The Years Database Delights and Disasters - ' RAC crashes and price ' (
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The Worst: The Orbitz RAC Crash. The travel site Orbitz blamed Oracles RAC (Real Application Clusters) technology when its site crashed and stayed down for an entire day in July. RAC credibility nose-dived as Orbitz de-installed and removed the technology from its environment like it was yesterdays fish. All you can do in a moment like that, with the tinkle of falling glass echoing in your ears, is feel sorry for Oracles security top gun, Mary Ann Davidson. Imagine having to deal with the aftermath of creating a marketing campaign that claims a product is "unbreakable"—as if there is such a thing.
The Best: Price Wars. OK, maybe it wasnt a price war per se, but it was nice to see IBM cutting the entry-level price on DB2 UDB, as it released IBM DB2 Universal Database Express Edition for Linux and Windows Version 8.1. The simple, quiet, self-installing, skinny version of DB2 lost clustering, data warehousing, data mining and other business intelligence features, including Intelligent Miner and IBMs DB2 OLAP Server. But it still supports XML, Web Services, Java and Microsofts .Net. Best of all, it came cheap: $499 for a base server package, plus $99 per user. Microsoft already owns the SMB market, but Oracle had to react, and react it did, coming out recently with an under-$1,000 offering. The offering, Oracle Standard Edition One, can run on a single processor. It costs $5,995 or $195 per user with a minimum of five users, so companies can get away with a $975 Oracle database. With Oracle Database 10g pricing sticking to the same—i.e., really, really expensive—pricing as previous iterations, its nice to have an Oracle option for which you dont have to hock the children.
Next page: Glad tidings of open source good cheer.
