Oracle DBMS suitability?

classic

Greetings to All:

I'm currently working for a medium size company ith ten retail branches and distribution centres through-out the country (new zealand) and two overseas offices (one in sydney australia, one in hong kong). Total workstations number approximately sixty. Transactions at each branch are in excess of 1000/day.

Currenty operations are using the Oracle DBMS but a question has been raised about whether it is the most suitable solution.

Can someone give me suggestions on whether our company is using the suitable DBMS? what are the other options that we have on the market if to switch? (based the suggestion on price? features? functionality? etc.)

Yours faithfully

smarlowe

1,000 transactions a day? Almost any DBMS can handle that load in a minute or two, even if they're on slow old hardware.

Oracle may still be a good choice since switching can be expensive in man hours, but you really should look at postgres and it's replication server as a stable, reliable solution. There are some other good dmbses out there besides postgresql to check out too, and your low load allows you to pick almost any database and expect reasonable performance as long as it meets your program's needs.

toma42

If you're using oracle and it works for you and you own it, DON'T SWITCH. Oracle is a fantastic database and if it's not broke, why fix it?

smarlowe

Because you don't own oracle, you rent it, yearly. And if that yearly rent is more than the amount it takes to program to a new dbms, then it's usually worth it. Other than that though, I do pretty much agree with your sentiment. If you make lotsa money on it and it pays it's way, then Oracle is just fine.

If it's a penny ante back office that has to throw around a few dozen transactions a minute, then almost any database can do that. On cheap hardware.

Yearly costs on servers are more than just license costs too. The yearly maintenance on big iron can be huge. If you've got a super expensive box running Oracle right now and could run it on a smaller box it may make sense to just downsize the oracle server onto reliable PC hardware with a RAID array under Linux or BSD to reduce yearly maintenance.

Doesn't Oracle still license by the "power unit"? (#CPUMHZ100)*some_number_they_dreamt_up.

Putting it (or leaving it) on a Pentium 100 with a SCSI raid array is probably a good idea, since this system is doing very little right now.

If the cost of the system is sinking the office it's in, the system has to get cheaper.

classic

Dear Scott&Tom:

Thanks for your prompt reply. The company does not currently own the license for oracle, it pay an yearly undisclose amount of money to have the license.

I think we are currently running oracle on linux server.

Recently I've come across PostgreSQL & Clustra 4.. Perhaps financial side it would benefit on looking at alternative solution for the company due to the slowing down of world economy and the fall of new zealand currency.

The server is currently running on PIII xeon server with 1024Mb of RAM.. perhaps that is way too much as well.

Is there any other suggestion that the company should look into, please post it here.. Thanks for all the help! ^_