According to a letter republished in The Register, Oracle is dropping their Basic and Silver level support for MySQL. Not much is really lost; at the basic level you don’t get much more than a couple of support incidents per year, while silver adds some basic monitoring tools. The stuff people normally associate with production-grade databases such as performance monitoring isn’t available until you hit the gold level at $2,999 per server per year. For the full set of tools you can expect to pay $4,999 per server per year.

Keep in mind that these are prices inherited from Sun. There is speculation that prices will be increased so that they are comparable to Oracle’s Berkeley Database line. The transactional version of Berkeley DB is currently going for $5,800 per processor, while the “High Availability” version will set you back $9,800 per processor. With some exceptions, Oracle considers a “processor” to be a single or dual-core chip. On the other hand, one could always stick to the free version of MySQL and find tools from one of the many third-party vendors.

Meanwhile IBM has recently cut the price of its entry level database by half. Like all major vendors, DB2 comes in a free “express” edition. Their version, DB2 Express-C, supports 2 GB of RAM and 2 cores. For an extra $1,500 per year you can upgrade to the “DB2 Express Fixed Term License” version. This doubles the cores/RAM allowed and adds features expected in production environments such as active-passive clusters, replication, and backup compression. Also included in the paid version are the Optim Development Studio and Optim Database Administrator products.