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Oracle Switching To Linux
Bill Kendrick writes: "This Computerworld story quotes Oracle CEO Larry Ellison as saying 'We'll be on Linux no later than the summer, so we'll be running our whole business on Linux." When asked what this means for Unix vendors like Sun... "It will be several years before the big machine dies, but inevitably the big machine will die.' Ouch!"
This is kind of interesting... I just looked at their web page today, and Oracle 9i is licensed to run on different flavors of Unix, but no where listed did it say it was licensed to run on Linux. I wonder if they'll be changing that soon?
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
It'll be interesting to see if more /.ers will support Lary's nat'l ID system if its run off a linux based system, ne?
Sleep is for the weak!
Who says linunx can't run on Sun systems? I've had a production sparc linux distro running successfully for over a year now. I'm not sure I'd want to pay for Oracle, as MySQL is still happy with life, but I doubt that my Sparc servers will be EOL'd any time soon.
-- Hi! I'm a
exactly. this will happen at the same time as they throw away all their desktops and install network computers as per Larry's last brilliant idea. not that network computers aren't a good idea, but because Mr. Ellison says 'this is a good idea' doesn't mean a whole industry instantly realligns itself.. He can't even get the DB industry to do that anymore.
(refering to Sun) "I think it's going to be really hard for an open standards company like that to get deep into the software business". So Linux yes, open source not so much...
nuff said.
Oracle may be moving their backoffice to Linux but what about the database software itself? It is still a closed source proprietary application.
I want to know when they will be announcing that Oracle is Open Source!
~.Evanrude
Perhaps Sun should announce their commitment to PostgreSQL.
*ROFL* - N o kidding!! Thats just how this sounds. To me it, at first glance, it may appear that oracle could be canabalizing their own product. If Linux is good enough to replace Sun kit, why isn't PGSQL good enough to replace moderate database requirements? What an interesting time we live in!
So there you are, some Big Company, with this nifty Linux cluster running Oracle, saving money on the OS and servers, but being bled white by Oracle's per-transaction fee structure.
And then somebody discovers this "PostgresSQL" thing....
Payback's a bitch, innit?
DG
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What does Ellison see in Linux? *puts on his flame-retardant suit for this one*, for the businesses he supports (gotta give him credit folks #1 database co here, and not overnight) what does he see in Linux's future that Solaris can't match or beat already?
3000 dead over past 2 years, still no free Palestinians, still
I think that Sun is in big trouble, even with the high end servers. Just an example at my company: We have an E450 with 2 450MHz CPUs and 4GB RAM. That system easily costs $35000. So we decided to try out some cheap-o Linux desktops: dual Pentium III/1GHz with 2GB RAM. These cost $5000 max (from Dell. You can get them cheaper elsewhere). Anyway, the Linux desktops outperform the E450 by 30-40% on our applications. The problem comes in when you try to use too much RAM -- Linux doesn't seem to be able to handle it very well compared to Sun. But for 95% of the stuff we do (Verilog simulations, HDL synthesis, timing analysis) they are faster and cheaper than the E450. Plus more and more of our applications are becoming available for Linux.
Intel is releasing faster chips all the time and Linux is continually improving -- I don't think it will take long until Sun is left in the dust.
It seems from a lot of people's comments that they think that Larry is saying that Oracle will finally support Linux. Well, Oracle has run on Linux for awhile now, though it's been a lower priority. Patches come out for Solaris versions first, then Linux and Windows.
All Larry was saying that at Oracle they'll be running their own product on Linux rather than Solaris. From which we can presume that they'll start making Linux a higher priority when it comes to patching...
I want Oracle 9i for UltraSparc Linux,
and I want it now.
Why does your message leave me wondering if you
are aware that Linux runs on the very RISC machines you are praising?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Those big machines aren't going away anytime soon. There's a reason why Intel hardware is so cheap. It's just plain not as reliable as Sun's.
Not to mention that with what Oracle charges for it's very confusing clustering software, it was actually cheaper for my company to buy one more expensive Sun server to run Oracle on than lots of cheap ones + the clustering software. Since Oracle licences are a recurring expensce, and we just had to buy the Sun server up front, the disparity gets even worse.
That reminds me, I have to take the opportunity to rant about Oracle pricing now. They actually charged us for a second license because our Oracle software is located on a NFS-shared network filer. This way, if the hardware of the DB server takes a shit, we can quickly mount the filesystem Oracle lives on, and start it on another box.
