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Did you know that Oracle already allows free downloading of any software the customer licensed, and a lot of Oracle's software can be downloaded by anybody for use in development and testing? That's the full version, not a crippled or time-bombed version.

I don't know about the auditing - I'm not an Oracle customer. I'm an Oracle employee, posting AC because I'm not authorized to speak on behalf of the company.

Did you know that Oracle already allows free downloading of any software the customer licensed, and a lot of Oracle's software can be downloaded by anybody for use in development and testing? That's the full version, not a crippled or time-bombed version.

I don't know about the auditing - I'm not an Oracle customer. I'm an Oracle employee, posting AC because I'm not authorized to speak on behalf of the company.

If you are a licensed Oracle site you have support 24/7/365...

Wrong. An Oracle license gets you squat. If you want support, you'll have to pay a yearly fee that's roughly one fourth of the astronomically high one time license fee.

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/pricelists.html

...to say nothing of things like Oracle that cost ca. $40k per CPU socket.

Oracle is available at a number of price points, starting with free.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index.html

Hmm, looks like one of the ClamAV developers was proposing something like this in 2006:

http://us.generation-nt.com/answer/patch-rfc-rearranging-files-improve-disk-performanc-help-181277711.html#r

Could probably use blktrace to do the profiling by logging inode access patterns and identifing inodes that are frequently accessed together. Then those inodes could be packed / defragged next to each other on disk.

BTW, here's an interesting utility to plot inode accesses recorded by blktrace/blkparse :
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jaunty/man1/bno_plot.1.html

Also this looks similar:
http://oss.oracle.com/~mason/seekwatcher/

48 SATA drives onboard a 4U rack, dual six-core opterons, redundant power supply. This thing won't let you down. Go big and heavy with this and it'll cost $1/GB. http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/x86/031210.htm Make sure to ask for a discount, only suckers pay full price for Oracle gear.

I think TechCrunch should do it instead of Google. To be clear, however, this is about the data. It is not about the database. There are several products, both open and closed, that can handle the storage part (just to name a few):
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/spatial/
http://grass.itc.it/
http://opensourcegis.org/

In the meantime, many businesses are poviding their addresses online and in phone books. Many already link this location to a map so customers may easily get directions. So this is a kind of "Who cares?" scenario.

87% of all statistics are made up on the spot 95% of the time. Your "95%" was pulled from a dark, smelly place.

The facts are here, for the Linux kernel as an example, and they show that almost 19% of the Linux kernel is supported by individuals and about 7% have unknown affiliations, leaving only 75% that are known to be employed by corporations. Most other FOSS project have less corporate support than does the Kernel, so the individual support is well above 25%. On many FOSS projects there is NO corporate support.

You also fail to appreciate that corporations get back in return MORE than what they've invested, or they wouldn't assign company programmers to contribute code to the Kernel under the GPL. Using the kernel again, a single corporation may assign 9 coders to work on the Linux kernel, but the kernel they use was developed with the aid of 4901 corporate employees working for 531 OTHER corporations, so that corporation has received the value of 4901 coders that they didn't pay for. Does Ellison think that paying for 9 but getting the work of 4,901 is a good return on an investment?

Personally, from what I've read of Ellison, I believe that simple minded greed will rule his actions and I'll predict that he will eventually see Linux as competition to his new proprietary Solaris+Hardware business and began fighting Linux or even try to hijack it the way SCO's McBride tried to do.

According to my son, the Oracle administrator, Oracle's paid support stinks. While his employer pays thousands for support he gets better help from the free, independent public forums attended by other Oracle users. But, pointy haired CEOs seem to think that they MUST buy commercial support from the vendor, regardless of its value.

Oracle's claims support for the following Open Source Software, but at least one is under a CDDL license, which is not like the GPL.

Not only that, but Oracle makes money selling a clone of Redhat to its customers as part of its total support package. You can run your Oracle DB on an Oracle Unbreakable Linux box.
http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/linux/index.html

Seems you haven't been there in a while. sun.com redirects to oracle.com. It is now called Oracle Solaris.

See: Oracle Solaris

The Sun has died and turned into a brown dwarf.

You can read the published advisory here:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/security/alerts/alert-cve-2010-0886.html

Larry Ellison has already stated that he estimates Oracle was making about as much money from Java technology as Sun was. So whether or not the Java business was profitable for Sun, Oracle already knows how to productize it into profit, particularly after their purchase of BEA Weblogic. They paid 8.5B for BEA just to have a leading Java enterprise stack; do you really think they'd have fired Gosling when they consider Java that strategic?

