Oracle Switching To Linux

Yeah, right... by Cheetahfeathers · 2002-01-31 08:43 · Score: 2, Insightful

Right at the point when we can get kick ass high end hardware such as Sun's E15k for free... that's when Sun will die. Remember, Sun is still primarily a hardware company.

Re:Yeah, right... by Kayax · 2002-01-31 09:15 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.
Re:Yeah, right... by Pig+Hogger · 2002-01-31 09:17 · Score: 2

Sun is still primarily a hardware company.
So nothing can prevent them from embracing Linux, then...
Re:Yeah, right... by spudnic · 2002-01-31 09:33 · Score: 2

From reading the article I don't think they are going to be installing Linux on Big Iron. Instead, they are using a cluster of Intel based machines to distribute the load.

Linux works great in clusters and performs wonderfully on commodity i386 machines. What's the problem?

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Re:Yeah, right... by segfaultcoredump · 2002-01-31 10:27 · Score: 4, Informative

Ok, i'll bite:

for starters, you are comparing a dual cpu box with a quad cpu box. The quad's always cost more per cpu. Simple matter of the fact that it is harder to get 4 cpus' to talk together compared to only 2 (why do you think intel has yet to produce a 64 way smp server.... sun did it 5 years ago, cray did it before them.) You also have to look at things like backplane contention (are all of those cpu's on the same bus? sucks to be you if they are)

anyway, yes, sun boxes cost more than their intel counterparts in the low to mid range. That said, I have yet to find an intel box that does what the X1 can do for the low end, and once you get to 8 ways systems, intel starts to disappear from the map (and the sun boxes are the same cost or cheaper).

Now, we got the hardware price argument out of the way.

when making a decision, there are 3 major areas to consider: Price, Performance and Reliability. Only an idiot would focus on price when the cost of downtime is a million an hour.

The real reason i purchase sun boxes is not because they are the fastest. You want fast cpu's? Go get an intel box.

here are the main reasons I continue to purchase sun boxes:

#1) Sun's support organization. It is second to none. period, end of story. You have a problem, they fix it. I had a failed disk earlier this week, the support rep's first response was to send a tech on site that day.

#2) When they boast about binary compatibility from $1,000 to $10,000,000, they are not kidding. I can give the developers a low end box and know that the app will still work on a mid to high end box

#3) It just works. I dont get the "what glib are you using", "is that rev XYZ of that nic?" or any of that other crap.

#4) the hardware seems to last forever and ever and ever. And sun supports the stuff for a long time. Every try and get dell to support a six year old box? yeah, good luck.

#5) did i mention the support?

#6) it was built to be managed from a serial port and live on a network from day 1. I love the fact that i can put all of my servers in a colo, walk out, and do the OS install from home. I know that PC's are now beginning to get to the point where you can hook a serial cable up and get them to boot from the net and do an os install. lets face it, there are whole books on how to use jumpstart in the sun environment and do 100% hands off installs. It just works, and it is fully supported.

So, as you can see, there is more to the decision than just cost. In the world that i work in, time is money, and the hardware cost is a very small percentage of the TCO.
Re:Yeah, right... by eyeball · 2002-01-31 11:34 · Score: 2

Not to mention that sun's been 64 bit for how many years now? Plus half of the sun's I run in production have well over 4 gigs of ram, something Intel/Linux still can't handle last time I checked.

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Re:Yeah, right... by msobkow · 2002-01-31 11:50 · Score: 5, Informative

I agree with some of your points, but with caveats.
(1) Sun's support is great if you are in the right area. Check with companies in smaller centers to see what kind of support they are getting, and how long it takes to get a good engineer out to resolve any serious issues.
(3) Isn't quite true. The OS is only the foundation, and you rapidly find that you need this particular OS patch for Sybase, another for DB/2, another for Encina, Tuxedo, Websphere, ... If you can find a combination of packages that can agree on patch levels, count yourself lucky! The only advantage Sun has here is a better coordination of patches than standalone Linux.
(4) You have got to be kidding! Sun's CPUs, memory modules, and hard drives fail at least as often as other vendors. Personal experience would indicate IBM and HP as the most reliable, but I have no empirical evidence to support that observation.
Your point on price not being relevant is largely true. The cost of the physical hardware is trivial compared to maintenance staff, software licenses, development costs, and cascading downtime.