They even said they would not have charged us a second license if we had a second machine powered off, which we brought up in the event of a hardware failure. They claimed that Oracle was providing us the benfit to be able to failover quickly. Umm, no, the network filer is. BEA doesn't charge us for this setup. iPlanet doesn't charge us for this setup. Why should you get to?
It's Cnet's domain, along with news.com, computers.com, etc.
I remember when I worked for ZDNet in '96 we used to make fun of CNet, our main competitor at the time, for purchasing such general domain names. "What, do they think they own everything?"
A few years later, they bought ZDNet.
Considering that the article says they're replacing some older HP hardware with the new Linux setup, I'm curious to know what boxes they propose to run the Linux on... assuming they had the beefiest HP hardware from 3 years ago, those would be some big boxes; a V2500 or V2600 could hold up to 32 CPU and 32Gb of RAM, as I recall...
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
This isn't too say he's lying, but don't think Oracle is going to go chucking valuable platforms to back up his rhetoric.
To quote the article:
They're getting rid of old equipment, not mindlessly replacing new hardware.
I wonder how old the HP boxes are?
It almost makes you wonder if Oracle is going to create a Linux distribution of their own, and then have THAT as the only thing that Oracle will run on; this would eventually result in Oracle, basically, being bootable; it becomes an 'appliance application,' as I call them. After all, anybody running Oracle anyway is running on dedicated hardware, and Oracle likes raw disks; filesystems just slow things down, after all. Wonderful idea, if you ask me.
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It's not a huge win because they are replacing three servers, it's because they are Oracle. I'm sure when the IT department heads hear that Oracle trusts Linux enough to place the bulk of their business systems on it, a lot of them will take it very seriously.
The article also said that they would also provide FULL system support for Linux. That's a really big plus. The IT managers know that if they deploy Linux that Oracle will back them up if anything goes wrong.
Big, big win.
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load "linux",8,1
One would think Microsoft is in some serious trouble with all of the large corporations you hear out there switching to Linux solutions. But ask yourself this: What systems do you think these companies were already running? More often than not, I'd wager they were using UNIX, and the reason they switch to Linux is to reduce costs.
Switching to Linux, when all of your sysadmins know Windows, is going to cost in retraining. If your shop runs UNIX, the sysadmins will be ready to roll with Linux.
So, you see, those who tout Linux and decry Microsoft are really taking an ironic stance. They are helping MS (by hurting their competition) when they advocate Linux.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
"Open source terabyte relation databases? Hello?"
Human Genome Project? Last I heard, PostgresSQL
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The article said they where working with Red Hat on the deal. I would assume that they are going to come up with a tight distrobution with just the essentials for Oracle. They'll stick with super stable kernels, nothing fancy.
;)
In a situation like that, support shouldn't really be a big problem, at least no bigger than normal.
I guess if you're installing your 8 processor Oracle database server on a LinuxFromScratch box, you'd probably be on your own.
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load "linux",8,1
I've been told of cases where ironically switching to Linux generated sales for Microsoft. My old University's Linux advocates convinced the school that very few professors or students needed the Sun workstations that the school was buying, that PC's with Linux would meet the needs of nearly all students and professors. What the Linux advocates did not expect was that once the decision was made to replace Sun hardware with PC hardware someone brought up all those useful Windows apps. The decision was quickly made that the PCs should dual boot into Linux or Windows NT.
Sun won't need to do a damn thing as there will still be companies that will want Sun hardware/OE to run Oracle and other applications on. Take banks and brokerage houses for example, they live for Sun/Solaris/Oracle and they have such a deep investment in licenses and staff that they won't change unless their forced to. Also, managers at these places (who have to answer to the SEC/Fed if certain machines go down) want Some Big Company they can sue the pants off of if their hardware fails. On top of that, tell me what Intel company gives 24/7 on site hardware/OE support that guarantees a fix in two hours?
Actually, you've got a point. A company I used to work for (Fortune 500), tried to replace their old IBM mainframes with Sun Sparc, and the Sparc boxes could not handle the transaction load. (the app was classified advertising customer billing, for one of the biggest newspapers in the U.S.) It was taking the Sun boxes about a day and a half to do one day's worth of billing.
Apparently unlike the majority of the people here, I don't want to see Linux drive everyone else out of the marketplace. Choice is good. I just want IT managers to realize that Linux is a viable option in some situations and not something they should be afraid of.
