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The Open Sourcing of Oracle
Thanks to Simone for pointing out this article by Andy Duncan regarding Oracle and its relationship to Open Source. The article starts out with background, and the metaphor to the Italian Renaissance is a bit odd, but I do think that this is a path Oracle is looking to walk down - what do you all think?
Jesus man, "All your base" is SOOOOOOOO last month!
So, when the makers of the Matrix decided to name the woman who convinces Neo of his destiny the Oracle, where they making a sly ironic jab at Larry Ellison's profit mongering clsoed source software company, or where they jsut ignorant of the rapacios predatory nature of the company that's more suited to Agent Smith than a kindly black woman?
The gamble seems to be that no matter how FREE software becomes, programmers will NEVER be able to write clear documentation. We'll always need O'Reilly to turn GeekSpeak and man pages into meaningful sentences.
Have you paid your O'Reilly Tax today?
Ok, let's get this straight. Oracle and MySQL are not in the same class of product.
MySQL is a glorified desktop database. It is not truly relational, it lacks some very important and basic features
that databases need for high end business use (transactions, triggers, and stored procedures spring to mind).
It's good for displaying web page content and not much else.
Oracle, despite its complexity and expense, is a robust, full featured database.
It does a lot that mySQL doesn't do and probably won't ever do.
Postgresql is a much closer contender for the space that Oracle fills in a business
(i.e., databases for something other than flat web content display, etc.).
You would be a big moron to replace Oracle with mysql for your inventory tracking system, for an order database,
really for anything that involves anything except spitting out data with occasional, single user updates.
It's just that silly. I shit you not
It isn't that simple (or silly). I worked a company that shipped a product on MS-SQL after literally getting a payoff from Microsoft.
Turns out that the IT customerbase is very sensitive to the DB platform you choose. If they are on Oracle, they will only buy Oracle-based products. If they are a total Microsoft shop, they will only choose MS-SQL-based products. Part of the reasoning is licencing of course, but a huge part is the operational impact of a new platform. The company found the door slamming on the salesmen at larger companies purely because we were running on a non-politically correct DB.
Your product is on Oracle. That means you've got 0 resistance from Fortune 1000 companies that generally have standardized on Oracle and have the DBAs and servers set up already. Put it on Postgres or Interbase or Sybase or Microsoft, and then you'll have to fight your customer all the way to get your box into their datacenter. Maybe your bosses don't have this insight, but they'll find out.
Simple: BIND.
The closest is Apache, but while it is on a lot of servers, it isn't as well represented in the top traffic sites. Apache is the closest to leading its field of any package
Nope. Apache has something like 62% market share. Bind has a virtual monopoly.
They would not have to purchase, set up, or support the database regardless of what it was. The database is integrated into the solution. If we were selling a product that worked with databases, your agrument would make perfect sense - in fact it would make the most sense to use odbc or jdbc or at least provide adapters for several databases.
At the small silicon valley company where I work, which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, we (well, the bigwigs, of course, I'm not this brain-damaged) have decided to base our offerings at least initially on oracle rather than one of the myriad Free and non-Free alternatives simply because the thinking is that customers would think it odd if we used anything else. Never mind that other databases cost less and perform better, and the the database is in our case invisible to the customer. It's just that silly. I shit you not.
If you run a large system (Sun Enterprise 4500, 6500, or 10000), thousands of which exist in pretty much most major businesses, Oracle *will* run rings around PostgreSQL in terms of
- performance
- reliability
- managability (distributed)
- maintainance
- parallelism
If you need proof, you need to graduate college.
-Stu
uses TeraData from NCR, last i checked
-Stu
10%?
By what measure?
The Fortune 500 are much less than 1% of the business world. In terms of economic power, however...
-Stu
the point of the above is that while 10% of the business world requires the power of beefy Sun boxes & Oracle, these guys also constitute a sizable portion of revenue.
let's not forget that
a) Oracle is the #2 software company in the world in revenues
b) Sun makes as much revenue as Microsoft.
So.... it's not about propaganda, it's about hard, tangible numbers of what people use. Of course, you'll just say that "they've been duped into buying crap", but they people doing the purchasing probably know better than that. Hey, we use Linux, because we know its great for many tasks. Generally most places I consult for don't use MySQL or PostgreSQL (though I think we have a small intranet system somewhere using OpenBase and one that might be in Postgres...)
-Stu
And I can PROMISE you that neither of the above solutions can possibly handle several thousand queries per second on a table with over 100k rows.
The above products, while not shabby themselves, are simply not in the same league. They are different solutions for different problems. Compare a Solaris box to an S/390 IBM mainframe. Different tools for different work.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
One line of the entire book makes the statement. The story was regarding a review of the book. 8)
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
And magically, I got modded down with at least 4 trolls.. 8( I'm thinking that the moderators where having fun today..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
PHP works like out of the box with MySQL and PostgresSQL. With Oracle and Informix, there some work to do before you get it to run.
If one is paying the massive amounts of money for Oracle, then they are either
a) buying a system that relies on Oracle as being there for the backend
b) Planning on using some more development tools than PHP - possibly writing things as stored procedures in the database
c) know enough of what the hell they are doing that it doesn't matter.
Having something like PHP working with it is probably the least of their worries - that is until after they get it all installed and find the app they bought doesn't provide everything and need to develop some more stuff for it.
I run a large Oracle database and two smaller ones. The big one is used by a student records package (Banner). All the interaction is done via Oracle Forms or stored PL/SQL procedures. There are a few scripts here and there written in Perl for automating some things.
One of the small databases is used by Remedy helpdesk software, and the other is used for any web applications people want to develop (normally with ASP/ODBC).