I can't believe no-one has mentioned this yet. Oracle's Exadata2 solution uses Sun x4175 and x4275 servers, and runs on NO, not Solaris, but Oracle Enterprise Linux. (Which I believe is just a RedHat variant.)

Its my impression that Oracle bought Sun for the hardware, in order to deliver a one-stop-shop solution for Oracle clusters. The one-throat-to-choke model, if you will.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/db/exadata/pdf/exadata-storage-technical-overview.pdf

slides 16, 17, 22, and 57. And that helpful link was provided by Scott Davenport's Sun blog at:
http://blogs.sun.com/sdaven/entry/oracle_exadata_2

We may soon need similar lessons here in the UK when we want to access those filtered sites suspected of potentially hosting copyrighted material. Damn, that sounds sad.

Hate to break it to you but most web sites you could ever even think of accessing will be hosting copyrighted material. That's right not just potentially hosting copyrighted material but actually hanging up copyrighted material for anyone to download.

To avoid getting copyrighted material, you'd have to find a country that did not sign the Berne Convention treaty, but even then the material might be under copyright. Alternately, even the countries in the Berne Convention treaty might have material online that has been made Public Domain either because the copyright expire or the rights holder (not the creator) put it into the public domain. Even then you'll have to download (and read) pages of copyrighted information to get at the PD stuff.

Alternately you can just download as much copyrighted material as you want. Try starting from these sites:

• SourceForge
• CreativeCommons
• Linux Kernel Archives
• arXiv
• Ubuntu
• Fedora
• NetBSD
• Oracle
• Sun
• Haiku
• Internet Archive
• and so on

And remember, there's more where that came from.

They license their database software not by the servers it runs on, nor by the processor, but by the core... Believe it or not, they also charge extra for installed memory

I've not spoken to Oracle sales, but this page disagrees with your assertion. The only pricing options I see are per named user, and per processor. Nothing about cores or installed RAM. Furthermore while I'm not a DBA my company works with Oracle's DB a lot, and this is the first I've heard of such an insane pricing scheme. Do you have anything to back your claims up? (I'm more than happy to be proved wrong)

Just head to http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/index.html and grab the standard edition. The license for it allows for development against it, with some expected caveats: 1 download = 1 person, you can only use it for development (ie, you have to buy a license the moment you start using your app for anything other than testing), and you can only install it on one server.

You *do* have to buy a license if you want to test more complex oracle deployments, though, it seems.

One thing that many people don't seem to get right: Using these "NoSQL" databases doesn't mean that you don't get ACID. Many key-value databases support ACID just fine:

• Berkeley DB transaction support; Berkeley DB used to even include XA support for a distributed transaction manager.. but that seems to have been removed.
• Tokyo Cabinet transaction features

You've got to remember that (simplifying drastically,) SQL is a query language layered on top of a "NoSQL" style database (whether built into the SQL DBMS implementation, or a 3rd party one). Such "NoSQL" databases have to be ACID capable in their native API and implementation first.

One thing that many people don't seem to get right: Using these "NoSQL" databases doesn't mean that you don't get ACID. Many key-value databases support ACID just fine:

• Berkeley DB transaction support; Berkeley DB used to even include XA support for a distributed transaction manager.. but that seems to have been removed.
• Tokyo Cabinet transaction features

You've got to remember that (simplifying drastically,) SQL is a query language layered on top of a "NoSQL" style database (whether built into the SQL DBMS implementation, or a 3rd party one). Such "NoSQL" databases have to be ACID capable in their native API and implementation first.

I'm still fuzzy on what NoSQL is supposed to be and what it is supposed to bring to the table.

From what I've understood, it's basically a common banner for various different databases that all share the common property of not being relational databases and not providing ACID guarantees.

If so, it seems to me that the whole NoSQL vs. RDMBS debate is about a false dichotomy. There are some applications where a relational database is the right tool for the job, and there are some where a relational database is not the right tool for the job. In some of those latter cases, one of the NoSQL databases may be the right thing.

This is nothing new. Non-relational databases have been used on Unix for a long time, and are even a standard part of POSIX (see for example the manpage for dbm_open). It's also long been known that, for example, Berkeley DB can be a lot faster than an RDBMS - as long as your application doesn't make use of all the features an RDBMS provides. Lots of programs even don't use one of these database systems, but invent their own, custom format. Git is a very successful example of this.