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load "linux",8,1
Not so.
The reason it's almost impossible for companies to support their software directly on linux is that there are so many versions of linux and so many revisions. With a Windows or Solaris, there's a couple years between releases so you have time to build your QA plan, do your QA, have your teams fix bugs that QA finds, then mark your product as certified on that platform/version.
With linux, by the time you have QA'd/fixed/certified your product on one version (let's say Linux 2.4) the 2.6 kernal is out. So even if you lock people in to one or two distros and don't allow them to modify their linux kernal at all, you probably won't keep up with the QA/certification. The most likely solution is going to be that you'll only be supported on very old versions of your linux distro. Probably will always be a 6 or 12 month gap (at the least) between the supported linux version and the current linux version.
And yes, I know from experience because I work for a massive company that released our software on linux for awhile (RedHat only) and decided that the time/money required for QA and development upkeep on that platform alone just wasn't worth it for the miniscule number of people who wanted to buy the product and run it on it.
Besides, if you have someone who is concerned about the cost of their server's OS, they're probably not interested in buying a $1,000,000 10,000 license piece of software and the $1,000,000 support contract to go along with it.
If Oracle is going to be working with Red Hat to offer an "official" Linux version of their database, does that mean the end of the (admittedly rather pricy) Red Hat-branded version of PostgreSQL? If not, are they going to offer a migration path for users who start with the Postgres package, and eventually decide that they need the replication/Java support/marketspeak-compilance of an Oracle solution?
Horse hockey. Most Oracle users use it because they are told (by sales types) that, "Oracle stable. Stable good. Open Source unstable. Unstable bad."
There are a small fraction of Oracle users that "cannot afford to lose data and/or they need something that you can scale the hell out of." Both of which are not 100% true of Oracle (personal experience(*) here), but true enough that sales droids make good money.
(*)I've had Oracle databases simply go away when the machine crashed (would not even try to recognize the data on disk until a full backup had been restored). Mysql and Postgresql have never done this to me. As for scalability, Oracle is a beast. It costs exponentially more as you get into options like parallel server (which makes it less stable and harder to manage by an order of magnitude), and your hardware costs skyrocket as you have to start buying boxes capable of calculating the last digit of pi. Personally, I don't call that scalable. Call me wierd.
If you can buy better third party support with the money you AREN'T spending on OS licenses and proprietary hardware, you're ahead. At some point Sun can't fend off the huge x86 economy that brings this to bear.
First, the less consequential. We're losing faith rapidly in Sun's engineers. They are getting as bad as Microsoft with buggy bug-fixes.
What's important is for the price of a high-end Sun box, I can distribute across several faster Intel boxes. I will have enough money left to swap out what are commodity boxes when they fail. Support is less of an issue for what amounts to disposable server hardware. Even after buying with the assumption that everything will break, I will still have cash to spare.
I can architect a server infrastructure that, as far as the end-user, and therefore the keeper of the purse-strings, "just works" cheaper, and will beat the Sun platform between 3-5 times in terms of performance.
You say Time is money and you're right, but even if Sun's support or hardware reliability was everything you say it is (and IMO it is not) it takes less time to swap out a fast Intel box, and throw it out if it's fried.
The market has essentially polarized into Windows vs. (some form of) Unix. Which basically boils down to "Microsoft" vs. "everyone else". Some play both sides but if they're smart they know what'll happen to them if they hang around MS too long. Some exit strategy is required.
So we get Unix, with all its warts. But we also get a "People's implementation" via Linux which is great ("pimp" linux :) and BSD - pick your political party. There's the "Mack Truck" versions via Solaris/AIX/et al on honking big mothers of machines. And
things like QNX, various real-time Unicies, etc... A free market. (I'm purposefully avoiding the Linux everywhere thing, sure do it but other systems have often have their own advantages and it may not be too healthy in the long term, we have to wait and see)
Where do MS fit in then?
This saddens me greatly if Oracle is dumping Sun, that would really hurt them. Server rooms will eventually be much less impressive if Sun goes out of business and they are replaced with racks of cheesy intel hardware. There is so much GOOD about Sun I wouldn't know where to begin. It angers me to see the Slashdot comment collective wacking-off, thinking they've won some huge victory. Linux isn't that spectacular...and as far as I can tell it's not business oriented at all. Solaris is so far superior to Linux for so many reasons. Linux is a bunch of guys writing crap on their own time, and proud when it only take 45 hours to get their soundcard working! Hey look! I got X windows to run on my 1 GHz box and the mouse cursor almost isn't jumpy! In addition, suddenly Sun is the "enemy". From personal experience, I know Sun deals a LOT with open source, and they release a LOT of their software for free (especially for small-scale users). I think that if you're a big, successful company you're branded as EVIL, no matter what.
