I’ll give myself a quota for no more than one rant a month. However, one of my pet peeves is how Oracle licenses the database. I’l probably return to why I dislike the general model in a future rant, but this on e will be specific to partitioning.

To use partitioning, you have to pay for the Enterprise Edition of the database at $40,000 per CPU and then pay an additional $10,000 for the partitioning option. That is a lot of money if all I really need is SE One (at $5,000 per CPU) with Partitioning. Unfortunately, that is not an option.

I know partitioning used to be a fairly exotic feature. That was however over 10 years ago, when few datbases were really large and few SQL statements would benefit from parallel execution. As the average database has grown to be really large and most database servers now are multi CPU (and core) servers, this should now be treated as core database functionality.

In many cases it doesn’t matter as large companies has site wide use of Oracle DB technology. It does, however, matter for smaller companies and startup companies. If you were to build a new solution today and market it initially to small companies or even run it as your own ASP, you would not be able to design with partitioning. Later on, your solution will be created and the cost of rearchitecting for partitioning is unacceptable.

Even worse is when you’re taking an existing application and trying to move it downstream where SE One has to be used to meet the budgets those implementations have. Why spend a lot of time of a lot of good resources to implement “manual” partitioning?

I think Oracle would benefit from making partitioning included in all licenses. One thing it would do would tie customers closer to Oracle as the cost of converting partitioning from one DB to another is high due to the lack of standard even for the DDL used. I think it would also remove another reason for customers to consider other databases. I think licensing should be such that customers can scale with the database and get started on what they need. The situation today is such that building small and needing partitioning always requires a discussion of “can we replace Oracle in our technology stack”.

By having partitioning as an included feature, companies could design for it when they begin designing new applications and get the use of it as they grow. That helps Oracle attract small companies that hopefully grow into large customers over time. It also helps in not getting people convinced that Oracle doesn’t scale as using partitioning was too expensive when they started and now it’s too costly (or politically impossible) to change it.

Designing manual partitioning schemes is really a waste of my and other Oracle professionals time. So… Please Oracle, it is time to revisit how licensing partitioning is done. It is a feature we need to put in the core toolbox and get people to make better use of the database with it. I hope 11G comes with a new licensing strategy for this. I believe Oracle would make a lot of money on making this an included feature in all editions of the database.

That’s the partitioning rant. I know others have similar ideas on this as I’ve read some recent blogs on partitioning. I love Oracle’s partitioning, but I hate having to use it only for the largest customers. I really dislike having to think of and implement manual partitioning, I know it will n ot scale as well as database driven partitioning and I still have to waste my time on it for financial reasons. Even worse is having to discuss if we should avoid Oracle altogether as we cannot use partitioning and then maybe a cheaper database will work just as well for us. I don’t want to have to avoid the best database over financial details.

If one database is the best for the job, then I want a licensing model that allows me to start small and pay more as my need grows (meaning using SE One to start with and grow to EE while I design for and with partitioning the whole time).