PostGIS & Oracle Spatial Price Comparison 0
Ken Lord emailing to the annual “Who’s using PostGIS and for What?” inquiry wrote in detail about his experienes with Oracle and also a justification for decision to chose PostGIS over Oracle Spatial. I thought it was quite insightfull for anyone who are doing a cost/benefit analysis of choosing a spatial database for their next commercial project. To summarize it costs CAN$60,000 to use Oracle Spatial per CPU for web applications. Support & Maintainance is an additional CAN$13,000.
This is because inorder to use Oracle Spatial you need to buy Oracle Enterprise. Plus if you are going to use it for Web Applications then you will have to pay the per CPU license instead of the per user license.
PostGIS on the other hand seamlessly works with Mapserver (webifying your Spatial DB) and has most if not all of the functions offered by Oracle Spatial. Not to mention the supportive community who contribute by submitting bug fixes and answering newbie to advance questions. The documentation for PostGIS is also quite extensive.
There have been a few interesting comments to the annual inquiry from the developers of PostGIS. One of my favourites was: “We can have a new feature added to PostGIS for the license fees of a commercial solution”
This is not to say that one would never consider Oracle Spatial for a project, since Oracle Enterprise with its myriad of features maybe able to fullfill the requirements of a project better than PostgreSQL/PostGIS. However, as far as Spatial Databases are concerned PostGIS does make economic sense.