Oh yes it is:
I predict that the Oracle database server itself will be open source within ten yearsIt's a fair question. There is obviously some competion from MySQL and PostgreSQ since the people using them are not paying CAL's (Client Access Licenses) to Oracle. What Oracle can charge for is where their code gives value over MySQL and PostgreSQL. Now, the databases do not live in an isolated world. Integration with other software is important and we see a lot of that in OSS. PHP works like out of the box with MySQL and PostgresSQL. With Oracle and Informix, there some work to do before you get it to run. Zope, python and mysql, I haven't tried but I guess it's a nobrainer.
If this integration in OSS continues, products like Oracle and Informix will find it harder to provide added value since integration with other products will eat in to that and the OSS competition will seem even stronger.
So, the difference between OSS:ing and simply adapting pricing to competion is to get into the OSS integration framework. If developers start to think equaly about PHP+MySQL as PHP+Oracle, more people will knock on Oracle door to ask how to solve various database related problems. This is allready a large revenue stream for Oracle (I guess) and the question companies like Oracle have to answer is wheather to climb onto the chimney of what _may_ be a sinking boat or redefine their business into service and consulting and try to make a living out of that.
Just a thought
/jarek
Oracle will provide you and your system with 24/7/365 support from highly trained individuals, for the "ridiculous" price you pay for it. Again, it's all a matter of how much your downtime costs you. If you're Ebay, Amazon, etc, downtime costs big bucks. It makes sense to have that level of support available for their business. If you're a weblog, downtime costs you very little, comparitively speaking. Paying for Oracle in that situation doesn't make a lot of sense. PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc. don't cost a lot up front, but if your business model depends on multiple transactions per second, aren't necessarily the best choice on the odd chance that things screw up.
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
I have not heard of SAP DB. Thanks for the post, I will check it out!
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"In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL."
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
Pardon me for spoiling your FUD, but:
Maybe you should try using these databases before discounting them. Just because MySQL does not have transactions or row-level locking does not mean other 'free' RDBMS do not. As far as your claim that 'you tried'. What, exactly, did you try? Maybe the 'experts' you hired were stupid or incompetent. Maybe your architecture is inefficient. Maybe a hundred other things caused these problems and you incorrectly thought it was the fault of the database.
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"In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL."
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
Ahem. Let me put it this way. If Oracle open sources their database, they will probably do it while watching flying pigs dodging upward-falling bricks above the blue-moonlit icescape of Hell. During which period, federal taxes will drop to $0, the Israelis and Palestinians will shake hands and make nice, and the Pope will convert to Buddhism.
Oracle makes their money from a simple value proposition: "No matter what the load you need to handle, no matter how much clustering and fancy data synching you want, provided you hire a good DBA we can get you 24/7 uptime, 356 days a year, with perfect data integrity. If you have a problem, they will know how to fix it or work around it. For which, we expect you will be willing to pay through the nose, or other bodily orifice of your choice."
That ain't going away anytime soon.
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From the page: "In Oracle & Open Source, we concentrate on: Where to get today's open source base technologies and application tools; how to install them; how to connect them to Oracle; and how to modify them, should you wish to do so, to suit your own requirements"
In fact they "didn't try to address the future of open source, particularly in terms of its relationship to commercial software"
But I guess you cant expect the /. editors to check up on the facts can you. And after all you are only here for pro Linux/OSS and anti MS bias aren't you ...
DWR is Ajax for Java
> Why the hell are you posting articles like this? As far as I can see it's just a blatent advert for their book. You've
> even put "not any time soon" in the intro.
I found this article interesting not for the insights it allegedly provides for Oracle's relationship to Open Source, but for how Tim O'Reilly apparently is trying to sell the suits on Open Source.
O'Reilly appears to be attempting to act an ambassador between the hacker community, & the suits. Look how he involved himself in the Amazon 1-click contraversy, on one hand decrying the abuse of the patent system, while on the other providing Jeff Bezos a face-saving way out of this mess. Likewise, he has hired Larry Wall, who maintains the Perl programming language, as a full-time person.
It would appear that the subtext of this article is that O'Reilly is attempting to persuade Ellison to play nicely with Open Source, to act like a Renaissance prince & patronise Open Source. And if Ellison fails to get from this suggestion the ego strokes needed to make this work, then at least the idea is planted like a seed in the minds of other software moguls.
And if this seed falls on fallow ground? Worst case is that O'Reilly gets to write an ``I told you so" article when these proprietary companies slip into Chapter 11.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Considering that an enterprise relational DB is "boring" work compared to an OS, I don't think that either MySQL or PostgreSQL will ever grow as quickly as either Linux or Apache have. Making a full relational database which passes the ACID test is a non-trivial task, and while PostGreSQL of the two free RDBMS's has made the most progress towards this goal, I don't think it's capable of handling the terabyte-sized datasets that Oracle routinely does, and it will be a long time before anyone even thinks of even trying to do it. Why do you suppose there are only two serious contenders for a Free Software enterprise RDBMS (and up until recently, one of them didn't even fit that description entirely!)? An RDBMS is not as sexy as an OS or a desktop environment, not the sort of thing that would capture the imagination of the hackerly community. Finally, an industrial strength RDBMS like Oracle doesn't fill the needs of the hackerly community, but those of the business community. A site like slashdot certainly needs an RDBMS, but it doesn't manage terabytes of data, and neither will it be a major catastrophe if the database fails because either A, C, I, or D was not followed (it may cause inconvenience at the very most, but probably nobody is going to die or lose money as a result). Frankly, I think Larry Ellison is safe for the moment. Nothing that the Free Software World has to offer can really match Oracle at the moment. The same cannot be said of Bill Gates, though.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
I should hope not. Pedophilia is absolutely loathsome, and...
Oh wait. You forgot a comma.
So? Just because support is where they make their money, doesn't mean that their going to make the source available to their competitors.
Je ne parle pas francais.
