Oracle to charge for four 11g database add-ons

Oracle has issued details on pricing for its new 11g enterprise database, with the vendor making some of the most talked-about features available as extra-cost add-ons.

At the launch of Oracle Database 11g in New York just over a month ago, company executives spoke at length about new functionality but didn't address pricing.

On Tuesday, Oracle confirmed that the basic price for the Enterprise, Standard and Standard One versions of its 11g database would remain unchanged from the cost of the previous 10g versions. That puts the price of the enterprise edition of 11g at US$40,000 per processor or US$800 per named user. Oracle already offers a variety of optional add-ons for the enterprise version of its database including Real Application Clusters, Data Mining, Content Database Suite and Database Vault and pricing for all those options will also stay the same.

At the same time, Oracle debuted four options, each one focused around a single new 11g technology -- Real Application Testing, Advanced Compression, Total Recall and Active Data Guard. Real Application Testing and Advanced Compression cost US$10,000 per processor or US$200 per named user, while Total Recall and Active Data Guard are priced at US$5,000 per processor or US$100 per named user.

As companies move to a new database release, they spend a lot of time and money setting up a testbed where they can safely assess how well their existing applications will run on the new database. The Real Application Testing option allows users to record part of their real-life database operations and then use and replay that recording as a testing environment for their applications.

Oracle claims that using the Advanced Compression option will enable Oracle database users to compact their data so that it occupies two to three times less disk space than previously possible.

The Total Recall option lets database administrators go back and query historical information held in the database. It's a capability, which can be useful in monitoring changes to data as needed in relation to auditing and compliance issues.

Companies can use the Active Data Guard option both in disaster recovery situations and to help improve the performance of their key databases. The technology allows users to offload resource-hungry operations, for instance backups and queries, to a standby database.

New functionality that comes included in 11g includes better security, storage and data warehousing capabilities.

As far as platform support goes, Oracle has already begun shipping the Linux x86 version of 11g and users can download a free evaluation version of the database from the Oracle Technology Network.