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I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Re:Yeah, right... by Tsugumi · 2002-01-31 12:07 · Score: 3, Interesting

And I'll bite back. ;)
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.
Re:Yeah, right... by Shuck · 2002-01-31 12:35 · Score: 3, Insightful

Re: #1) Did you get a true tech or just a lame keyboard monkey? Ever have a "real" issue and watch the keyboard monkey dilly around calling support asking what to do?

A company I worked at lost their ENTIRE database because the keyboard monkey Replaced a failing controller card, swapped cable locations (put cables back in wrong slots), bumped a scsi cable, bent a pin and claimed ignorance!

What do you expect for paying 10% support contracts and having a monkeys that need a gui to do anything.

re #5) Did I mention KEYBOARD MONKEYS?

re #6) You obviously never tried to install apps that required a gui.

Jump start a sun. Sure but try to JS a sun off of a linux server and your are F*CKED. Because sun decided to make their own PROPRIATARY dhcp crud.

I could go on but this will just turn into a pissing match with each of us saying you/your os sucks. But bottem line is SUN sucks becuase they will never own up to all the mistakes they make.

Oh yeah that tech ^H^H^H^H keyboard monkey that screwed us up? well he "lost" his notes. I would say he burned them in the parking lot when he realized what he did.

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That's a good name--ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?
Re:Yeah, right... by jedidiah · 2002-01-31 14:14 · Score: 2

This is all well and good if you can split your problem up arbitrarily and without inducing a greater cost to "migrate". Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that Sun hardware is considerably faster than "overgrown PCs" in some area. A similarly equipped or spec'd PC might not save you all that much.

Larry isn't talking about a renderfarm here. Databases are a bit more tricky than that when it comes to throwing a room full of cheap PC's at the problem.

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A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Yeah, right... by big_hairy_mama · 2002-01-31 17:33 · Score: 2

Exactly... you can engineer a distributed system that is more reliable than even the best single-unit system (in the low-to-mid-range market, at least). The price is far cheaper to start with, and you have to go through several replacements before your hardware costs approach the cost of the single system (by which time you would have had to do replacements in the single system as well, increasing its cost... and so on).

If your company wants a mainframe that costs $1m or more, then there isn't really any commodity alternative. But for low-to-mid-range solutions, so long as you have an in-house tech team capable of living without paying for Sun's support, it's a tough call.

Gold Medal by Perdo · 2002-01-31 08:45 · Score: 3, Funny

Oracle Corp. is about to replace three Unix servers that run the bulk of its business applications with a cluster of Intel Corp. servers running Linux, Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison said yesterday.

I think we can chalk this up as a win.

GO LINUX!

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If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.

Re:Gold Medal by bribecka · 2002-01-31 08:48 · Score: 5, Funny

Oracle Corp. is about to replace three Unix servers that run the bulk of its business applications with a cluster of Intel Corp. servers running Linux, Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison said yesterday.

I think we can chalk this up as a win.

Oh yeah, big win! Linux replaced THREE SERVERS! 783,472,991 to go!

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Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
Re:Gold Medal by spudnic · 2002-01-31 09:38 · Score: 5, Interesting

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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Re:Gold Medal by xtremex · 2002-01-31 10:13 · Score: 2, Insightful

I agree with you partially. Everyone knows Oracle uses Suns. How come "industry leaders" still use NT machines for Oracle if Oracle themselves don't use NT??

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If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Re:Gold Medal by spudnic · 2002-01-31 10:20 · Score: 3, Interesting

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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Re:Gold Medal by WNight · 2002-01-31 13:51 · Score: 2

Even if I hated Linux, I'd be glad to see a viable alternative to MS. You see, unlike people who own MS stock, I realize that a free market will provide better returns in the long run than one controlled by a single company. I'm unwilling to sell our children down the road just for nice dividends in the short term.

And you're right about there being more than one type of person on Slashdot. There's those who like Linux, and trolls.

