RDBMS Vendor

Paying an RDBMS Vendor

This is the part that hurts. The basic pricing strategy of database management system vendors is to hang the user up by his heels, see how much money falls out, take it all and then ask for another $50,000 for "support". Ideally, they'd like to know how much your data are worth and how much profit you expect from making them available and then extract all of that profit from you. In this respect, they behave like the classical price-discriminating profit-maximizing monopoly from Microeconomics 101.

Classically an RDBMS license was priced per user. Big insurance companies with 1000 claims processors would pay more than small companies with 5. The Web confused the RDBMS vendors. On the one hand, the server was accessible to anyone anywhere in the world. Thus, the fair arrangement would be a $64,000 per CPU unlimited user license. On the other hand, not too many Web publishers actually had $64,000 per CPU lying around in their checking accounts. So the RDBMS vendors would settle for selling a 5-user or 8-user license.

If you can't stomach the prices of commercial systems, take a long hard look at PostgreSQL. Developing a credible threat to use PostgreSQL may result in some pricing flexibility from commercial RDBMS salesmen.