As it stands, the postgresql project has been advancing very rapidly, and is getting extrememly close to beating Oracle in functionality. If Oracle doesn't react to this in the next few years, they're going to start taking serious hits in revenue.
Unfortunately, going open source is only *one* way they can react. Rather than going "open" they might go "free", that is, gratis. Using the db binary as a loss leader for other products (including support) wouldn't be the siliest thing they could do, and it would help to stay ahead of the *really* free competition for some time.
The Great Bridge benchmarks, Postgresql beat Oracle on speed slightly (Bruce Momjian confirms this in this interview: http://lwn.net/2001/features/Momjian/).
Version 7.1 has just been released, with the big news being the addition of outer-joins. I understand that replication is one of the next targets (and given the speed that these guys have been working at, I would expect it to be in the next rev).
From The postgresql site (http://www.postgresql.org):
Key New Features and Capabilities of Version 7.1 Include:
Other than being an advertisement for some book, it looks like he's says that companies like MS and Oracle won't be historically reknown in the long run. Maybe he's right about that (although he didn't explain his reasoning), but it doesn't follow that Oracle should do it. Sometimes when someone's name survives on the lips of people centuries later, it has just as much to do with their failure as their success.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=rnum=1&seld=9095 76303&ic=1
In fact, I think there is only one way that history will give its due to Larry and Bill: These corporate giants must see the open source light, and they must blend the closed commercial world and the open intellectual world into an enlightened business solution that will last into the twenty-second century. The book and article are not about Oracle going OSS, as seen from this quote, it is about how Oracle strives to work with OSS. It is a good article and the sample first chapter tends to make me think I might pick it up when I have the time.The truth is Oracle (unlike Microsoft) has a good shot at running the money side of their business without change and still work with OSS. If they really want to do things up right, they might want to invest some heavy chunks of money into OSS which directly relates AND indirectly relates to their business. Stuff like what they have done with RedHat is only the tip of the iceburge with pockets as deep as Oracles.P.S. I agree with a previous poster, the moderators goofed in modding the initial post up so high when it is evident that the person did not read the article or the sample chapter.
In a place beyond time and space, in a land far better than this, look for me there...
You read it as Hemos asking about the open sourcing of oracle. I as well, do not read it as such. The analogy of the Ren. falls apart when you consider that the artists were known for their artistic skill. They were funded to produce pretty much whatever they wanted. That model does not fit coding. Even if it did, that design implies payment prior to product which would really be interesting today.Hemos can speak for himself, but I did not read his post as an invitation to discuss open sourcing oracle, especially in the light of the article and book being discussed.Besides, your language and tone in both posts are not oriented towards discussion. Sorry you are having a bad day.
In a place beyond time and space, in a land far better than this, look for me there...
Hollywood are you listening?
Windows 2000 simply didn't take billions to write. It's about as complex as other modern OSes, multi-million dollar projects, sure, but no more.
However, Microsoft has made billions from it (and NT 4.0 before it).
They do this at a moderately low unit cost, why? Because once the development costs have been paid, they simply dump bits onto a $.10 disk and throw a cardboard box around it. The hologram is probably the most expensive thing in the package.
Microsoft, Apple, Sun, and IBM have all written (and bought, etc) OSes, of varrying complexity. Microsoft's isn't better than all of those, and it didn't cost significantly less. So why did they make money? They burned a few million copies more.
Wealth nowadays isn't necessarily from physical objects. Not to say it's not real and valid, but there is a difference between making ten physical items and making one piece of IP and running off nine copies.
The more I use Postgresql and Oracle the more I like the former and hate the latter. I don't use Oracle much usually, but I had cause to write some Oracle apps the other day and it took all of a couple of hours to find two major bugs in Oracle. And Oracle sure is a lot harder to use and administrate than Postgresql.
That said, I'm sure there would exist apps where Oracle is more scalable, and Oracle probably has some 24x7 backup and support features that would be needed for some apps. But Oracle is not all its cracked up to be by any means.
The way i see it is the same relation as apple has with opensource. If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if Oracle opensourced some parts of their software.
There's one key thing that Oracle has over pg and mysql, it performs VERY well. Not in one particular tiny thing, like mysql and its quickness on simple lookups. In the grander sense, it performs better.
Apple has that same thing, it does what it does REALLY well. It provides probably the easiest to use interface, and to some, the most asthetically pleasing interfaces. The hardware isnt' something to ignore either. But by opensourcing their non-key feature: a bsd operating system, which already existed before, but is customized to hell.
Will oracle do the same, and take in some opensource code to make part of their db? Maybe not, but pulling an apple stunt, giving away its code, darwin, just brings us closer to an opensource/closed source relationship we can all tolerate, if not endorce.
Btw, yes, darwin was originally freebsd, but a lot of work was done to make it something else, but apple has to take credit to improving on it in the ways that it did.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Mod parent up. Very funny.
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E_NOSIG
Agreed. I mean, the very idea that Python, Perl, PHP, and TCL of all things had anything to do with Sun's stance on Java is just ridiculous. TCL?!? Python, Perl, and PHP don't really compete in the same space as Java, but TCL is just really stretching things. Of course, they do have a book on TCL programming to sell...
It was just an attempt to plug their books. The arguments were very weak. I mean, with all the Oracle developers out there, open sourcing their database products would just be a road to having their support sales gutted by a crop of instant competitors pushing their own erstwhile products. Oracle isn't that stupid.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
PostgreSQL has all these things.
Time to upgrade.
I agree with everything you said except for one thing. It won't take years. Great Bridge, nusphere, borland, SAP etc are already providing serious support for open source databases. Postgres has gone through two MAJOR revisions in under a year during which time it gathered an astonishing number of enterprise features including a few which oracle does not offer.
