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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!"
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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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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.