> On the other hand, the money you save on Oracle licences can be
> spent on bigger iron to run PG - so for non-exotic installations you
> should be able to come out ahead. Certainly if you were thinking of
> Intel hardware I'd expect PG to do well in terms of
> price/performance.
That is exactly what we are doing. Hmm. We could spend $100k on
Oracle licenses, plus $5k on a machine, or we could spend $105k on a
machine, and $0k on PG. Which is going to have better performance?
It's a silly question, because for $30k or so, you can get an amazing
machine with many gigs of RAM, many very fast CPUs, tons of disk,
RAID, everything. Or you could get one Oracle license, and run it on
a plain old desktop PC. The choice is obvious.
Now that you can run Linux on IBM S/390s, you could get an amazing
machine that is far superior to an PC hardware, and it runs a free OS
and a free DB, and it's about the price of a few Oracle licenses.