My guess is that in two years nobody will be able to charge for databases. MS-SQL server is being squeezed from the bottom by open source and from the top by oracle and IBM. I predict that pretty soon they'll pull an IE and give theing away in order to cut the air supply of oracle. Oracle will have to drastically cut their prices or open source it just to spite MS.
War is necrophilia.
"In an entirely unrelated point, notice that the same guy then sings the praises of Oracle for involving itself with free software, while they keep their DB entirely proprietary and shackled with the sort of licensing MS would be roundly denounced for."
What's wrong with that. You judge companies the same way you judge people. If somebody is a decent guy and but has a bad habit (maybe he smokes) you don't go around bitching about the smoking. If another person is an evil bastard who likes to beat up on everybody then you may mention the fact that along with being an evil basted he also smokes.
MS is an admitted enemy of open source. Oracle wants to be friends and is trying to get to know them better. Of course you would critisize people who call you communist, un american and hippies and would prefer to hang out with people who think you might be OK to go to the movies with.
War is necrophilia.
Hemos wrote:
<i>Thanks to Simone for pointing out this article by Andy Duncan regarding Oracle and its relationship to Open Source. The article starts out with background, and the metaphor to the Italian Renaissance is a bit odd, but I do think that this is a path Oracle is looking to walk down - what do you all think? </i>
<BR><BR>
Now, "this" clearly refers to the article, not to anything else. So, yes, you are rude for insulting tcharron, and wrong for not reading Hemos's blurb.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
It's 2:00am and your database is corrupt. If you go back to tape you will loose a half day of transactions. You then realize that the free database that you just bet your business on, doesn't have any real 24X7 support. Have a nice day. Hope that your free tape backup solution works just as well... Everything looks great until the sh*t hits the fan...
Wrong: http://www.greatbridge.com/product/support.php
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
SuperID
Free Database Hosting
The other half is Oracle's suite of enterprise standard software, Oracle Applications, which is a huge and unmaintainable pile of spaghetti code that runs against Oracle8. If Oracle would ever opensource the Apps, nobody would even try and download this stuff, much less compile and run it. It's just not worth the trouble.
It's almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity.
He says that he's worked in Oracle, so he has some insight.... I really have to question that.
He only worked as an external, in the UK data center - that very far removed from the real
strategy and planning at Oracle. I worked for Oracle for 6 years, including working in their
HQ in Redwood Shores - and I can tell you, if you're not in the HQ, then you might as well
be working for a different company.
Really, this is just his personal belief, with no real basis. Not that I'm saying that one day
Oracle won't go open source, but there's no evidence for it at the moment.
My personal observations are that Oracle has moved on from focusing solely on the rdbms side
of things for their revenue, and they're putting more resource into building the applications side
of the business. Back in the early 90's, Larry saying (at least internally) that the database was
their main focus, and that their applications were only a side show. Recently, Larry has been
publically pushing Oracle's applications, focusing more of the company on sell apps.
So, I'd say that Oracle is making the core database less important, revenue wise, these days,
and maybe they could open source it in the long run, but I don't seem them changing anything for
many years to come.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
Why the hell are you posting articles like this? As far as I can see it's just a blatent advert for their book. You've even put "not any time soon" in the intro.
Please let us know when it is some time soon, until then, post something more interesting.
You could run a web-site with perl and flat files if you wanted to. I think you'll find that Oracles target market are doing things a bit more heavy-duty than just running a website. As far as I remember MySQL hasn't even got ACID capability.
It supports triggers, transactions, procedural languages and what not. And it is far easier to set up and maintain than Oracle 8.1.7 on a Linux platform.
Of course, right tool for the job. Oracle still wins when it comes to enterprise features as clustering, data integrity and advanced security.
But for how long?
Don't discount open source databases because you've evaluated them a while ago. Check again, 'cause you'll be amazed at the progress being made. Which in some cases means going for the free alternative and spending some of the dough you've saved on extra hardware.
Cya,
bBob
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GCC being strict.
long k[]={0,178}; char*p=(char*)&k[1]; main(){while(p---(char*)k) putchar(72+((k[1]>>(p-(char*)k)*2)& 3|(!((p-(char*)k)&1)<<2) ));}
G.
What was the benefit to Jim Barksdale to give away Communicator? Why would he throw away years of engineering for free? Netscape was a very profitable company too.. at the beginning.
Here's the point: it just doesn't matter what Larry Ellison wants-- it's what he'll be forced to do. Mr. Barksdale discovered that people became unwilling to pay for his browser when an equivalent or better product could be had for free (IE3+). As MySQL (and especially PostgreSQL) mature, people will begin asking the same questions of Oracle v. OSS alternatives as they already are now with Windows NT v. Linux, Solaris v. Linux, Apache v. IIS, Apache v. iPlanet, Windows NT v. Samba, Perl/PHP v. ASP, etc.
The Reverand writes: "Honestly, the best DB's out their are Oracle, Sybase, MSSQL and DB2. None of these are cheap, sybase being the lowest cost. Oracle is still the highest quality over all of these."
You offer little evidence for this sweeping assertion, other than that you have got Oracle to work well at your clients. For real scalability, Oracle sucks.
Ask any Data Warehousing specialist who's tried to implement a multi-terabyte DW with Oracle: the fields are littered with the corpses of failed attempts using Oracle, since their one-size-fits-all OLTP architecture doesn't suit DW well at all. For example, Walmart's new joint-venture e-commerce business has its IT run by non-Walmart Oracleheads, who brought in Oracle to replace Informix for the project (Walmart itself uses Informix for everything), and as a result they were offline for a month, struggling to make it work. They refused to divulge specifics to the press, but we can take a rough guess.
Oracle trades mainly on its name and size, and buys key reference accounts like Amazon with free upfront licenses and consultancy. But it is far from being the best. It's just good enough, that's all.
