Solaris 10 6/06 Update Ships with PostgreSQL, ZFS

Published: June 22, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sun Microsystems this week put out its 6/06 update of the Solaris 10 operating system, and as promised, this update includes an integrated edition of the PostgreSQL open source relational database as well as the much-heralded Zettabyte File System (ZFS) that Sun has created for its Unix variant.

Sun began previewing the Solaris 10 6/06 update back in early May, and has been talking about many of its features for quite some time. (See Sun Previews Next Rev of Solaris 10 from the May 4 issue of The Unix Guardian for all the details.) In short, in addition to the ZFS and PostgreSQL integration, the 6/06 update also includes support for predictive self-healing when Solaris 10 runs on Opteron-based platforms, an SSL proxy embedded in the Solaris kernel, enhancements to UDP and TIBCO protocol performance, and a RealPlayer multimedia player.

The newsy bit of Sun's Solaris 10 6/06 update announcement is what the company is charging to support PostgreSQL 8.1.3. For Solaris, Sun charges $120 per socket per year for security update support, $240 per socket per year for business-class, 8x5 support, and $360 per socket per year for premium, 24x7 support. If you want support for the integrated PostgreSQL engine that is now part of the Solaris 10 distro, it costs $1,596 per socket for business-class support and $3,996 per socket for premium support for a one-year contract. If you want to save 10 percent, you can get a three-year contract for PostgreSQL support for $4,356 for 8x5 support and for $10,908 for 24x7 support; these prices are per socket as well, and are significantly lower than the cost of Oracle, Sybase, and IBM databases for Solaris. Solaris 10 tech support is not included in these prices, and is billed separately by Sun.

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