While these lists are more a starting point for negotiations than a firm offer, the significant increase in asking price is still makes a big impact on what customers end up paying.

Comments

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Sounds like an opportunity for Microsoft SQL Server.

Posted by: Dan Grossman | July 17, 2009 3:42 PM

Not surprised to hear this, sounds like Oracle is going the way of Sun (funny they are working on merger now.) Let's face it Oracle is a dinosaur, it's for Unix boxes that haven't been en vogue for 10 years. MS SQL Server is eating its lunch in the enterprise space and MySQL is doing the same in the web space.

Maybe Larry Ellison and Jason Schwartz can drink up to the good ol' time of 1997.

Posted by: Justin | July 17, 2009 9:23 PM

might push a lot of customers to adopt open source.

RDBMS itself is an ancient paradigm...What will happen when paradigm changes from RDBMS to some enhanced way of storing and managing data/content?

Posted by: Sumeet | July 18, 2009 5:22 AM

Wow! This will certainly set the long term image of oracle for corporate purchasers. Rising prices when everyone is trying to tighten their belts is suicidal. Hope MSSQL/MySQL will fill the small gap that oracle leaves here.

Posted by: Ravikant | July 18, 2009 2:33 PM

DB2 Anyone?

Posted by: Mohamed | July 19, 2009 3:02 AM

This is a smart move, in my opinion. Current Oracle customers won't change because of this. See more at my blog post... The Technology Consulting Blog

Posted by: Jose | July 19, 2009 7:07 AM

Sure it's a smart move....

if you've never read "Innovators Dilemma".

Retreat to the high ground anyone? By the way, has anyone seen an independent business unit to exploit the disruptive entrant (say...MySQL)? Me either.

Posted by: Geoff | July 19, 2009 9:26 PM

Before ranting about the comments, this does seem to be a case of exploiting customers who can't move. The clever thing, of course, is that $5000 here or there is nothing compared to the cost of even testing a migration to another DBMS, let alone doing the migration.

Anyway . . . comments . . .

Firstly, Oracle is available for very much 'en vogue' generic x86 Linux boxes, and indeed as easy to download pre-built Linux installations and even VMs (which you can upload onto en-vogue Amazon cloud services).

Secondly, my personal feeling is that the move from Unix to Windows servers is more down to an IT culture that has grown up on MS kit, and wants to unify on an MS platform, rather than any technical strengths - from my point of view replacing Unix with Windows (rather than Linux) seems idiotic.

When you get up into the Enterprise high end, SQL Server isn't cheap by any means, nor do you really have the same choice of server technologies (i.e. there are still significant differences between Sun, HP and IBM Unix server kit, whereas Windows and low-end Linux servers tend to be seen as replaceable in a PC like way).

The explicit strategy MS have used is encouraging developers to lock into MS database technology with free editions and then squeeze them for cash if / as they scale. To be fair, this is also exactly what Oracle do, and even mySQL (which is, of course, now owned by Oracle) makes most of it's money from large enterprise partners.

And as to the general point about RDBMS being an 'ancient paradigm' - so what?

Turing machines and Von Neumann architectures are even older, yet still form the basis of all computers today. Functional programming (the new hotness) predates almost every language in use today. OO is also roughly as old as RDBMS (both early 70s, becoming commercially wide-spread in the early 90s), yet 'OO' people uncomfortable with SQL tend to characterize OO as newer and superior.

A significant problem here is the confusion of Relational databases with SQL and a physical model of tables, and also a tendency to use a database where not required (because that's what a default architecture recommends) and then over-egg the discovery of the speed of direct file access when you don't need all the things that DBMS add on top of file access.

Alan Kay rightly criticized IT as having become a Pop Culture - fad based and unwilling to really learn from the past (rather than, like kids, dismissing it all as old hat, boring, and due to be swept away by something new).

Posted by: JulesLt | July 20, 2009 6:24 AM