On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 06:43:41AM +0800, Colin Coe wrote: > My point was that many organizations have Oracle anyway. Its paid for > and they have the DBA's to support it. Spinning up an RHN instance on > an existing Oracle DB doesn't cost anymore.
You're assuming a hierarchical organization with no cost shifting between departments. Large research universities (like UNC) are really loose federations, and there are several groups that would love to spin up spacewalk (eg. ibiblio), but won't do it because Oracle is the deal-breaker. *We* don't have Oracle--ITS does, and they charge per database even if the marginal cost is near-zero. Our ITS maintains a satellite server, too, but for a variety of reasons it is sub-optimal, and we can't afford what ITS would charge us for an Oracle database even if we wanted to pay it. All of this is a long-winded way of saying please, please, PLEASE switch to PostgreSQL if you want to grow the spacewalk community. We at ibiblio *do* have a postgres server. Your (Red Hat's) existing customers may in fact want Oracle, but (1) have you polled them in a way that will actually give you good data to confirm that, and (2) do you know that switching (in order to grow your developer base) would actually alienate those (presumably lucrative) clients? Cheers, -- Cristóbal Palmer ibiblio.org metalab.unc.edu _______________________________________________ Spacewalk-devel mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/spacewalk-devel