Oracle and MS are often the default choice for the timid business, as Oracle and SQL Server DBAs are easier to find than DBAs for technically better DBs: ironic, as most Oracle projects that I've seen seem to require more DBAs than an equivalent DB2 or Informix implementation would have. This therefore becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
So please don't confuse popularity with quality. If PostgreSQL does catch up sufficiently on scalability, and offers better value than Oracle, people will start using it in droves, just as Apache beat the once-mighty Netscape Server.
Simple. The same reason you go with Cisco.
So why on earth would Oracle go open source and give away their software for free?
2nd point. The article claims that Sun is moving towards Linux. I dispute this claim. Solaris is the flagship at Sun and will be for the next 5 years.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Why do people paint the divide between proprietary software and free software as a great chasm? For example, why do people suggest that an enterprise level product like Oracle and free software licenses are mutually inconsistent?
/billions/ to be economically viable and competitive.
Look, I'm sure it would involve a bunch of paperwork for a bunch of lawyers, but the distance between where Oracle is now, and Oracle as a free software product is really not that great. It's simple: the owner of the proprietary license changes it to a free license. That's it. Done. Now you have an enterprise level database with a free software license. Impossible? Nonsense.
The real question is whether or not such a move would be economically viable in the long run. Especially in the case of enterprise level databases, I think it would be. This is not the kind of software you merely install on a bunch of PC's and sprinkle around the organization. The database engine itself is only the beginning. For maximum impact, it needs to be installed on specialized hardware by trained technicians. Database applications need to be developed and/or customized to fit end user requirements. Data integrity must be ensured, and it's long term viability must be maintained beyond particular product lifecycles. This is not easy work. The people who can do it are not cheap to come by.
Can such services support multi-billion multi-national corporations? That I'm not sure about. But you don't need
Will it happen? Who knows. Could it? No doubt.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
Oh, I agree with you completely. Oracle currently has no incentive whatsoever to change their licensing strategy. (I just think it's dumb when people say things like "open source can never catch up to X". Come on - "open source" merely refers to a licensing strategy. E.G. - "open source will never catch up to JFS, d00dz". Oh, but then JFS gets open sourced. Doh.)
But a service play could work for someone else, a Great Bridge, for example. While I think it's true that Oracle is a more mature, more familiar, and more trusted environment; they also have a soft white underbelly. Even if open source solutions don't match all of Oracle's achievments (yet), they are more than adequate for many tasks.
Remember DOS? 80% of what people want for 20% of the cost. That was a winning strategy then, and I don't think things have changed much. But Microsoft had their sights aimed higher. And where was Microsoft aiming? The glass house: UNIX. And what happened? Linux. It's free.
Fun stuff to watch, that's for sure.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
I loved the Italian Renaissance metaphor. That was the best part of the article. I do believe that the things that are happening today in Open Source are fundementally changing the nature of our society. The old ideas of money will soon be gone, replaced with... what? No one knows yet, but it is being thrashed out in government (campaign finance reform) and business (open source). It is becoming more and more apparent to everyone that our systems are cracking and can no longer hold. It is exciting to be in the world of computing, because we are on the cutting edge of the new paradigm.
Oracle does need to be keeping an eye on these things, because they can change fast. Assuming that Open Source is the direction of the future, Oracle's business model will be in the "complete solutions" area. They will need to give away the DB to keep up with the rapidly evolving open DBs.
Your sig does not compile in gcc.
What have I done wrong?
http://www.millnet.se/ GO/U d- s+:+ a C++ UL++++ P- L+++ E W+++ N+ w++ M-- PE+ t+ X++
As to open sourcing their database that will never happen. Yes never is a long time but it's the best option out there for enterprise-level database needs. If anyone thinks the open source databases are going to catch up anytime soon they need to seek therapy ;) That isn't to say that the open source alternatives aren't good....they just aren't Oracle.
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
I believe MSSQL doesn't have a one process per connection model (which would bring NT/2K to its knees pretty quickly), or even a one thread per connection model. Instead it uses a thread pooling model, which is generally more efficient (on NT/2K kernel architecture).
That's not a discussion.
This is.
Got it?
Thanks, Cunt.
And please don't bring up MySQL or postgreSQL (you haven't so far, and I am grateful). If you want cheap web transactions fine, but I am talking about true DB apps where you need row-level locking, rollback, transactions, etc.. all the things That the above mentioned RDBMS's have. I use MSSQL behind a server that gets about half a million hits a day, and it is fine. Granted the machines are dual proc powerhouses, but it runs great. I have Oracle at my clients who have several thousand employees accessing financials. Nothing else could be as solid and run this.
I say this because we
Anyway, you know what I'm sayin. Right tool for the right job in the end.
Where is the benefit for oracle to OSS? It uses free tools to draw in casual developers, who then become Oracle DBA's. But why would they throw away years of engineering just to give it all away? That's ridiculous. Oracleis one of the most profitable companies in the world. That won't change. Just because a bunch of teenagers don't think it is worth the money, doesn't mean that the people with the money to spend on it agree. There is a reason Oracle can charge per/cpu licensing. It ain't because it sucks kids.
I am just trying to picture Linus in the Gladiator...
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
I make my living promoting Open Source tools. For most of our systems, PostgreSQL is adequate. The lack of Left and Right joins makes me want to shoot myself occaisionally, and we are limited in our ability to scale, but the product works, and works well.
We can even support our tools on MySQL, but we'd have to make a lot of changes because we have database appications, and we'd have to change them to MySQL applications because MySQL isn't really a database, it's a storage format that is retrievable via SQL.
However, Oracle kicks the shit out of these low-end toys.
Hands down, they are number 1, by far.
Open Source databases are not ANYWHERE close to catching up. MySQL is a simple database whose entire reason for existance is powering websites. If you are a programmer, NOT a database designer, and you think that a database will help you store your data better than files and AWK, you use MySQL.
