[geeks] Tim Oren on Oracle - Sun

[Mike Meredith]

On Tue, 21 Apr 2009 07:15:40 -0500, Brian Dunbar wrote:
> http://due-diligence.typepad.com/blog/2009/04/orcl-java-ibm-java.html
> 
> His conclusion is that Sun's server line and Solaris will linger then
> die, Java's future is iffy, mySQL has conflicts with existing Oracle
> products.

He doesn't seem to know as much as he thinks he does ... one big hint
is that he "spells" MySQL as mySQL. Also no mention of storage at all.

Hardware:

Oracle's takeover makes it _more_ likely that Sun hardware will survive
in some form. The "Oracle is a software company" line is out of
date ... they are now a hardware company as well. Will they be stupid
enough to kill off the hardware when it's a good fit for their database
produce ? Possibly, but not _that_ likely.

There's still a risk that commodity x86 boxes will take over the world,
but Sun make them as well as "proper" servers. Besides some of oracle's
customers _need_ the bigger servers that Sun does, and commodity x86
boxes just don't scale to that size (when will Dell ship a server with
256 cores and 2Tbytes of memory? Will it be before Rock arrives which
scales the M9000-64 to 1024 cores?). Oracle RAC is an interesting
product for certain workloads, but even people from Oracle suggest
avoiding it for mainstream workloads.

Solaris:

Possibly the most likely thing to be killed off, but by integrating
what makes Solaris good into Linux. If it works at least as well as
Solaris, I can't see the problem in having a "Solaris Linux
distribution". Anyone remember dual-universe Unixes from Pyramid ?
Enter "att" and get SYSV Unix, "bsd" and get Berkeley.

On the other hand Oracle may like having an os where they can put bits
of the database engine into kernel space. 

MySQL:

Given that it's open source, I doubt Oracle will try to kill it
immediately. It's more likely to be "killed" through long-term neglect.
But they may see it as filling a product niche that the Oracle DBMS
doesn't fit into (mostly because it isn't trendy).

Storage:

Oracle customers buy lots of storage so Oracle will be quite happy to
see their customers buy their storage from Oracle.




-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
 Write a wise saying and your name will live forever
 -- anonymous