You don't see a lot of MS Haters hanging out on the MS news groups (the ones MS hosts) and you don't see a lot of (honest) Linux haters on Slashdot. What would be the point? They either like open source software/Linux/etc, or are dweeby kids who get a kick from trolling.

Licensing by jeffy210 · 2002-01-31 08:46 · Score: 3, Interesting

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."

Re:Licensing by segfaultcoredump · 2002-01-31 09:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

Actually, it is licensed to run based on the number of cpu's. RAC (real application clusters) cost an extra 50%. Last I checked, you could download 9i for linux intel (just watch those system requirements very carefully, your favorite distro is most likely not covered)

All of that said, if oracle can get you to get rid of your 72CPU SunFire 15K and replace it with a 128 single cpu intel boxes..... (extra intel boxes to make up for the lost ram and system bandwidth in the 15K)

Lets see what that would cost ya...

list price for a 72 cpu license for a single box is 2.9 million. List price for those 128 cpu's w/ RAC will cost ya 7.6 million.

Lots of smaller, "cheaper" systems can often cost less overall. This is not the case here, where the price delta more than makes up for the cost of the big sun box, and we dont even have to get into the argument over the extra cost involved in managing 128 different systems. (besides, RAC is not a 'shared nothing' cluster, so management of large clusters is a real pain)

anyway, larry is always going to need sun to produce the big boxes for its big clients.
Re:Licensing by Sogol · 2002-01-31 09:32 · Score: 4, Insightful

I have had oracle 9iAS running on Linux for a year.
It is very poorly supported by oracle.

I had to do a lot of tweaking, (editing kernel headers, etc)
However, since i got it to work, it has totally outperformed the windows NT implementation.
For one thing, it has uptime of 200+ days.
Re:Licensing by speedy1161 · 2002-01-31 09:55 · Score: 5, Informative

The problem with Oracle licensing is that on Intel its in $ per MHz whereas on Sparc/PARISC/MIPS/etc. it's $ per CPU. This is what makes the 'big iron' competitive with the smaller machines, paying 25$ per Mhz on a dualie 2.2Ghz P4 is more expensive than paying for a 4 CPU license for an E450.
Re:Licensing by jedidiah · 2002-01-31 14:22 · Score: 2

From store.sun.com:

Sun SPARC Solaris MS Windows
HP 9000 Series HP-UX Linux Intel
Compaq Tru64 UNIX AIX-Based Systems
IBM OS/390 (MVS) Sun Solaris Intel
Compaq Alpha OpenVMS

You just didn't look very hard.

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A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Licensing by jedidiah · 2002-01-31 14:27 · Score: 2

store.oracle.com

The list price for 1024 CPUs worth of Oracle Standard Edition licensing is 11 million.

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A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Licensing by segfaultcoredump · 2002-01-31 14:37 · Score: 3

those are list prices from store.oracle.com. University's get a huge discount.

note that standard edition is much cheaper than Enterprise Edition. (like 1/10th the cost) However, if you want to use RAC (which larry is indicating as the replacement for a single large system) then you must use EE. Also, you are not permitted to put standard edition on any system with more than 4 cpu's. Also, this is just oracle's cost, you still need to add in your own cluster software to make sure that if an instance goes down, you dont loose that data (RAC is not a 'shared nothing' cluster)

now, if you want to manually partition your data, you could get away with using standard edition on a ton of boxes. you are simply trading cost in one area for extra time and expense to implement in another The actual advantage in ones particular environment is dependant on the cost of time (students are cheap ;-) and the ongoing cost of managing the extra added complexity.
Re:Licensing by LoseNotLooseGuy · 2002-01-31 18:45 · Score: 2, Informative

if an instance goes down, you dont loose that data

I suspect that in the event of an instance going down, you would not "let loose or release" the data. However, it is possible that you would fail to retain it. The word you were looking for is lose.

Congratulations! You have been participant #18 in my campaign to rid Slashdot of this error.

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Proudly correcting Slashdot's most irritating linguistic error since 2002.
Re:Licensing by LinuxHam · 2002-02-01 04:35 · Score: 2

list price for a 72 cpu license for a single box is 2.9 million. List price for those 128 cpu's w/ RAC will cost ya 7.6 million.