PostgreSQL is at least a properly designed system, but it is limited.
However, despite NEITHER database approaching Oracle, we have decided that Open Source will overtake them?
This is arragance beyond belief.
I don't get it, what Open Source product has been SO successful that it dominates everything?
The closest is Apache, but while it is on a lot of servers, it isn't as well represented in the top traffic sites. Apache is the closest to leading its field of any package.
Linux? Not a shot in hell. Linux doesn't lead in ANY market. Desktop, Microsoft Owns that. Unix Server market: owned by Sun. Unix Workstation Market: MAYBE won by Linux, but Apple OS X is likely to own that by the end of the year.
Let's be real people. Open Source Products right now are getting better. Whenever they reach your "good enough" level, then you can use them. I need certain features, PostgreSQL provides them. As much as I acknowledge that Oracle is better, PostgreSQL meets my needs and is cheaper.
However, to suggest that Open Source will win and dominate everything is kind of silly. This Manifest Destiny, that we will in the long run own the world is kind of silly. It seems that the areas Open Source has "won" have been small servers/daemons (sendmail, bind, etc.) where the open source version does the trick, the needs are limited, and therefore there is limited value added options.
However, let us understand where open source packages are good and where they need work. The big-three software titans will be remembered as the Carnegies, Rockafellers, etc., of the early computer era. However, to be deifying Linus this early is kind of silly, don't you think?
Alex
We may actually be running 7.1, I code, not sysadmin. Lots of our code was written before that upgrade. Thanks for the tips, but lots of people have told me.
Alex
Most of comercial products are in this stage and the companies will think twice before releasing the code just to be exploited and thrown out. The only one who would benefit at this point are competitors.
We are following the open source movement kind of closely at Oracle and I am sure that if there would be a way how to gain any profit by open sourcing any of the great bunch of products, Oracle would do it immediatelly.
Of course any opinions expressed here are just mine and mostly likely different from these of Larry Ellison or anyone else in the company :)
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
But databases are NOT the point. Oracle is offering complete solutions. Its not just the database, its complete application server, soon also development environment, its CRM and ERP and everything tightly integrated and cooperating. As far as I would like to, I don't see open source products even started on this line.
For some parts of what Oracle offers you have open source alternatives, though still few years behind in the development, but there are whole parts of Oracle solutions where there are no alternatives in Open source whatsoever.
And I will tell you when will be the right time for Oracle to start to worry about opensourcing its database. At the point when first bank of the world top10 will adopt ANY open source database. Not sooner, but not even later.
Of course any opinions expressed here are just mine and mostly likely different from these of Larry Ellison or anyone else in the company :)
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I can't believe I am just about to platform bash, but:-
:) )
:-)
Please don't rule out Sybase for large systems. I work for a large investment bank, and we use both Sybase and Oracle heavily. (As you would imagine a bank might..
Whilst Oracle does have the edge for indexing extremely large DSS systems (bitmap indexing..) Sybase is more than capable of holding its own - even for tables >20Gb in size with rowcounts in the tens of millions. People tend to forget just how much cheaper than Oracle Sybase is - IMHO it offers much more bang for buck...
If only its technical support in the UK did not suck rocks most of the time...
Ah well, Rant over.
and where exactly are you gonna store the 10 terabytes of object files that get generated when you try to compile this puppy?
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> for scalability, features, or support they're
;).
;). Don't believe Oracle when they say implicit XX with DML is the correct behaviour. Or the thing about zero length strings and NULL...
> not even in the same ballpark
OK.
Scalability: Oracle or DB2 win for now. Then again has anyone tried Postgresql on Linux on a IBM mainframe
Features: Oracle has more features gathered through the years, but it also has a lot more junk. Sometimes I wonder whether something is a feature or Frankenstein's neck studs!
BTW try rolling back a "drop table" in Oracle. You can do that with Postgresql. The guy doing Oracle DBs around here was quite impressed, and the tab command completion almost made him drool
As for support. I think Postgresql has better support than Oracle for small/medium sized companies.
The developers will actually openly admit on the mailing lists that something doesn't work, and whether they intend to fix it or not.
This is very very important to me. I prefer getting the truth, rather than some Marketing Guy saying "It'll work! Nobody has problems". Then spend days trying to get it to work, days trying to contact tech support, and then only to hear in the newsgroups/lists some user saying that "Oh that's actually broken".
Of course the developers can't keep that up. They'll likely need more hierachy to handle the mailing list stuff. But as long as the hierachy doesn't include any market droids things should be fine.
Cheerio,
Link.
RMS would get upset at a lot of the icons here. Look at the icons for Linux and Linux Business - there's not a single 'GNU/' in either!
I think this is known as a strategic partnership. It is in Oracle's interest to run it's software on a large number of platforms, and also to run on free operating systems. That way, corps can cut some costs on paying for Oracle and solaris/windows. More money goes to Oracle, or a larger percentage of the price of deployment. In effect, the database layer becomes the important platform, not the OS.
However, i'm sure they want to keep charging a premium for their proprietary database and app server software, as long as they can.
Plus, it's a bonus for Ellison to stick it to Gates. It makes sense though, as long as Oracle stays significantly better than the open source alternatives.
John
John
Open Source being what it is, I'd say that "one day" is not just likely but inevitable. Someone out there is rich enough or crazy enough to be able to do the work necessary.
Whether it will happen anytime soon is anyone's guess, but if there's demand it will be done.
/Brian
Wow. Never been called a troll before.
Look, to the idiot who modded me down: I'm one of you Open Source Zealots (tm). I simply have enough guts to admit when what I support isn't doing the job. And I still wouldn't be trying to run Linux on a single high-load server.
(I'm also a hardcore Mac junkie, and there's no way in hell I'd be running a database server off a pre-X MacOS either. LinuxPPC? Sure. X? Hell yeah. But there are things the Classic Mac simply doesn't do well (apart from network security).)
