Oracle Database Machine: For many, much pricier than first touted

That increases the price 140%, and makes the price per terabyte of the Database Machine about $33,000 -- higher than Netezza's and just slightly lower than Teradata's.

Netezza, which had blasted the Exadata and Database Machine as products that had been cobbled together "with glue and spit," declined to confirm or dispute the price of its appliance listed by Ellison. But in a statement, Netezza said, "We do believe we will compete very favorably on price/performance with the Oracle Database Machine and Exadata entrants in the market."

Upselling customers to faster, pricier configurations

Teradata's Lea, meanwhile, said that Oracle's price per terabyte applies only if customers buy their Exadata Storage Servers configured with 1TB SATA drives rather than the faster, smaller 300GB Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) drives.

Oracle charges the same price whichever drives that users pick. That means users who pick the faster SAS drives would pay 333% more per terabyte. That raises the price per terabyte for Oracle users with fully transferable licenses to $46,000, or 31% more than Teradata, and up to $110,000 per terabyte for those lacking any Oracle database licenses, which is 314% more than Teradata's price.

Colon said Database Machine customers shouldn't be surprised if they find themselves steered by Oracle's sales representatives toward the faster but pricier SAS drives.

"There is always the vanilla out-of-the-box solution that Oracle doesn't really recommend," Colon said. "You really have two options: buy what they recommend today, or buy it eventually down the road."

Also, Oracle's price per terabyte is based on the amount of raw storage you buy, rather than on the amount of actual user data users will be able to store. Databases typically need extra space to create indexes of the data, temporary read/write working spaces, and redundant and replicated data for backup purposes.

Some of that space can be reclaimed, said Monash, depending on how efficiently a database compresses the data. Still, a database with raw tables that take up 10TB may actually require 20TB to 30TB of storage overall, even after compression.

Lea claimed that Teradata data warehouses, despite less advanced compression technology than Oracle's, still require less disk overall to deliver peak performance.

"To optimize an Oracle environment, there is a lot of data duplication," Lea said.

Let the pricing become formalized, analyze it, and then maybe make an investment.

Eliot Colon, Miro Consulting

Ellison didn't disclosed the price during the launch, but Monash estimates, based on Oracle price sheets, that a lone Exadata costs about $150,000, of which about $120,000 is attributable just to the storage software licenses for the 12 drives.

For these reasons, Lea said Teradata has no plans to cut its prices in the wake of the Database Machine announcement.

Colon, meanwhile, said that it was far too early to recommend the Database Machine to anyone.

"This needs to play out a little better to see what unforeseen costs may arise," he said. "Let the announcement and the mood stabilize a bit -- let the pricing become formalized, analyze it, and then maybe make an investment."

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