+1, Interesting. As I posted above, I literally have thousands of servers that the owner wants to move to Linux on S/390, but the vast majority are running Oracle on Sun or HP. Oracle has released on Linux for S/390, but its unsupported. They're just doing a "market need analysis" right now. This raises an interesting price, though. Imagine customers trying to come to them and say we want to consolidate 1,000 Sun Oracle servers to an IBM Linux mainframe.

Are you saying their question will not be "how many Oracle instances will you be running", but "how many processors are installed?" With Linux on S/390, you create a cookie-cutter version of a virtual server and can bring a new server online in under 2 minutes. How would Oracle license something like that? One box, with 4 or 16 processors running anywhere between 100 and 10,000 Oracle instances.

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Intelligent Life on Earth

Re:Hmmm... by baronben · 2002-01-31 08:46 · Score: 3, Interesting

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?

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Sleep is for the weak!

Linux kills Sun? by Vis · 2002-01-31 08:46 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

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Will they access Linux with NC's? by sphealey · 2002-01-31 08:46 · Score: 2

Point being, Larry Ellison has a tendency to make sweeping pronouncements of that nature, as with the "Network Computer". Maybe they come true, maybe they don't. But if Larry's next payment to Russia for his newest MiG comes due and he doesn't have the cash, he just changes the pricing structure on the Oracle RDBMS to get a few more cents per transaction, since that's where the real money is.

sPh

Re:Will they access Linux with NC's? by nizo · 2002-01-31 09:02 · Score: 5, Funny

But if Larry's next payment to Russia for his newest MiG comes due and he doesn't have the cash, he just changes the pricing structure on the Oracle RDBMS
So THIS is how he plans to get rid of the competition. (Pictures of MIG flown by Larry flying over competitors corporate HQ, surface to air missiles a-flying). Can we all chip in and buy one of these for Linus?

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I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Re:Will they access Linux with NC's? by Spacelord · 2002-01-31 09:32 · Score: 2, Funny

Does anyone remember that Simpsons episode where Homer went to work for a guy called Scorpio who had a secret underground base with a death ray or something, and he was trying to take over the world.

For some reason this guy always reminded me of Larry Ellison so I can just picture him flying that MiG over Microsoft's hq in Redmond :)
Re:Will they access Linux with NC's? by sphealey · 2002-01-31 09:37 · Score: 2, Funny

So THIS is how he plans to get rid of the competition. (Pictures of MIG flown by Larry flying over competitors corporate HQ, surface to air missiles a-flying).
Not totally a joke, actually. I read an interview with LE in a flying publication where he said that whenever he is flying his MiG into Seattle and is put in a holding pattern, he asks for a fix centered over Bill Gates' house!
sPh
Re:Will they access Linux with NC's? by rodgerd · 2002-01-31 10:01 · Score: 2

Power hungry villain with a beard. Sounds right to me.

Re:Just more of... by verch · 2002-01-31 08:47 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

I thought Oracle doesn't need any OS layer... by Otis_INF · 2002-01-31 08:48 · Score: 2

at least their application ware, or am I wrong? Wasn't it Oracle's plan to create an application system that runs native on the hardware without any OS? I thought they finished that with 9i, but again, correct me if I'm wrong. If I'm not, yapping that the company will totally run on Linux is a bit odd then.

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Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.

Re:I thought Oracle doesn't need any OS layer... by Pengo · 2002-01-31 08:58 · Score: 2

that was supposed to be 8i, and Dell was going to provide the hardware I believe. (Dell or Compaq, I forgot...) but basically Oracle had their own kernel layer that basically acted as the OS.

My guess is, as they got further into the game, they realized that they wouldn't be able to compete with any level of scalability the performance of Oracle on Sun. The One Widget to rule them all! *cough*
Re:I thought Oracle doesn't need any OS layer... by questionlp · 2002-01-31 09:31 · Score: 2, Informative

Dell makes two different models for Oracle 9i, more information about the units can be found here.
IIRC, the server that Oracle showed off Oracle 8i with was an HP double-wide pedestal server (possibly a PA-RISC server).

