Oracle cuts price on 10g database

Aiming at the SMB (small to midsize business) market, Oracle is shipping a major upgrade to its database software and is cutting prices on lower-end versions of the product.

The Unix and Linux versions of Oracle 10g began shipping last week, and a Windows version is expected by the end of February, Oracle officials said. The upgrade adds grid capabilities that make it easier to bring additional servers online when more computing power is needed.

Oracle chopped $1,000 off the price of Standard Edition One, its lowest-end database, bringing it to $4,995 per processor. Customers can also buy named user licenses for $149 per user, down from $195, with a five-user minimum. Customers can run the software on dual-processor servers, up from a single CPU.

“We have a multipronged approach to enter the lower end of the market, which we feel we weren’t penetrating before,” said Jacqueline Woods, an Oracle vice president.

For Oracle 10g Standard Edition, its midlevel database, Oracle is offering its RAC (Real Application Clusters) technology at no extra charge on as many as two nodes. It was previously available only as a $15,000 option on the high-end Enterprise Edition.

“The whole idea is to have wider adoption of RAC at lower levels, so that people understand what the advantages are and migrate to the Enterprise Edition for their key applications,” said Noel Yuhanna, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Oracle has been losing business to Microsoft’s SQL Server, Yuhanna said. The pricing moves are intended to reverse that.