“Oracle is aggressively adopting Linux both internally and for its products, despite SCO Group’s threats earlier this week that it may sue those who don’t pay licensing fees to the company. Chuck Rozwat, an Oracle executive VP, says the company has moved its IT infrastructure to Linux, a year after CEO Larry Ellis issued the mandate.” Read more at InfomationWeek.
I am glad oracle is switching to linux, I have dumped their application server about a year back, and now we hand roll our apps w/ apache and php. Ditch the java layer and oracle is very nice.
My only problem is I cant seem to find a good linux Jinitiator plugin for Mozilla’s I did have some success w/ the Xover plug from code weavers and the win32 version of jinit.
I guess this is more a question then a comment.
does any of the readers here use jinit on mozilla?? Is there a native port that I am failing to see?
Some stuff still requires I use java and jinit and its a pain coming from a nix browser.
Thanks
Wow i sure hope SCO tries to sue Oracle. Being screwed by IbM and Redhat is probably not enough for SCO. SCO deserves some additional counter suits and Oracle is as good a candidate as any.
I had a job a few years ago that required me to learn Oracle. I spent my days at work using Oracle on Windows and my days at home using Oracle on Linux. I always thought Oracle was very nice on Linux, so I’m glad to see them make this move.
Another nice side effect of this, and other large company’s involvments in Linux, is that it helps make Linux a more mainstream OS, so hopefully more hardware vendors will be willing to either release specs of their hardware, or provide decent Linux drivers for their hardware.
This actually is a smart move on Oracle’s part, it massively lowers their operating overhead to use linux.
They’ll need to be able to pass that savings onto the consumers to stay competitive for longer. With the rate of improvements being made in open source databases I’m afraid that database engines are becomming yet another commodity software item. The day when a company could make boatloads of money off database servers is pretty much at an end.
Don’t underestimate Larry Ellison. He’s a very shrewd businessman, and has been diversifying his business from the very beginning, yes Oracle the RDBMS has always been their gravy train, but that doesn’t mean it’s essential to their long term survival.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Oracle transformed itself into a “services company” providing support for databases, Linux, and Java, much like IBM.
The timing of this announcement is quite heartening. I almost wonder if we’ll see any smack-talk from Larry Ellison about SCO’s suit against IBM and Linux – the Novell-Ximian interview was full of that stuff, and it was a great laugh. And, you know, Larry will only be funnier.
-Erwos
Larry is trying to keep a bigger cut of the pie by removing the other players from the picture – namely Sun. By removing the cost of Sun hardware and Solaris, Oracle gets to keep a larger share.
Larry is sending the message that open source is viable by going Linux. Now if we all believe his story, then why don’t we go ONE STEP FURTHER and remove Oracle from the picture too?
There are plenty of open source alternatives to Oracle – MySQL and PostgreSQL to name two.
I think Oracle is doomed.
oracle.com seems to be running on solaris
My company is mostly Oracle. Any projects using another database is not supported by the DBAs and therefore cannot be in a production system.
We use AIX for production, and Linux for development and testing. We don’t use Windows because the hardware to run Oracle is so much more expensive to run in Windows than in AIX / Linux to get the same performance. The money for the hardware comes from a different budget than the money for the software. Anyone with corporate experience will understand that.
Our chief DBA used to work for the parent company. They had 3 DBAs on staff. One to oversee the 200+ Oracle proction installations and 2 to oversee the 5 MS SQL Server production installations. If they were a MS SQL Server shop, they would require over 80 DBAs to maintain the production systems. Factor the cost of the DBA’s salary and I think you will see that Oracle is the cheaper solution.
The arguement for going open source works for Windows as well as Linux when talking databases. Consider this: mySQL will cost $440 for pro license, $690 for installation support, and $1500 for standard entry-level support or $2630 in total (see http://www.mysql.com). I was quoted $1200 per year for Oracle Small Business suite which happens to include Oracle 9i Database. Hmmm…. if we never upgrade mySQL, it only start paying for itself after the second year. Then, there’s the cost of hiring a new DBA or retraining the old ones.
Can anyone point to benchmarks comaring mySQL vs Oracle with queries against tables with millions of records by hundreds of simultaneous users? Can anyone show me a high performance, low maintenance, low cost alternative to Oracle? After that, lets start talking scalability and fault tolerance.
I would be curious to know exactly what you get for the Oracle Small Business suite and why it is so cheap compared to the enterprise versions of Oracle.
Does it ship with scaleability features disabled, or without certain functionality, or is there a limit to the number of users connecting, or a limit to the database size supported, etc… And, I am fairly sure that this license only allows for ONE server with ONE CPU.
While I will be the first to agree that MySQL is nowhere near being a competitor to Oracle, the question of licensing and support TCO for open-source software compared to proprietary is large. It’s hard to compare directly, because usually open source support contracts include far fewer restrictions on usage than proprietary ones.
Just like it is possible for software to have “hidden costs”, it is also possible for there to be hidden benefits.
For example, if you browse http://www.pgsql.com/support/ you will see the standard support packages for PostgreSQL. Now, unline MySQL, you never purchase the software itself (that is free for download), but you can choose several levels of support. The cheapest yearly support package is $1000. Not much less than the above-quoted Oracle package. But, even with the cheapest level of support for PostgreSQL, you get all PostgreSQL features (except replication/clustering, which costs a little more), and there is NO restriction on the number of servers or number of CPUs involved. You could set up 10 servers with PostgreSQL and still buy this support package. Any step above this in support packages also automatically includes the eRServer license, which provides replication/clustering for high availability and failover.
So, once again, it’s kind of an apples-to-oranges thing.
I am an IT director for a small company, and we have decided on PostgreSQL for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the openness of licensing for multiple servers. Also, though, I have found that PostgreSQL is incredibly easy to maintain, if you know something about Unix.
“I am an IT director for a small company, and we have decided on PostgreSQL for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the openness of licensing for multiple servers. Also, though, I have found that PostgreSQL is incredibly easy to maintain, if you know something about Unix.”
Tools like pgmanager help in that regard.
http://ems-hitech.com/pgmanager/
You just don´t get it, do you think that licence cost is the only issue??. I don´t think you have worked too much for a real company…