He'll be flying into the airport late again... by somethingwicked · 2002-01-31 08:49 · Score: 5, Funny

"You'll see us taking FULL SUPPORT RESPONSIBILITY for Linux," he said. "If you're running the app server and something goes wrong, call us and we'll come and fix it."

Hmmm, gonna be pulling some late nighters there. I'll give him that its good talk. But I bet this is one case where the "sales" department hasn't told the support department their pitch yet.

"YOU TOLD THE CUSTOMERS WE'D DO WHAT?"

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---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---

Re:He'll be flying into the airport late again... by Knobby · 2002-01-31 09:08 · Score: 2

If Oracle ships a very light version of Linux with their database, then there's a good chance that this may be feasible.
Re:He'll be flying into the airport late again... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-01-31 10:54 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.
Re:He'll be flying into the airport late again... by WNight · 2002-01-31 13:41 · Score: 2

Theoretically the OS cost is a small part of the "TCO" (Total Cost of Ownership) but I've actually seen it be fairly high.

You can't get away with Win2k Pro as your DB server OS (assuming you use MS) because it's limited to 10 simultaneous (by MS's extremely stupid definition) connections. So you need Server, and probably Adv. Server... And to go over certain limits you need to buy it specially, with a custom license.

You can end up paying $3k per server just for license fees, on a machine that cost $4k to build.

Now, this is peanuts compared to millions of dollars, but I assume the same things happen with Sun/SGI's hardware and OSes, just with more money.

My old work saved $5k by replacing a few WinNT/2k servers with Linux running Samba. The computers didn't have to do much, processor wise, but always had a ton of connections open and thus required a more expensive OS.

(I can't remember why they had to buy licenses, maybe they weren't compliant, or maybe the old licenses came with the old hardware, or whatever...)
Re:He'll be flying into the airport late again... by jedidiah · 2002-01-31 14:35 · Score: 2

For a particular release level, there is only one variant of Solaris you have to worry about. The RISC vendors already made their money off of you from the hardware. So, they have no motivation to soak you for the "diamond platinum" version of their OS.

If Apple ever made server hardware, it would likely be the same way with MacOS/10.

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A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:He'll be flying into the airport late again... by CokeBear · 2002-01-31 14:52 · Score: 2

If Apple ever made server hardware, it would likely be the same way with MacOS/10
um... actually Apple does make server hardware. Check it out here: http://store.apple.com

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Reality has a liberal bias
Re:He'll be flying into the airport late again... by KjetilK · 2002-01-31 23:58 · Score: 2

Yeah, but this statement is possibly the most important statement in the whole article. and it is the most important thing anybody can say for the acceptance of Linux in the marketplace.
The reason for that is that it takes away the reasons for the "there's nobody to blame if Linux crashes" FUD.

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Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid

most telling Ellison sentence by shibut · 2002-01-31 08:49 · Score: 3, Interesting

(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.

Re:obvious by verch · 2002-01-31 08:51 · Score: 3, Insightful

You are probably right, if longer term means 50 years or so.

Why do people assume that linux must kill everything else? Why wouldn't other OSes evolve as well?

I swear, linux zealots insist that monopolies are wrong and people have choices for the OS they run, but they want linux to be the only choice.

Larry to Sun.... by wowbagger · 2002-01-31 08:51 · Score: 5, Funny

Larry to Sun et al.

I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid... afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.

Unforturnately for Larry, the same quote is being said to him by the Free Software movement....

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www.eFax.com are spammers

Isn't it a bit ironic... by GCP · 2002-01-31 08:51 · Score: 5, Funny

...to hear the purveyor's of insanely expensive commercial software boasting about how they're switching from expensive commercial software to free software?

Perhaps Sun should announce their commitment to PostgreSQL.

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"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."

Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by Pengo · 2002-01-31 09:01 · Score: 3, Interesting

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!
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by zsmooth · 2002-01-31 09:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

Most Oracle users don't use it for "moderate database requirements". They use it when they simply cannot afford to lose data and/or they need something that you can scale the hell out of. PostgreSQL is nice but will *never* replace Oracle. Sun would look childish to offer PGSQL as a replacement.
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by Pengo · 2002-01-31 09:24 · Score: 3, Insightful

the idea behind the clustering technology is it doesn't have to scale, you can add more boxes into the cluster and thats your scalability. I don't want to go off comparing database technology to something like distributed.net, etc. But, things such as queries are naturally broken down into simple tasks that are easily distributed across multiple machines.

if their cluster solutions works as well as the rest of the their software, it shouldn't be a problem.

