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Oracle's Declaration to Sun Customers ... and IBM

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Re: Oracle's Declaration to Sun Customers ... and IBM

#41

Post by berntb »

hapless wrote: post #36
crad wrote: post #11

No mention of MySQL anywhere in that declaration, which is interesting given the EU's regulatory body concerns.

Oracle already owned the most important component of MySQL: InnoDB. MySQL AB, the independent firm, never owned the core technology upon which their product depended. Oracle has had a death grip on MySQL for years. Sun also had a competing product at the time of their MySQL AB acquisition: Their Postgresql consulting/support group. Nothing happened to it when they bought MySQL AB. Large companies can sustain heteroge…

>>Oracle already owned the most important component of MySQL: InnoDB

I don't keep us as well as I should.

Falcon seemed like the upcoming champion (the ideas seemed relevant for modern systems) and I thought it ought to be a good/better substitute for InnoDB.

It didn't work well enough?

I guess it is just an academic question, now.

Re: Oracle's Declaration to Sun Customers ... and IBM

#42

Post by ciupicri »

bd_ wrote: post #38
ciupicri wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even better BSD so that BSDs can integrate it, too.

BSDs already can; the problem is GPLv2 doesn't let you link with _anything_ else. FreeBSD, for example: http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS

That's right, I forgot about FreeBSD :-D Anyway, I still wonder with what other licenses it is incompatible.

Re: Oracle's Declaration to Sun Customers ... and IBM

#43

Post by zts »

bd_ wrote: post #38
ciupicri wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even better BSD so that BSDs can integrate it, too.

BSDs already can; the problem is GPLv2 doesn't let you link with _anything_ else. FreeBSD, for example: http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS

On the contrary - GPL doesn't let you link with much that isn't GPL. BSD and CDDL - which ZFS is licensed under - are far more open.

Re: Oracle's Declaration to Sun Customers ... and IBM

#44

Post by jhancock »

mikedouglas wrote: post #29
seldo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty conspicuously absent, in fact. MySQL's best hope is that Sun throws it overboard before the acquisition completes; there's no way it will survive within Oracle -- it competes directly as a zero-cost alternative to Oracle's core products.

Oracle would be crazy to give up MySQL. Controlling it, they can ensure it'll never compete with their high-end products, while taking the air out of the entry db market.

postgres works great and keeps getting better. Oracle and Sun are both irrelevant to most startups.

Re: Oracle's Declaration to Sun Customers ... and IBM

#46

Post by ajross »

tsuraan wrote: post #14
neovive wrote: post #2

" ...tightly integrating Oracle software with Sun hardware." Does this mean support for Oracle software on Linux will slowly degrade? Oracle would likely prefer to sell you the entire suite of hardware, OS and software vs. just selling software.

When I was interviewing with the DB2 team for IBM, they mentioned that the high-end IBM database servers implement special instructions (CPU-level) for accelerating certain DB operations. I don't know any more details than that, but I'd guess that's where Oracle is going to go with SPARC.

I'm not aware of any DB2-specific instructions, but POWER6 and above implement a decimal floating point instruction set, allowing things like regulatoriliy-mandated financial computations to be hardware accelerated instead of computed in software. That's clearly a nod to the same market that is buying DB2.

Re: Oracle's Declaration to Sun Customers ... and IBM

#47

Post by ajross »

zts wrote: post #43
bd_ wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BSDs already can; the problem is GPLv2 doesn't let you link with _anything_ else. FreeBSD, for example: http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS

On the contrary - GPL doesn't let you link with much that isn't GPL. BSD and CDDL - which ZFS is licensed under - are far more open.

Must we have this flame war again? Or if you insist, can you please at least pack your arguments into one post, complete with competing definitions of "free", and "open", and sneering sideways attacks at the other side's development model or developer personalities?

Re: Oracle's Declaration to Sun Customers ... and IBM

#48

Post by rm-rf »

Oracle makes up a magic number called a 'core factor' that determines license costs for a given platform. By manipulating that number, Oracle gets to favor one platform over another by making it cheap or expensive to license Oracle products on a particular platform.

Right now my IBM reps are trying to convince me that I can replace a 88 SPARC CPUs on couple E25k's with POWER on IBM hardware. They argue that with POWER, I'd have less than half as many CPU's to license, and the reduction in per-CPU Oracle license and maintenance costs will pay for the IBM servers.

To counter that, all Oracle has to do is change the core factor for licensing SPARC processors, making Oracle licensing costs on SPARC hardware less expensive than POWER or Itanic hardware. That would drive enterprise customers away from HP & IBM and toward SPARC, as the Oracle license cost for a given performance level could be manipulated such that the TCO on Sun is less than competitors.

Re: Oracle's Declaration to Sun Customers ... and IBM

#49

Post by nailer »

nailer wrote: post #28
mapleoin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle isn't really developing Oracle Linux since that's just RHEL. All they do is provide support.

They're developing part of the kernel, which will be included in future RHEL releases. They also have people working on Spacewalk and Xen too IIRC.

And Systemtap, which is a fairly important part of both RHEL and OEL I forgot to add.

Re: Oracle's Declaration to Sun Customers ... and IBM

#50

Post by Tamerlin »

pyre wrote: post #37
tsally wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but I expected them to slowly phase Sparc and Solaris out, and offer their existing Sparc customers discounts to upgrade.

Not necessarily. It's not like IBM doesn't sell x86 processor systems along with their POWER (and Cell?) processor systems. Oracle will probably package their own hardware by leveraging Sun's resources. You will probably be able to purchase a Sun-Oracle SPARC system and have a choice of Solaris or Linux (which also runs on SPARC) to run your Oracle database on. Otherwise you can run Oracle on Linux if you aren't buyi…

That's true, IBM is still one of Intel's biggest server OEM's world wide.

Personally, I think that SPARC will end up getting buried by Itanium and POWER, which will in turn get overwhelmed by Opteron and Xeon. :)

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