MonsterCookie :
This is exactly the reason why companies who made big-iron mainframes (like SGI, SUN, Cray, IBM etc.) went bankrupt:
-they thought, that other hardware/software cannot match the performance they provide, and people will keep on paying insane prices for their stuff.
-they were WRONG, and such companies will always fail, including giant software companies like Oracle.
Free software and commodity hardware might be slower, but for 200,000USD one can keep a dozen Linux servers running some other database, and pay the yearly salary of a good sysadmin.
I hope that soon that happy yellow elephant pushing that blue logo (some will know what I mean) will push hustler software companies like above out of their business.
Don't take this as an insult, but your an amateur.
That $200,000 wasn't for a server but for the licensing costs for a single Oracle Enterprise Database 11g system. You can get it a bit cheaper if you go through one of their supply partners and buy it as part of a whole system integration piece. So purchase the RDMBS + Fusion Middle Ware + Servers + Infrastructure, whole thing will probably cost you a million or two but if your into this business then that cost doesn't scare you because it's revenue generating and amortized over the budgeted lifetime of the system.
Oracle happens to be making money hand over fist, obscene quantities of it, precisely because they tailor their products towards big data while offering full support. That last is important because when your talking hundreds of millions of USD or more worth of sales, you do not leave your companies very existence into the hands of some random Linux servers thrown together on the cheap being run by a few folks with no documentation or standardization.
RDBMS's are extremely expensive. Postgres is ok for small stuff, but it doesn't scale nor offer the same enterprise features. MS SQL is "ok" but again your lacking when it comes time to scale up. This leaves three big database's you can chose from, Oracle RDBMS, IBM DB2 and Sybase ASE. All three have their own strengths and weakness's, though only Oracle and IBM offer whole solutions. I believe Yahoo had their own software developers take Postgres apart and build a special closed source version of it for them that enabled them to scale it up. That solution isn't viable for most big customers.
This all brings me to a very important, and often overlooked point. When it comes to IT costs, hardware and licensing is dwarfed by Operation and Maintenance (O&M) costs. O&M's big ticket item is the personal costs, salary, health insurance and retirement for those IT workers that are maintaining and running the servers, possible even designing and engineering them if a company runs in-house. I've done enterprise Linux and it's no where close to what MS Windows and Solaris are for management. It requires a lot more "hands on" work though Red Hat is slowly getting there as they now offer lots of property management tools for automating large server installs. Linux is amazing as an appliance, where another vender builds the device, sells you the device and then provides support for the device, like security patch's and what not. Ultimately these are the reasons you see big data installs go with licensed software vs "free !!!" software, it is a lot cheaper in the long run and you have another entity that is legally liable for any problems or failures of their product. That all being said, Red Hat is really starting to kick a$$ right now in offering custom solutions. We are working with them to find a drop in replacement for our Solaris 10 systems running Weblogic, Oracle RDBMS and some other extremely special software. It's looking like we can get RHEL + JBOSS but are still stuck using the Oracle RDBMS's because Postgres just isn't enough for us. That should end up saving a ton of money just from switching from SPARC's to x86 in our next iteration, though it has a massive up front cost investing as we need to re-engineer our architecture from Solaris containers to VMWare eSXi (another piece of expensive software).
The close to this is that enterprise level IT functions dramatically different then medium business and lower IT. There is a line you cross that requires thinking to shift from looking at tree's to seeing the whole damn forest. You stop thinking in terms of saving a few hundred or a few thousand USD and start focusing your energy towards identifying potential problems before they become problems, then engineering solutions for those problems that can scale without inuring major cost penalties. All this requires taking an approach focused on reducing manpower requirements for doing O&M and do "more with less".
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