Oracle has published a new comparison table for the MySQL Editions offered with support. Major changes include a rise of the price and InnoDB is removed from the Classic Edition.
Previous prices for the Enterprise edition of MySQL as offered by Sun a year ago ranged from $599* to $4,999* per server per year. Oracle is currently offering four editions: Classic, Standard, Enterprise, and Cluster Carrier Grade. Standard, Enterprise and Cluster come with support at prices starting at $2,000 for a server with 1-4 sockets/year, and going up to $5,000 and $10,000. A socket is basically a processor that can have multiple cores. Prices for servers with more than 5 sockets are not disclosed.
The price for Classic is also not disclosed, those interested being directed to contact the MySQL Embedded Sales Team. Classic is available only for “ISVs, OEMs and VARs to license as an embedded database”, and it no longer contains the InnoDB transactional storage engine. InnoDB was created and it is developed by Innobase Oy, a company acquired by Oracle back in 2005, so practically it belongs to Oracle.
According to a tweet posted by MySQL, the free MySQL Community Edition is still available with InnoDB:
MySQL/InnoDB still available for download under the GPL from http://mysql.com/download/ and http://dev.mysql.com/ - no change here.
While the Community Edition is untouched by the latest price changes, a question can be asked: “Is Oracle going to continue to invest in the GPL version of MySQL, keeping it a viable option, or will everybody have to choose a paid edition or move to another database?”
