Oracle Corp’s crowing over a new Business Research Group study it claims shows its Oracle7.3 Workgroup database is up to 54% cheaper than Microsoft SQLServer 6.5 running on Windows NT. The study looked at 300 NT sites and concluded Oracle costs $54,000 per site and Microsoft costs $117,000 per site. That doesn’t account for the price increase Microsoft is set to introduce with the enterprise 6.5 release. Oracle says its Oracle8 is no more expensive. the fact remains however that more than 50% of Oracle installations on NT are of its more expensive enterprise database, not the workgroup, and that SQLServer is architected to support discrete application serving while Oracle accommodates multiple jobs. Oracle say it’s win rate against SQLServer is up a couple of points to maybe 82%, and says it’s addressing Microsoft’s key advantages on price and ease of installation. But there’s not much it can do about the promise of dinner Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer as the last chance Microsoft can offer to win a bid. It says it’s still examining ways to get Microsoft top open up some of its APIs to make it easier for Oracle to ruin on NT, but expects the forthcoming 5.0 won’t make it any easier. Apparently it’s had no luck convincing Microsoft to write its Wolfpack 2 clustering APIs to support the Oracle Clustering Interface.
