DB economic value

[PaoloPUK]

Dear experts,

can somebody tell me whether rules of thumb or references exist to assess the economic value of a database.

To be more clear. Immagine that I want to demonstrate that DB1 with 50 records is less valuable than DB2 with 500 records. Either from the point of view of the economics, of the usefulness, and so on.

It is obvious that DB2 is better, but how much? 10 times, 100 times?

If DB1 is sold for 100$, how much will be DB2 sold (assuming that the unit record has a known cost or economic value)?

Thanks a lot.

P

[Kevin3NF]

If I have a database with 5 records in it, and those records contain my customer's billing addresses for my 5 largest customers, that DB is worth infinitely more to me than a database with 10,000 records of shipped orders from 7 years ago.

If your databases contain the same (marketable ) information, and one simply has more of it, then the largest is likely to be worth more, all other things being equal.

A million dollar database is only worth what someone will pay for it.

You left out some key points...thus my straying...

Kevin3NF

[COBOLdinosaur]

Basically, you are asking what is the relative value of information.  The answer is nothing, until someone needs or want s the information , and then the value is determined by how difficult it is to obtain; who has it, how badly it is needed and the economics of using it.

The question is akin to "how deep is the ocean".  The answer in both cases require far more detailed information.

[VGR]

I agree with the above, but I will try to make some assumptions about what you mean ;-)

If your question can be rephrased as "how do you compute a database [system] overall cost over time ?" then it has nothing to do with the number of "records" [old term, that I use also] or "rows" in its tables. The performance and capacity (are there limitations?) have to do with the criteria of choice of the system, but nothing to do with its "cost".

The "economic value" - understood as "cost effectiveness" by me - has more to do with the :
- purchase & licensing price of software
- purchase price of needed hardware, if it requires one (like is usually the case for Oracle or DB2)
- setup price in terms of human time and paid-for assistance
- "tuning" cost, if needed (again, for Oracle)
- operating cost, this time assessable via maintanability by (only) trained personnel, easiness of administration, robustness and resistance to stress, as well as backup easiness & costs
- upgrade easiness & cost (is it able to be put easily in a cluster? In parallel mode ? Support multiprocessor machines? Be distributed over a network? Support active or passive redundancy? move from one hardware platform to  newer one seamlessly?)
- repair facilities and costs (do you have to call upon a paid assistance? Or a third party company ? to recover your data ? Or do you have built-in features and mechanism to try yourself first ?)
- maintenance cost (yearly fee?) and mechanism of patching, update etc (do you have to recompile? Does the DB engine itself look for updates ? Is it able to install the critical updates unattended ?)
- reasonably-assessed lifespan of the system and upgrade/replacement costs foreseen

I hope I understood your concern well. if not, I apologize ;-)