/Brian
Hey, stranger things have happened. I've heard tell of a man who was lucky enough to have a Cray for his personal system...
And in any case, if a company needs it and can't get it, they'd hire someone to write it anyway.
/Brian
FIRST POST!!!1!!
Okay, now that I got that out of the way (and I probably won't be when I actually get this posted...)
I think Oracle probably holds the same place in the database world as Sun does in the server world. Open Source is a great thing, but it hasn't quite evolved to the enterprise-level capability that's needed. If I was doing anything involving heavy processing, you'd better believe I'd be running a Linux (or BSD or Darwin) farm to do the work. But if I needed something that was going to handle anything and everything I could throw at it, Solaris would still be my first choice (and you can get source anyway, even if the licensing is ludicrous).
Oracle's future is in positioning themselves as the Solaris of databases; when MySQL and PostgreSQL finally do catch up, they should be preparing themselves to go down the same route as IBM, opening up to the Open Source community while providing a rock-solid support network for their users. If Larry Ellison wants to prove to the world that he's not quite as much of a nutjob as everyone thinks he is, this is the sort of idea that should be on his roadmap.
/Brian
A quick scan of chapter one seems to learn that Oracle itself doesn't do anything Open Source, except supplying Oratcl, a scripting tool.. So it's all about what *other* people do concerning open source and Oracle compared to what Oracle itself is doing in Open source. The last part can be easily answered: not a lot, except the already mentioned Oratcl and porting Oracle 8i to Linux (but not free and open source I presume).
The devil's lacing up his iceskates...
But seriously, I don't think Larry Elison has *ever* publically said anything positive about opensource.
Or at least that's what my boss is thinking... just bought a (pricey) Oracle 8i license for our 96 CPU Origin 2000. Have to pay *per CPU*, but he and the DBA's feel it's worthwhile.
Darwin is Openstep's underlying architecture with an overhauled version of Mach and updated BSD goodies. It is *not* xBSD. We've been over this _many_ times before.
Oracle is for heavy-lifting... not running the weak backends to a website. It's hard to quote a price for Oracle as you pay per power unit... based on number and performance of your CPUs. We recently turned an old 96-CPU Origin 2000 into our own "mother of all databases" and paid dearly for it. The admins and my boss claim it'll be worthwhile. We'll see... I seriously don't belive we do that much DB work to justify Oracle. For some folks it makes sense. For others, it's a must.
INNER JOIN Holy_Ghost ON Father.Holy_GhostID = Holy_Ghost.ID INNER JOIN Son ON Father.SonID = Son.ID
WHERE Divine_Revelation = True AND Gods_Other_Than_Me = False AND Teaching_Untainted_By_Quick_Buck_Evangelist > 0
Oracle: (0 rows returned)
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Which shows that Hemos probably did read the article and that the author is smoking the cheap crack. Please read the whole article before complaining that others didn't read it.
Two is not equal to three, not even for very large values of two.
Oracle has too many advantages over its competitors to open the source code. If Andy Duncan thinks that MySQL is going to be competitive in a few years, he is smoking some good stuff. Does anyone really thing that one day MySQL is going to support parallel servers on a multi-domain Sun E10k? This guy's only crediability is that he was a contract DBA at Oracle's EMEA data center - he sure is in the know. :)
http://jamesthornton.com/acs/benchmarks-ora817-pg7 03.html
So much for "openness", although if you look hard enough you and draw your own conclusion about the name of a "leading proprietary database application" is you can see PostgreSQL can perform impressively:
http://www.angelfire.com/nv/aldev/pgsql/GreatBridg e.html
And they are known for dirty marketing tricks, where once they lock you in they jack up the price:
http://pub13.ezboard.com/fiwetheydatabases.showMes sage?topicID=76.topic&index=1
You're right to focus on the economic issue.
Will it happen? I very much doubt it.
Look at it from Oracle's point of view. One of your biggest assets is the sole access to the source code of your product.
Doesn't matter whether you make more money from Services or Licenses. At the end of the day people come to you for Licenses if they want Oracle DBMS. They come to you for Services because you know the Oracle DBMS better than anyone in the world. So BOTH your revenue streams are dependant (at least in part) on the fact you have the Source.
So if you give the Source away - you've given away your competitive advantage. MAYBE you can make money from distribution - but not from Licenses. CERTAINLY you can make money from Services - you're doing it now - but giving away the Source is giving away your main competitive advantage in this arena. In a few years - maybe less - you are just one amongst many Services companies competing for the Oracle DBMS Services market.
So would you survive financially? Definitely. Would you be making more money than you are now? Almost certainly not. In order for that to happen - the increase in the overall Oracle Services market would have to be so much that Oracle Corp's share offsets the loss of License Fees.
Best case scenario you're taking a big risk for a moderate financial gain. I can't see the shareholders going for it can you?
probably. Postgresql is already a 90% replacement for Oracle Workgroup server.
And before you flame me, that oracle workgroup server, not enterprise server. And most Oracle installations are the "workgroup" product, which is total overkill itself in most situations. Probably even MySQL would suffice for many things people use Oracle for.
But then ten years is a long time.
--
From the article:
In Oracle & Open Source, we concentrate on: Where to get today's open source base technologies and application tools; how to install them; how to connect them to Oracle; and how to modify them, should you wish to do so, to suit your own requirements.
What does this have to do with open sourcing Oracle? There is nothing in the article about that.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
The Oracle database is way too expensive for what it is.
We are running 12 websites, and here are the databases that we use:
- MySQL: Free, very stable, and perfect for dynamic websites.
