What has Oracle to do with motorcycles? At first sight: nothing at all! Except I’m a motor rider myself and I’m doing something with databases. But, inspired by a motorcycle-vlogger I made a mental connection between those area’s, where motorcycles can be replaced by cars or any other luxury goods we are using. Just a small reflection about overlooking the hidden costs or savings.

(and by the way, the photo of Itchy Boots I used, has her permission).

Motorcycles

To explain the relation, and relevant for this short blogpost, I first need to tell you what bike I own at the moment.

My motorcycle is a Yamaha XT1200Z Super Tenere Worldcrosser with 112 BHP, 1200cc, an impressive machine with massive power, especially designed for people like me, a wannabee world-traveller with little or no experience in off-road riding. The motor has been equipped with all kind of fancy electronics avoiding me falling off, be involved in an accident or get lost. But… you don’t see a lot of dirt-road travellers choose this bike for their adventures.

On YouTube I am following a Dutch Solo female adventure motorcyclist called Noraly (a.k.a. Itchy Boots). She was travelling around the world but had to take a break for the Corona Crisis. The motor she is riding is a bit different than the one I’m riding. She’s is riding a Royal Enfield Himalayan, with 24 BHP and 400CC (and gave the motor a name it by the way), a top speed of 85 mph, and almost no electronics on board.

A not so much impressive machine, it’s more a moped from my perspective. But….. with this motor she’s capable and more than happy of actually travelling around the world on dirt roads or no roads at all, on her own. And when I see the footage, I’m impressed. Impressed by the bike, but above all her attitude, bravery and ability to adapt.

 

royal_enfield_himalayan

She explained the choice of this motorcycle (picked a few):

  • Relatively light, comes in handy when falling off on a dirt road.
  • Enough torque.
  • Reliable.
  • Comfortable.
  • Probably the most important: simple technique. Any mechanic in the world, from Dubai to Chili, is able to repair this motorcycle with generic spare-parts.

Speed is mostly of no importance on the roads where she is riding.

enfield-down

Databases

Well, think of my motorcycle as an Oracle database Enterprise Edition (EE) with all kind of Options, and the Royal Enfield Himalayan as an Oracle Database Standard Edition (SE2) , the free Oracle Express Edition (XE) or PostgreSQL EDB, and you know where I’m going. Pick the right tools to do the job, and you may be saving a lot of money and get a better utilized environment !

Undoubtedly a lot of customers are paying for Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, but are using none of the options. In a lot of cases this is justifiable, because of history, consolidation, contract negotiations and so on. Changing your platform-environment, e.g. by going to the cloud, could be a perfect opportunity to leave the history behind, and save money (in operational costs). The next example involves the cloud, but it easily could be another hardware, Oracle Database Appliance, or other.

Cloud

Recently I was involved in a relatively small project of moving Oracle databases and middleware to the Azure Cloud, while converting Enterprise Edition to Standard Edition when possible. Not all could be converted to Standard Edition by the way, but it saved roughly 220k on yearly support costs : no more RAC, no EE support costs.

The yearly operational costs of the Cloud-environment is going to be roughly 140k per year, with more environments than before, good performance and up-to-date versions. So there was no need for complicated business-case calculations, this was quite obvious.

In this example it wasn’t possible to convert the Oracle database to PostgreSQL EnterpriseDB and/or Oracle Cloud but it’s imaginable that the savings will be higher if you succeed using this database and/or platform.

The moral of this story:

When not done already: wonder if the used tools aren’t oversized, perform an application and/or a database rationalization, and calculate the savings. It may have a surprisingly positive outcome!

Regardz.

Resources:

Yamaha Worldcrosser: https://bikez.com/motorcycles/yamaha_super_tenere_worldcrosser_2014.php

YouTube Itchy Boots: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEIs9nkveW9WmYtsOcJBwTg[/et_pb_text]