To me, it seems that what we are seeing here is loads of people who had learned to use relational databases for all their storage needs discovering that there are other ways to store data, and that one of those methods may work better than an RDMBS for a particular application. Well, yes. Does that surprise anyone? It sure doesn't surprise me. Does it mean that RDMBSes are now useless? Not at all. Does it mean you should use a non-relational storage system where this makes more sense? Of course! Now, can we please get back to work? I don't see the point of having a holy war over whether RDBMS or NoSQL is better, when common sense says that they both have their uses.

Have you checked out something like XML DB? I haven't used it much myself, but it sounds like it may meet your needs. It comes bundled with the XE database, which is free as in beer. (But XE has some limitations that the enterprise product doesn't have, of course.)

Disclaimer: I work for Oracle.

Have you checked out something like XML DB? I haven't used it much myself, but it sounds like it may meet your needs. It comes bundled with the XE database, which is free as in beer. (But XE has some limitations that the enterprise product doesn't have, of course.)

Disclaimer: I work for Oracle.

Thankfully, not

No, Sun did try to re-invent itself. I should know, I was part of the reinvention. I used to be docs lead for this product, which used to be the most powerful 4U x64 server on the market. (It got replaced by another Sun server that's essentially the same box with a new version of Hypertransport.) Sun got this product by acquiring Kealia, which was founded by Andy Bechtolsheim, the same guy who designed to first Sun workstation back at the dawn of time, and who had left Sun a decade before because he couldn't get anybody to drink the x64 koolaid.

It wasn't long before Bechtolsheim left all over again, followed by most of the rest of Kealia. This repeated the acquire-and-destroy cycle that Sun went through when they bought Cobalt networks back in 2000. In both cases they expended huge resources to expand into the x64 user space, but the existing SPARC mafia made sure the new guys knew they weren't welcome.

Maybe you're right, and Symbian isn't following the same route. But if so, why is it taking them so long to get serious about Maemo? The platforms been out since 2005!

Not the GP poster, but...

Oracle is a "Linux company" in more ways than one. Linux is the principal development platform for major Oracle products. Oracle (as in Oracle Enterprise Linux) does Linux support (similar to RHEL), though I am not sure whether Oracle's contract is cheaper/better than RedHat's. Oracle also sells hardware/software combination and sends a representative to install and configure it according to the buyer's preference. Before Sun acquisition, the only operating system for this used to be, you guessed it, Oracle Enterprise Linux (On HP hardware). After Sun acquisition, it is Sun hardware but most likely the OS will still be Linux. Most medium-end customers of Oracle are more comfortable with Linux. Extremely high-end customers, though, prefer Solaris. Oracle can view this situation in 2 ways:

1. Any value addition to Linux, is a good thing for Oracle. Since Oracle employs ZFS developers, the customers who want to use ZFS will be more comfortable buying the full Oracle solution hoping, not without reason, for a better support than RedHat, Novell etc.

2. On the other hand, Oracle can consider Linux to be a competitor to Solaris. If ZFS is not GPLed, medium-end customers who currently use Linux will be pushed to upgrade to Solaris if they want to use ZFS.

I see more sense in 1, but 2 is also not entirely without merit.

Just bind!

Exactly! The principles of free software is transforming the world: Open collaboration. Wikipedia, Creative Commons.

In hindsight, it will likely be hard for people to understand how Stallman could be viewed as such a radical.

And it will be very hard to understand how some people became among the richest in the world by selling software.

a few days back this have been prooved to be correct

people using accessibility of the GNOME desktop contributed by Sun will have to change (Orca screen reader, a project led by Sun's Accessibility Program Office). Killed by Oracle.
"the accessibility of the GNOME desktop will become the open source equivalent of an unfunded mandate, doomed ultimately to fail."
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/09/0024241/Oracle-Drops-Suns-Commitment-To-Accessibility

Now they have to migrate to Oracle Product.
"Oracle is committed to creating accessible technologies and products that enhance the overall workplace environment"
http://www.oracle.com/accessibility/index.html

This sure is too costly to work with open source.
Cost of change for these users will be high.
They would have better commit to closed source solutions such as Oracle in first place.

After all it is very well known that companies never kill their product line and have stable roadmaps.

Oracle distributes Linux under the GPL. The software has no cost. You can download it yourself here. (It is actually just re-branded Red Hat). Oracle does charge for supporting Linux, but section 508 does not apply to services, only to products. Since Oracle is not selling Linux software, they have no legal obligation to make it accessible.