Regarding Postgres, your claims are pretty weak. I have been using it for about 4 years and have never 'lost data'. Besides, isn't that what backups are for?
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by Ami+Ganguli · 2002-01-31 10:07 · Score: 2

Most Oracle users don't use it for "moderate database requirements".

Untrue. The vast majority of production databases could run perfectly well and reliably on PostreSQL or mySQL. Take a tour of a large datacenter some day and look at the applicatios that are really there. Sure there's the odd massive mission critical database, but most of them are running small, hacked together apps or are very lightly loaded.

Paying lots of money for database software (and hardware for that matter) is a political thing. Everybody wants their application (and therefore their job) to seem important, so they make-believe that the world will end if there are a few minutes of downtime. It's just not true.

Don't get me wrong, I realize that there are applications that justify the expense of Oracle. But if people actually looked at individual applications and found the best fit for each one, Oracle would be making much less money.

--
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by SubtleNuance · 2002-01-31 11:04 · Score: 2

PostgreSQL is nice but will *never* replace Oracle

Yes, and GNU/Linux will never replace HPUX, Solaris, AIX, IRIX or SCO.

whoops, never mind that last one.
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by Znork · 2002-01-31 11:13 · Score: 2

True. Or, well, large datacenters hopefully (ha) have the sense to consolidate their DB's onto DB servers with 20-500 databases each.

Still, there are piles of machines with loads that could easily be served with a 5 yearold low to midrange machine... which will be the death of the large machines, it's getting hard to find applications of any but the most estoteric use to corporations that actually need 'serious' processing power anymore. Which, of course, is the reason that all the iron vendors are adding partitioning capabilities to their systems like mad so they can sell on the consolidation capability.
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by ajs · 2002-01-31 11:28 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by kcbrown · 2002-01-31 12:55 · Score: 2

He's got a point. If you need a database, and losing even a one email could mean the difference in thousands of dollars in fines for violating your service agreements with your client's, you need another big pocketed company to blame when it's the database fault, and not yours.

That won't help you when the chips are down. Either you can word the service agreement so that you can absolve yourself of blame in the event of hardware or software failure (in which case the database you're using won't make a bit of difference), or you are going to be in violation of your service agreements no matter whose fault it really is (as long as it's not the customer's). Your customers simply aren't going to care whether it's a problem with Oracle or a problem with you: they're paying you, not Oracle, so if you happen to have a database problem on your end that causes the service agreement to be violated, the customer will blame you, period.
Seems to me that the ability to shift the blame to someone else is only useful to middle managers who are trying to climb the corporate ladder, not real businesses with real, paying customers. Blaming others for problems that are causing pain to your customers only makes you look stupid in the eyes of your customers. All the customer cares about is that you get the problem(s) fixed -- no matter whose "fault" it is.

--
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by WNight · 2002-01-31 13:24 · Score: 2

The way the legal system works you're often off the hook for negligance if you can show that you hired someone who should have been capable of handling the issue.

If you build a bridge yourself and it's wonderful, but someone sails a ship into it and it falls over, you're hooped.

If you hire a licensed engineer to build a bridge and it sucks, you're (msotly) covered even if it falls over in the wind, as long as you didn't have cause to believe he was doing badly.

So while you can't sue Oracle or MS (while they aren't the biggest companies, they're both rich enough to tie something up in court for decades) for damages, you can point to your use of "proper" software to drop your liability for punative damages.

This isn't lawyer speak, but I was told this by a lawyer, for what that's worth. (Though it wasn't as legal advice, and was in laymans terms.)

However, now that a "Real" company like RedHat (ie, not some kids working from a garage) sell support for Linux and RedHatDB, you'd probably be safe going with them.

