It was naive of me to think the Ballmer actually bitch slapped someone after reading the title :(

Most commercial enterprises I know of would not touch Windows with a barge-pole in their data centres. Hence the choice of Oracle for a database vendor, rather than Microsoft.

We have(had) several installations of Oracle 10g "Enterprise Edition" installed ...

It's worth noting that a default install of this product includes extras that you are by default not licensed for, ones that are included in all the handout and install notes, ones that Oracle ring you up about and want extra money for.

At least part of the problem with Oracle is that you don't actually get to see your licenses.

When our accounts dept rang up to ask if on paying the new bill we would be covered for all of our products we were told that we "might be covered" ...

what in hell does that mean?

Either we pay up and are covered, or we don't pay up and we're not ...

If they don't know, how on earth can we?

If it wasn't for that fact that we use pl/sql packages now would be a good time to migrate!

The only time MS doesn't raise prices on a product is when they know it is not competitive.

Oh well well well, Oracle fleecing its customers again eh?

Times are hard and a recession's biting, maybe this will bite them in the arse!

Here's hoping. I despise Oracle, it reeks of beard and FAIL.

We're moving from Oracle to SQL Server, save a bit of cash and there's more SQL DBAs out there than Oracle muppets. I've not met an Oracle DBA who I would invite for a pint far less trust them to normalize my database schemas!

"Microsoft has taken a swipe at Oracle's recent decision to jack up prices on some of its products."

Someone please remind me: since Windows 95, has the price of successive editions of Windows tracked or exceeded the Retail Price Index?

When Microsoft re-wrote SQL/Server with version 7.0, they managed to produce a highly object oriented engine, that was both extensible and performant, with a parallel optimiser comparable with DB2.

“Bloated” is a rather unfair comment when Oracle boils OLAP, IFS (file-system) & HTTP into the core, where MS has stuck to a de-coupled OLAP… there are lots of options, but at least you don’t pay extra for them.

Lots of “commercial enterprises” run SAP and even J2EE applications with MS SQL Server for dull {cost, support, performance, reliability} reasons.

.. but Slapping MS misses the point: Oracle is expensive; Oracle is slower on the same kit than DB2; Oracle is proprietary; on every measure except multi-version concurrency there is something that is better.. but it is very expensive to migrate DBMS technology.

.. so well done MS for pointing out the cost of Oracle..

"....if they'd been made independent and allowed to run on other platforms it may have been a contender." Was that sarcasm, or do you just not know that M$ SQL is the most common database out there, with more instances than Oracle? They overtook Oracle way back in about 2001 or 2002 if I recall rightly. Whilst Oracle database, I believe, still leads on revenue, I think the picture has been IBM DB2 and M$ SQL gaining rapidly over the last few years, with M$ SQL being the fastest growing commercial database. And M$ SQL has penetrated into our datacenters, something I would not have expected ten years ago when we were an Oracle shop from wall to wall.

Personally, I think M$ would love to raise prices on M$ SQL, but they are watching the market and reading the fear that Oracle will raise licensing costs on the Sun products like MySQL, and so they are feeding that FUD and keeping it at the forefront of customers' minds by claiming not to have raised M$ SQL's prices. Just like IBM and hp are hoping to pick up Sun hardware bizz with the uncertainty over Sun's hardware bizz, M$ is hoping to pick up wavering MySQL customers or Oracle DB customers. After all, M$ can afford to tighten the belt for a bit.

I've been told that Postgres is very good. Oracle is bloated. Stable but doesn't pack all the features of some of the other databases that are around now.

We're slowly seeing companies starting to provide support for open source data bases and open source frameworks now. If that continues then we could have a very competative support market since this is where a lot of companies are making the biggest profit margins. I think many companies and developers would choose an open source (FREE!) db with paid support over Oracle or M$ SQL. Its just going to take time.

Those of you comparing Oracle to Postgres might be interested in EnterpriseDB (http://www.enterprisedb.com/). I've not yet gotten too far into it, but by providing PL-SQL access to a Postgres database engine, (i.e. an Oracle compatability layer) it looks like you can build a database application (relatively speaking) on the cheap, and if and when it scales to where you need the likes of Oracle, you're pretty much there already.

As for M$ SQL-Server, with Sybase's recent price hikes, if the MS version ran on an enterprise-class server OS we'd probably switch in a heartbeat.

You ought to make it clear that the 8% growth in Server & Tools Divn was over the full year. 4th quarter revenue was down 6%.