Of course U.S. schools and government offices still have to make their computers accessible, under 508 and under the ADA. But Oracle is more than happy to re-sell Windows desktops and sell Windows support to that market, where Microsoft has already funded the development to make Windows accessible

I was under the impression that Oracle does sell linux.

http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/linux/index.htm

As long as Oracle is not selling Linux, Oracle has no legal obligation under 508 to make Linux accessible.

Oracle is not selling Linux? Maybe someone should tell them.

As long as Oracle is not selling Linux, Oracle has no legal obligation under 508 to make Linux accessible.

Oracle is not selling Linux? Maybe someone should tell them.

• Standy databases. Yes, I know MySQL and PostgreSQL have some replication, but it's nothing like DataGuard. Do you want physical or logical? Log shipping or transactional? How about maybe you'd like to activate and test your standby database and then press a button and it's back to where it was?
• Oracle streams - a form of SQL-level replication. Master-slave, multimaster, transformational, complex business rules, etc. Nothing like it in open source.
• The whole family of Flashback: e.g., "I'd like to do a query and have the results as of the state of the database four hours ago". Or "I'd like to immediately change the database back to its state at 01:20:03am". Or "oops, I dropped a table, please bring it back instantly." Etc.
• High-performance compression that in many cases is faster than non-compression. You can encrypt it, too.
• For nearly every DB feature, Oracle has "more". It's great you have B-tree indexes - Oracle also offers bitmap and there are cases where they are really useful. It's nice that you offer hash partitioning (if you do), but Oracle can partition on a half-dozen different things. Etc.
• RAC (Real Application Clusters) - active/active (or as many "Actives" as you'd like) clusters, all instances talking to the same DB.
• Online redefinition (change your tables, views, etc. and have Oracle store everything up until you snap everything over at once - great for reducing downtimes).
• Very sophisticated introspection. By this I mean the amount of stats the DB collects on itself. There is an insane level of instrumentation and it's very easy to see where waits and delays are.
• Ability to generate and playback workloads.
• A lot of migration assistance - e.g., "here is how your database would run if you upgraded it", "here is the SQL that will not run as well if you upgrade", "here is the recommendation for fixing your PL/SQL to run better in the next version," etc.
• Query analysis is enormously better than open software (explain plans, etc.)
• Auditing is several orders of magnitude more advanced
• Star queries, OLAP, cubes, spatial, all of that.
• XML and text support are much better.
• Virtual Private Databases
• PL/SQL, Java, etc. native to the DB, as well as an entire GUI-front-end building system (Application Express)
• A fully-integrated volume/filesystem manager (ASM), cluster software, and VM, all manageable by the DB ;-) ASM is really very nice.

I'm sure I'm missing some things - those were off the top of this Oracle DBA's head. Here is a quick list of features.

I love PostgreSQL as well, and MySQL to some extent, and even SQL Server. But they're not Oracle. DB/2 is the only thing approaching its class (along with more specialized niche players like Teradata). Most of the features I mentioned above don't come into play until you're in a 24x7 high availability environment, are trying to minimize downtime, or are working at big scale.

They have this to say about MySQL: Oracle Makes Commitments to Customers, Developers and Users of MySQL http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/042364

Why are we linking to articles from yesterday about what has happened today?

What are Oracle’s plans for the GlassFish Enterprise (Java EE) Server after the transaction closes?

Oracle plans to continue evolving GlassFish Enterprise Server, delivering it as the open source reference implementation (RI) of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specifications, and actively supporting the large GlassFish community. Additionally, Oracle plans to invest in aligning common infrastructure components and innovations from Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server to benefit both Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server customers.

What are Oracle’s plans for NetBeans?

Oracle has a strong track record of demonstrating commitment to choice for Java developers. As such, NetBeans is expected to provide an additional open source option and complement to the two free tools Oracle already offers for enterprise Java development: Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. While Oracle JDeveloper remains Oracle’s strategic development tool for the broad portfolio of Oracle Fusion Middleware products and for Oracle’s next generation of enterprise applications, developers will be able to use whichever free tool they are most comfortable with for pure Java and Java EE development: JDeveloper, Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, or NetBeans.

What are Oracle’s plans for the GlassFish Enterprise (Java EE) Server after the transaction closes?