As someone else in this thread said, some of the people who use Oracle *need* Oracle (and Sun hardware, etc). Most of the people who use it could get by with lesser software and lesser hardware, if they weren't hung up on a name.
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by jedidiah · 2002-01-31 14:42 · Score: 2

Not every database application is easily divisible into the equivalent of a renderfarm. Some applications will still need a "big box". If a given application wasn't already clustered, it is unlikely that throwing some "clustering pixie dust" on it will magically make a room full of PC's able to replace a single large server.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by jedidiah · 2002-01-31 14:44 · Score: 2

Clustering a database will very likely require re-engineering it. This is the fundemental problem with this and other similar "pretend 100 PCs are a SunFire" type of exercises.

This idea was flawed when Microsoft was pushing it and it's still flawed.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by jedidiah · 2002-01-31 14:48 · Score: 2

Quite so. Quite a few production Oracle databases are in this "toy" category. Certainly, any Oracle instance running on NT is a good candidate for replacement with something Copylefted.

Of the 4 production instances I manage, 3 could be migrated to a lesser RDBMS. 2 of them could probably even be run as Access databases.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by jedidiah · 2002-01-31 14:54 · Score: 2

Oracle has too much memory overhead for 20-500 of them to be crammed all onto one server.

The kind of consolidation that you're talking about is generally used for collections of servers that are relatively low bandwidth and sparsely accessed. Those IBM mainframe Linux solutiosn work so well because most of the machines being replaced are mostly idle.

Cramming 100+ databases onto a single big box would be a much more interesting problem.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by jedidiah · 2002-01-31 14:59 · Score: 2

You'll only need REALLY expensive hardware if you've got some REALLY big computing task that you can't split into many small pieces. No copyleft database will help in that situation. You'll still need a monster server (like that terrabyte genome database).

OTOH, trying to undercut a RISC server with a glorified desktop PC is not all that easy. A serious PC server will still cost a non-trivial amount of money and might not even be cost competitive with a RISC box.

This is especially true in terms of CPU cache and IO bandwidth. PC servers only tend to catch up to RISC boxes in terms of performance once you get to the disk subsystem.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by ink · 2002-01-31 15:57 · Score: 2

Oracle makes their money from the ERP products more often now. Their database software still makes a pretty penny, but it is often integrated with Financials or other Oracle add-ons. I think Oracle knows that they can't milk the database market for much longer, but they are very well diversified.
And.... What's to prevent Sun from selling E15k boxes loaded with some tricked-out Linux? We can all be happy here.

--
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by Pengo · 2002-01-31 20:38 · Score: 2

It's ANSI SQL stupid.

It shouldn't matter, especially if there are things such as JDBC, ODBC and other technologies of the sort being used. I have ported 2 HUGE applications from Oracle to PGSQL, and both went over without so much as a hitch. Even the Oracle procedure language went over in a snap.
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by Pengo · 2002-01-31 20:44 · Score: 2

So what your saying is that clustering is fundamentally flawed, or it's impossible to fix?
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... by ajs · 2002-02-01 05:29 · Score: 2

Oracle is pretty well know [sic] for being rock solid IF you know what you're doing with it.

I'm pretty well known for being the smartest guy on the planet. And my dog is pretty well known for curing cancer.

Hyperbole asside, I dont' know that Oracle is rock solid. I just know that it's fairly stable bloatware that has good name recognition. I would trust my data to Sybase long before trusting Oracle again.

Consider, for a moment, how many man/years have gone into the devopement of this product,

And Windows, for that matter.

how many other products (rdb, for example) have been integrated in

Bloat is not a good thing.

and overall, how mature of a product it is.

If, by mature, you mean old. Yes, I agree.

Then consider who's running it right now;

Same people who were running IBM mainframes in the late 80s and laughing at all those "idiots" who were trying to move their end-users off the green screen. Nuff said.

who has been running it for eons (folks who can't afford to have their "databases simply go away").

In ever large Oracle environment I've seen Oracle is not relied on to keep data secure. That's what contingency planning and hot spares are for.

You can arm-wave at my experience all you want, but 15,000 high schools were none too pleased when Oracle lost their data and I had to spend 1/2 hour restoring the backup... THREE TIMES IN 2 MONTHS just because a Sun decided to crash, and Oracle doesn't tollerate partially completed transactions on disk.