- Sybase: around $7000 and better than Oracle ($20,000)
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I've been using it for some pre-production testing since the BETA release and they haven't given me any problems, except that the new WAL (Write Ahead Logging) feature bottlenecks on my slow disk subsystem. IO performance is very, very important for postgres, but I disgress.
AFAIK, LEFT OUTER JOIN and RIGHT OUTER JOIN is in this release. Don't have a use for them as yet.
IMHO, postgres 7.1 is a major, major improvement in term of both reliablity and features, so you _should_ at least try to upgrade your production system. pg_dumpall is your friend.
Moving on...
I noticed that in the Oracle and Open Source table of contents, the author has chapters on open source tools for connecting to Oracle for web development. Unfortunately, he didn't include my project: SQL Relay. The url is http://www.firstworks.com SQL Relay is a connection pooling mechanism. The number one problem with using Oracle on the web is the connection cost. SQL Relay solves that problem. Dave Muse mused@firstworks.com
This is a nice illustration of what I find so unappealing about the "Free everything!" crowd. There is an utter contempt for the skill, talent, labor and risk that go into creating the goods they want to redistribute. In this case, it's the idea that creating software is simply "blasting bits" onto media. In other contexts, it's a similar attitude towards the creation of music, pharmaceuticals, inventions, brand names, literature... The only professions worthy of respect are sysadmin, Linux advocate or seller of T-shirts and stuffed monkeys. I'm no Libertarian but people like this make me want to beat them over the head with a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
In an entirely unrelated point, notice that the same guy then sings the praises of Oracle for involving itself with free software, while they keep their DB entirely proprietary and shackled with the sort of licensing MS would be roundly denounced for.
Oracle has the same privilige games have on the desktop; they're cut total immunity from Open Source advocacy, probably because they're simply too important to the advocates to forgo. In fact, both Taco and Hemos seem to believe that as long as their their Windows partitions are only used for games, they don't really exist the rest of the time.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
As the article points out clearly, in the future, support is where Oracle will make their money.
Corporate Gadfly
Jonathan Archer: the most beaten up Enterprise captain in Star Trek history
I wish I had some mod points to mod this up. I have to agree. If there are so many fantastic Open Source developers hwo know so much about RDBMS', and could contribute to Oracle's codebase, why is MySQL so lacking?
And the other point.. what would Oracle gain? They already have market share. They're not interested in attracting customers who can't pay for their licenses, so what would the point be? This guy who wrote this article may be a good DBA, but he doesn't understand the first thing abot business.
When someone comes up with something truly innovative based on the old version (8i right now, I guess), you stun them with an avalanche of money and fold their swell ideas into the newest version.
You keep your flagship product in paint and powder, and use the Open Source community as a development lab. Those on the kool-aid budgets get a quality product, and the champagne-class still keeps the share price safely stratospheric.
As far as the O'Reilly book goes, peer into the future. Who can argue that the increasing maturity of OSS is not eroding software prices? While complicated, niche products might never be Open Source (military combat system software, for example) large price tags for operating systems and office software might well go the way of music, as word processor programmers join the Renaissance minstrels in the ranks of those who work for a bite to eat.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
This is particularly likely if they decide to re-engineer the product's kernel to be more object-oriented. Oracle's attempts at adding object features to its database started at 7.3 with user defined data types, got a huge boost at version 8.0 with user-defined object types, and another kick forward in 8i (8.1) with the internal Java engine. But it's all just grafted onto a relational kernel that hasn't changed significantly since version 7. (The rumor is that Oracle's developers are afraid to touch it for fear of breaking something, so all new features are bolted on using PL/SQL packages.)
So, let's say they rewrite the kernel from the ground up and give it a new name. It becomes the flagship product, and that clears the way for Oracle to release the older source code to whomever wants it. They'd be making most of their money on subscriptions to their online apps anyway.
If you sign up at http://otn.oracle.com you can download literally millions of dollars of software from their site. Their software doesn't have any timers or nag screens. You can even get free "Developer" licenses for many of their products. So, for all intents and purposes, Oracle has become a Shareware company, although they don't advertise it. And, in fact, I would say that they are the biggest and the best Shareware company there is. Can anybody think of anybody bigger or better?
However, Oracle won't let you see bug reports for products that you aren't "supported" for on their support site (http://metalink.oracle.com) which requires a valid support contract even to get onto. So, I doubt they are going to become anything like an "Open Source" company.
Hahaha, yeah, right! :-)
...Anyone?
Isn't any of you people aware that is costs money to live.
heh, i know why it's been moded up so much, to bait people into trying it. /.'ers are going to lose karma.
wow, alot of guilable
"It'll be like stealing candy from a baby... why, that look like a lark!" - Mr. Burns.
I never heard about Oracle developping Open Source projects or participating actively on such projects. They seem to tend towards the 'Open Source is a trend, but we won't fight it' attitude, which is ... well good, however not enough.
Open Source is and will make the industry milestones in the future. Companies that don't realize this will just miss the boat. It's simple, no company will ever be able to fight a million developpers and more. (Speaking of the future, of course ;)
YES! Cool, no more Microshaft...
From the article
And Linus Torvalds (creator of the Linux bazaar), rather than Bill Gates, may be the subject of epic films in the future.
Penguins of Silicon Valley?
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Yes, the nick is flamebait
"programmers ... have the natural herding instincts of paranoid tigers"
Makes the EDS "herding cats" ad look pretty tame.
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Yes, the nick is flamebait
I can't believe I did that.
Mod me down, please.
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Yes, the nick is flamebait
1) mod up the five slashdotters on the list below.
2) reply to the article (not this post).
3) copy this post into your new post.
4) Remove the top karma whore
5) add a link to your
6) post!
7) Paste the URL of your post into your
Within days you will receive at least 50 karma points.
People to mod up
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Yes, the nick is flamebait
How the heck is that a troll comment? Whoever mod'ed that needs to have his/her points revoked...
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