Oracle plans to continue evolving GlassFish Enterprise Server, delivering it as the open source reference implementation (RI) of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specifications, and actively supporting the large GlassFish community. Additionally, Oracle plans to invest in aligning common infrastructure components and innovations from Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server to benefit both Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server customers.

What are Oracle’s plans for NetBeans?

Oracle has a strong track record of demonstrating commitment to choice for Java developers. As such, NetBeans is expected to provide an additional open source option and complement to the two free tools Oracle already offers for enterprise Java development: Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. While Oracle JDeveloper remains Oracle’s strategic development tool for the broad portfolio of Oracle Fusion Middleware products and for Oracle’s next generation of enterprise applications, developers will be able to use whichever free tool they are most comfortable with for pure Java and Java EE development: JDeveloper, Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, or NetBeans.

What are Oracle’s plans for the GlassFish Enterprise (Java EE) Server after the transaction closes?

Oracle plans to continue evolving GlassFish Enterprise Server, delivering it as the open source reference implementation (RI) of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specifications, and actively supporting the large GlassFish community. Additionally, Oracle plans to invest in aligning common infrastructure components and innovations from Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server to benefit both Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server customers.

What are Oracle’s plans for NetBeans?

Oracle has a strong track record of demonstrating commitment to choice for Java developers. As such, NetBeans is expected to provide an additional open source option and complement to the two free tools Oracle already offers for enterprise Java development: Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. While Oracle JDeveloper remains Oracle’s strategic development tool for the broad portfolio of Oracle Fusion Middleware products and for Oracle’s next generation of enterprise applications, developers will be able to use whichever free tool they are most comfortable with for pure Java and Java EE development: JDeveloper, Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, or NetBeans.

Oracle has more than one db product: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index.html

Why go through the expense of Oracle-ing MySQL when the product you describe is already in the portfolio: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index.html

I understand the concern - that MySQL will be an in-house "competitor" for resources to Oracle's database. However, why wouldn't they be complimentary?

That's the big mystery.

Microsoft seems to be doing ok with both SQL Server and SQL Server Express. It helps that the migration between the two is mind-numbingly simple.

If Oracle set up an easy way to migrate from MySQL to Oracle, and they renamed MySQL into "Oracle Express", there you go.

Rather than, say, Oracle Database Express Edition (XE)?

If he'd wanted to retain control then why did he sell mySQL to Sun? Once that sale was completed he gave up his rights and claims. He certainly didn't have a problem with a corporation owning it in exchange for a cool billion earlier.

What Sun said they wanted to do with it is immaterial; Monty's rights to do anything more than complain vocally were terminated by his own hand the instant he signed the contract, and were made irreversible when he deposited that check.

The fact of the matter is that Oracle doesn't give more than about a shit-and-a-half about mySQL. Oracle cares about Enterprise installations and mySQL not only ain't there now, it never will be. Even Foxbase^W^H MS SQL Server spanks it 37 ways to next Tuesday in Enterprise and Data Warehousing environments.

Meanwhile, if mySQL really is and has remained open source, then it's still open, so Monty should STFU and fork it already. If not, then he himself killed it and there's no one else to blame.

Once you sell your 2CV to someone, you have no more say in what's done with the car, even if it turns out to have been bought by Top Gear and they want to blow it up. Once you take the money, you don't get to complain anymore. If it had meant that much to Monty then why did he sell?

Cake: have vs. eat.

The comment moderation on his blog is just icing on that cake -- only comments supporting poor, ickle widdle Monty's untenable position are allowed through.

And for those who still refuse to change the "evil Oracle" record, The base Oracle DB charge is $350 (Std) / $950 (Ent) per user or $17,500 (Std) / $47,500 (Ent) per processor -- annually, not including required support and other charges -- Oracle doesn't give a shit about mySQL and the paltry few thousand that supporting it might bring in.

If it's really still Open Sauce and the community doesn't like what happens with it then mySQL will fork. Again. Except that it will need a new core team since the current core team has bills to pay and enjoys employment during an economic mess.

Let me demonstrate what I dislike about Oracle. They bought a product called "Berkeley DB", something you probably have installed on your linux box for various purposes (SVN uses it, depending on how you set it up). Now, check out the download page. Try to download any of those from the command line. Just try it. You can't.

Now, that may be meaningless to most people but I have a lot of linux servers without X windows on them and I need to download the source to bdb once in a while. Now I have to do this process of transferring the file around, all because Oracle needs me to click their stupid agreement before I download. This is where Mysql is going, mark my words.

