BEST OF POSTS
This is a list of the best posts.
- No Such Thing As a Software Engineer
- 4 Things I Wish I’d Learned as an Undergraduate
- A Lightweight Post Mortem Process
- Morning Operations Meeting
- Scalability Best Practices
- iPad or Kindle?
- Lower Your Standards and Build a Better Team
- Fail Early
- Delayed Replication
- iPad Review
- PDLC or SDLC
- Scaling & Availability Anti-patterns
- Newsletter – NoSQL
- Interviewing Engineers Continued – Part I (The Recruiting Process)
- Please Be Quiet
While I agree with you about the commoditization of hardware, I would somewhat disagree about the scale up approach to heavily commercialized RDBMS platforms like SQL or oracle.
On these platforms, from a licensing perspective one is almost penalized for scaling out and not up (ie I can change out 4 core procs for 6 or 8 core with no change to overall licensing on SQL or reduced costs on oracle). The introduction of multiple server complexity also convolutes many of the out of the box features like simple failovers.
Hi Curtis,
Thanks for the comment. I agree that if you have a processor-based (not core-based) license then moving from a box with dual cores to quad cores is possibly cost effective. However, given the limit how many cores you can grow into, you are likely to quickly outgrow this approach if you are rapidly growing. Additionally, the more cores the greater the hardware cost which has to be factored into the equation.
BTW, Oracle has prevented this practice by charging a core factor for its processor licensing model:
From Oracle Tech price list: http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/technology-price-list.pdf
“Processor: shall be defined as all processors where the Oracle programs are installed and/or running. Programs licensed on a processor basis may be accessed by your internal users (including agents and contractors) and by your third party users. The number of required licenses shall be determined by multiplying the total number of cores of the processor by a core processor licensing factor specified on the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table which can be accessed at http://oracle.com/contracts. All cores on all multicore chips for each licensed program are to be aggregated before multiplying by the appropriate core processor licensing factor and all fractions of a number are to be rounded up to the next whole number.”