Enterprize Databases: Mission Critical Commodities
When selecting an enterprise database, developers often choose price over performance
By Edward J. Correia
June 1, 2004 —
(Page 1 of 5)
Features, performance and standards support may look great on a press release, but where the rubber hits the road for people deciding on database implementation, the bottom line usually comes down to price.
Paul Strange, director of software development at Selling Source Inc., which builds data-driven Web sites for retailers, said when his company got started, price was the primary factor. "We selected MySQL because we were small, it was free, and because it was well integrated with PHP, our language of choice."
That response was typical of developers and even vendors, as SD Times sought to discover the thinking behind the selection of database products from companies other than the so-called big three: IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.
According to Zack Urlocker, vice president of marketing at MySQL AB, cost is often the leading selection factor for the Web-based applications that are typical for MySQL. "We've had a lot of success in the midtier, with ISVs and the very largest companies looking to lower costs." MySQL is free for noncommercial development or if the commercial developer's source code is released under MySQL's GPL; otherwise the software costs US$500 per server with no per-user fees.
Urlocker said that as Web-based applications have become more business critical over time, they also have migrated from the periphery to the data center's core. But despite the database's importance to the enterprise, Urlocker contends that in the eyes of many companies and prospects, it has become a commodity, "and they want to pay commodity prices and not pay for advanced features they can do without."
IBM Corp. responded-and perhaps contributed-to that commoditization in June 2003 with the introduction of DB2 Express, a full-featured version of its relational database engine for Linux and Windows with a starting price of US$499 plus $99 per user. "We have worked to remove price as one of the roadblocks," said Jeff Jones, director of strategy in IBM's Information Management Solutions division.
OPEN SOURCE, OPEN DOORS
Aside from attractive pricing, Urlocker asserted that open-source gives MySQL a major leg up in terms of freedom from vendor schedules and operating system lock-in. "SQL Server is a great product but will only support Windows. Because we're open-source, [developers] are not beholden to our development plans [and can] port it to lesser platforms and ask us to maintain it," which he said the company does routinely. MySQL currently runs on about 20 platforms.
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