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From: rmilner@zia.aoc.nrao.edu (Ruth Milner)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Ingres
Message-ID: <1991May17.231043.21429@nmt.edu>
Date: 17 May 91 23:10:43 GMT
Sender: nraoaoc@nmt.edu (NRAO Array Operations Center)
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Organization: National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Socorro NM
Lines: 31

Forgive the following naive questions, I haven't had to deal with commercial
database packages before.

We are about to buy Ingres and were shocked to find out that a) update pricing 
does not include any technical support (that's another $6K), b) there is 
no "warranty"-type period when you can call in for free with technical 
questions, and c) if you don't buy the support to begin with, you have to
pay for missed years later on. Now, I've heard of things like c) before, but
it always related to having missed updates. Since update support is separate
here, you could be at the latest release, have never made a single phone call
to take the time of their tech support people, and yet if you want to start
asking questions a couple of years later, you'd have to fork over $18K to get 
that third year support. We told Ingres that this was surprising, and they 
said that it's standard in the database world (said it rather patronizingly, 
too).

Is this really true?

The price was also pretty shocking to us despite the 80% educational discount 
we get (does anyone actually pay $50K for the base system on a Sun 4-class 
computer?). Are all of the major database packages in the same ballpark? 
Oracle, Sybase, etc.? And do they all have what amounts to (for us, at least) 
60% of the purchase cost for support every year?

Since another of our sites has had Ingres for a couple of years, it's the
package we probably have to get, and we can probably get by without the
support. But I'd love to know if this is really standard in the industry.
-- 
Ruth Milner
Systems Manager                     NRAO/VLA                    Socorro NM
Computing Division Head      rmilner@zia.aoc.nrao.edu