Mysql has been dying for a long time, and thankfully my current business has outgrown it (we need more horizontal scalability) so we'll be moving off soon. Plus we do a ton of framework development and object orientated databases with table inheritance and such would make our ORM (object relation mapping) a lot simpler and automatic. I hate to see 3 dba's sitting around a cafeteria table solving class inheritance mapped to relational tables for the upteenth time. It's weird how when you get to that step of development it's always hard. And yeah yeah, there's Ruby blah blah, I need a real solution.

I have been watching MariaDB for the possibility that Monty can regain some street cred with a solid fork. It looks ok but they just haven't done much. He's been spending a lot of time ranting about why Mysql's management is so horrible instead of actually making something better. Although his rants did open my eyes to some things....

Anyway, as the parent said, there's postgresql, there's also Ingres, which people always forget about. Ingres != Postgres ;)

Oracle could easily go after the low-end market by offering a crippled version of the Oracle database.

They do.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/index.html

I'm confused too.

Unless Oracle Express is different enough from their main code base that it would be less trouble to ditch Express and just let the OSS crowd continue to maintain MySQL.

Plus Express is still harder to install than MySQL, and a usable version of MySQL "ships" with every Linux (and BSD?) distro.

MySQL has much more of the web back end market than Oracle does. I have yet to see anyone implement a website with Oracle - I'm sure there are somewhere, but with the share of MySQL?

Open source Web applications often use MySQL because it's popular, free, and open source. That doesn't make it a good choice; there are other products that are much better at just about everything MySQL does, and some are free/open source.

MySQL is widely deployed on commodity web hosting providers. Consequently, it's often used by noncommercial or low revenue sites whose traffic can be adequately handled by MySQL.

You're office suite analogy isn't applicable because they are in the same markets. Oracle and MySQL are not. Oracle has the business infrastructure and business management software, whereas, MySQL is used mostly for web backends.

Oracle competes with MySQL in the "free RDBMS" market. Oracle is missing the "open source" and "widely deployed on cheap hosting" parts. Oracle Database can be used for free without violating the license and without paying for it, but with limitations MySQL does not have.

What about the Berkeley DB they bought? They'll just need postgresql and sqlite next.

The typical architect who opts for a NO-SQL approach is basing her decision on what an RDBMS can do / can't do primarily on experience with mySQL. She would never consider something much more scaleable on the extreme like Oracle or even heaven forbid DB2. She has never tuned let alone touched one of these real RDBMS. Similarly, her idea of hardware doesn't much transcend a set of independent servers linked with GBE. So her hammer is anything but an RDBMS and the conclusion is totally foregone that an RDBMS won't work. The real conclusion is that mySQL won't work which is totally accurate. Go look at the Larry Ellison video of the Oracle/Sun database machine which will eat most of these "unsolveable" problems for lunch. Yes it is expensive, but building an empire so your pet project can succeed is also expensive and probably more risky as well.

Parsing and building SQL is just overhead, and especially parsing SQL is no easy and light task.

No optimization without quantification. Parsing is very fast, especially compared to disk IO. Are you sure the SQL is slowing your program to any appreciate (or even measurable) degree? You should be able to measure any supposed effect with a profiler.

Nevertheless, if SQLite so offends your sensibilities, you can always use Berkeley DB. It gives you a similarly powerful storage engine without the necessity (or ability) to write SQL to access it.

named sub-queries

What do you think stored functions and procedures are?

My personal opinion is that Oracle is very dedicated to the entire Eclipse ecosystem as well as to JDeveloper. It's about choice. There is an entire free download product that is continually being enhanced called the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (Oh-Pee is how we say it within Oracle). In fact I believe it was one of the first, if not the first commercial IDE to support the latest Eclipse 3.5 Galileo. http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/enterprise-pack-for-eclipse/index.html OEPE is targeted for Java and JEE developers and is mostly about supporting the Java standards. Additionally, the majority of the TopLink code was donated as the EclipseLink project and is currently the JPA reference implementation. Just take a look at the presence has at the next Eclipse conference and I think you will see that Oracle is committed to Eclipse. http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/

When you get into the "upper-stack" components like SOA Suite for integration and WebCenter Suite for enterprise portal development, and Oracle's Application Development Framework (ADF) that Oracle strongly recommends JDeveloper. Those products have been based on JDeveloper for a long time and the user-experience developing for those products is extremely smooth because Oracle can influence everything about the IDE. If you want to do Java and JEE development in JDeveloper, you can do that too. It's your choice.