Personally I think that with one exception (see below), the idea of hardware tailored for specific languages doesn't make much sense (although processors and languages have always had symbiotic relationships... C is a good example with its pre- and post increment operators that were there because the hardware of the day had support for that). In case of Java, chips for running java bytecode natively would have to be a stack machines, and those were tried decades ago (60s?), and were eventually decimated by register-based machines. And even though cache certainly helps with stacks, the idea of doing all operations in memory instead of registers... well, just doesn't sound like a good idea.
I don't know why even many Sun people were hinting at java chips being a solution; they _might_ make sense for low-end embedded systems, but not so much for performance but for price and simplicity. Perhaps those were mostly marketing people, and the basic idea of hardware solution being faster than software was tempting (not to mention the fact Sun is really a hardware company).
Now, there IS one hardware architecture development that could well help Java... and it is something both Sun (project "MAJC" or such?) and IBM are researching / developing; processor-level multi-threading. Basically, having multiple processor cores that could do "thread multiplexing", ie. schedule in instructions from different threads to same execution unit. This is possible for threads but since they share the same address space (and thus memory mapping and caches)... and might give nice boost. However, it appears to be still more a research project than actual production thing.
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Moving to Intel opens the door for Microsoft. Once the Intel hardware is in, MS can just leverage themselves into corporations' backend. They don't call it Wintel for nothing.
The only thing stopping MS is if Oracle, IBM, and others pull a Jesus Christ and take Linux (or some other Unix) to the next level (whatever that means).
More of Ellison talking out of his ass.r ch ives.asp?ArticleID=24116
What did he say to CRN 11 months ago?
Let's see...
"Our database runs very well on Linux, but I would not try to run our applications live on any scale on Linux,"
http://www.crn.com/sections/BreakingNews/dailya
I found the majority believe that:
:D
:) No matter how you calculate, Sparc's license fee is at least 1.5 more expensive than Intel's. I've the price sheet on hand. However, if you'd really find a way to run Oracle on Sparc cheaper, don't hesitate to tell me!!! :)
1) Linux = Intel
2) Larry on Linux = Larry bids SUN and other UNIX vendors farewell
3) Why Oracle while we can get PSQL?
4) PSQL can *never* replace Oracle
5) It's a conspiracy! Larry wants to squeeze more from us because Oracle cost more on Intel platforms!!
I just speak from a DBA's standpoint, that:
1) As many has pointed out, Linux is not necessary = intel. Oracle being on Linux doesn't mean abandoning others.
2) If you have really admin/develop on Oracle you must know that Oracle relies heavily on Java, and Java is SUN's. I can only see Oracle and SUN would get more close than any other time in history.
3) & 4) PSQL can *not* beat Oracle now, if you get to know more about Oracle you'd understand how insufficient PSQL is. However, it doesn't mean PSQL, or any other DBMS, can't beat Oracle in the future. I still remember the day when Oracle 5 was regarded as 'cheap' and 'pathetic loser' among DBMS. Look at Solid DBMS, it goes from free to a very successful commercial DBMS in just a couple of year.
5) I failed to find a way to buy a cheaper Oracle for non-intel platforms, compare Mhz by Mhz.
My guess(again, from a DBA's view) is that Larry is not satisfying with the database business in midrange systems. Oracle works great on mainframe and it generates multi-billions profit, while it's always been a big trouble support midrange market because the variety is vast(you name it, SUN, AIX, HP-UX...all with lines of different hardware and software version). Compare to Linux it is relatively simple(note relatively).
Frankly I'm not sure whether Larry and his crews would like to use Linux to fight in midrange market, I'd really doubt about it not because I've little confidence in Linux, but because I felt that even Oracle staffs has then same attitude to Linux as those in Microsoft, that Linux is good for fighting below-midrange market. Of course, I'd disagree if they ask me - I run parallel-replicated Oracle server with Linux's load-balancing with RAID 5 and JFS. It's very depending on how many Linux developers/admins can support the midrange market.