Oracle Ships 11g Database For Linux As Pricing Holds Steady

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Oracle said Tuesday that Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition and Standard Edition One are generally available for Linux x86 systems. A spokeswoman said an announcement about the availability of Windows and Unix versions of the new database would be made at a later date.

The company said pricing for the database editions and existing options are unchanged from 10g. The Enterprise Edition is priced at $40,000 per processor or $800 per named user, while the Standard Edition is priced at $15,000 per processor or $300 per named user, and the Standard Edition One at $4,995 per processor or $149 per named user. A free evaluation version of the 11g database is available online.

While Oracle faces relentless competition from Microsoft and IBM in the database arena, it remains the industry leader with more than 47 percent of the $15.2 billion database software market last year, according to market researcher Gartner. With so many resellers building solutions around the product, any major release of the database software is a big deal.

Oracle formally debuted the new 11g release last month, touting its advanced data partitioning and compression capabilities, improved security and enhanced ability to handle real-time data, and its ability to work with new data types such as RFID tags and digital medical images. A Gartner report issued after the debut predicted that the new features and functionality would drive between 15 percent and 20 percent of the Oracle customer base to upgrade to 11g within 12 months " a faster adoption rate than earlier versions of the product.

That jives with what Jim Murphy, product development vice president at Mindreef, is hearing from his customers. Mindreef develops its SOAPscope software for testing service-oriented architecture systems and 80% of Mindreef's customers run those tools on Oracle's database. "The thing that really caught our development group's attention is its (11g's) improved manageability," Murphy says, noting that (11g) helps customers deploy SOAPscope more easily. Customers have been asking about Mindreef support for 11g since early this year, he says. SOAPscope supports the new database.

Some of the new features in 11g are add-on options that carry their own price tag. The Oracle Real Application Testing and Oracle Advanced Compression tools, for example, each cost $10,000 per processor or $200 per named user. And the Oracle Active Data Guard disaster recovery software and Oracle Total Recall product (for maintaining historical archives of changed data) are each priced at $5,000 per processor or $100 per named user.