Understanding the Total Cost of Ownership for Databases

Vendors often talk about the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). A MySQL environment offers significantly reduced overall costs and greatly reducing the total cost of ownership. When purchasing a database companies look at the license numbers of the database but often underestimate the surrounding costs of running a particular database. Overall TCO also includes the following costs:

• Hardware
• Application Servers
• GUI development tools
• Monitoring tools
• Administration costs
• 3rd party software
• Technical skills
• Scalability
  

MySQL offers a TCO that is a fraction of other database vendors. The following are some examples of how the costs of running a MySQL environment are significantly reduced:

• Hardware: MySQL database servers take significantly less hardware resources compared to Oracle DB2 or SQL Server. There is also more flexibility in choosing Windows, Linux, Unix or Mac OS platforms.
  
• Application Servers: MySQL environments usually use Apache or JBoss run at a fraction of the costs of running application servers from IBM, Oracle, BEA and Microsoft.
• Monitoring Tools: MySQL environments use tools like Nagios, Mon, Zenoss, Cacti are free or a fraction of the costs compared to vendor or 3rd party tools that often have licenses in the 6 and 7 figure range.
• GUI Development Tools: MySQL environments often run SQLYog, Navicat, MySQL Query Browser that are free or run at a fraction of the cost of 3rd party tools for the larger database vendors.
• GUI Admin Tools: MySQL Administrator, phpMyAdmin and Enterprise Monitor are free or run at a fraction of the cost of 3rd party tools for the larger database vendors.
• BI and Reporting: BI Open Source tools from companies like Pentaho run at a fraction of the costs of BI solutions from the major vendors.
• Scalability: Features like partitioning and replication are free in MySQL. So as your environment grows there are no additional license costs. MySQL Cluster is a licensable feature but it also is a fraction of the clustering solutions from the larger database vendors. Database servers are going to grow, so its great to know that a MySQL environment allows you to use free features or features that do not have large incremental increases the larger your databases grow.

When looking at a database vendor make sure and consider the overall Total Cost of Ownership and not just the costs of running a database server.