I finally gave up and moved Oracle off to a NetApp where I could do atomic snapshots every hour, and snap-restore the whole filesystem. It sucks to have to move my fault tolerance out to disk, but it was the only way, since the front-end software we were using only supported Oracle :-(

Then consider what you're comparing it to. Seems a little naive, yes?

Nope.

Hmmm by Arker · 2002-01-31 08:54 · Score: 2

Not sure what to think of this, honestly.

Sure, Linux is great, I love it. That's not the problem.

The hardware aspect of this just doesn't sound that great to me. Replacing three high end SPARC boxes with a cluster of Intel hardware might not be the greatest idea in the world. Secondary costs could easily skyrocket. I guess only time will tell...

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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.

Re:Hmmm by jsprat · 2002-01-31 09:31 · Score: 2, Interesting

...Replacing three high end SPARC boxes ...

To quote the article:
Instead of upgrading three of its older Hewlett-Packard Co. Unix servers, Oracle will move its application server and business software to Linux-based Intel machines later this year

They're getting rid of old equipment, not mindlessly replacing new hardware.

I wonder how old the HP boxes are?
Re:Hmmm by Not+The+Real+Me · 2002-01-31 10:10 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.
Re:Hmmm by Arker · 2002-02-01 00:17 · Score: 2

Ahh, sorry, the link was slashdotted so I had to go from the blurb *sigh* always a bad idea, I know.

Regardless, I stand by the gist of my statement though. I don't know how old their HP boxes were either. But I've worked with old HPs. In '96 I was working on a network of PA-RISC boxes that were considered very old at the time, and in terms of reliability they were light years above *current* Intel hardware.

Yeah, they were a pain in some ways. A coworker at the time was busy trying to port Linux to them, and he had plenty of choice words about the architecture and its peculiarities. But they had a fault tolerant cluster that did it's job 365 days of the year, and did it well. Those old Apollos definately had their good points. If I were in charge of Oracles infrastructure I would be extremely careful about replacing boxes like those with Intel boxes. Cheaper and faster they may be, but more reliable they have never been.

I have to agree with a couple of other posters - I'd have been looking really hard at some IBM big iron with virtualised linux servers myself. I don't know all the details, so I can't say what the final decision would be, just that I sure wouldn't have jumped the way they did without some serious good, and unforseen at this point, reasons to do so.

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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Re:Hmmm by LinuxHam · 2002-02-01 04:27 · Score: 2

Agreed. I'd be thinking real hard 'bout some of IBM's big iron if I were responsible for a datacenter like that

Thanks for the plug. As the Dead Kennedys sang, "We've Got a Bigger Problem Now". I was asked to analyze between 3,000 and 7,000 servers (depending on who you ask) and start picking off machines to cut over to Linux on S/390. Only problem is, about 80% of the boxes are running Oracle on Sun or HP. Oracle has already ported to Linux on S/390, but its absolutely unsupported -- a showstopper for my customer. I offered up running Oracle under OS/390 on the same box as the virtual Linux servers, and was told Oracle on OS/390 sucks very badly.

If Oracle gets serious about supporting Linux on all platforms, not just Intel, that'll make my day, month, and year!

Free tidbit for the mainframe gang: Sterling Software, the NDM aka Connect:Direct people, have had Linux version for a while now. Yesterday, they announced they are now fully supporting NDM/CD on Linux for S/390. That's a huge help for porting to Linux on S/390. Now the data path never has to leave the box!

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Intelligent Life on Earth
Re:Hmmm by budgenator · 2002-02-10 08:43 · Score: 2

Who better than Oracle to prove or disprove the Linux for the Enterprise thing. They definatly have the programing muscle to fix anything that needs to be fixed, and if they can't a lot of developers will burn some midnight oil just to pull it off.

Ellison, is the only CEO I can think of with balls big enough to push this through. I read a article where he joked about having to send a swat team to one of their Monteal Datacenter to force the employees there to use Oracle software.(I think he was only half joking too).

It's not to likely, that a guy who can brag about saving his company 1 Billion dollars, is going to crash and burn over an operating system choise, the reseach is all ready done in an the lab.

--
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds

Oracle still not open.. by Evanrude · 2002-01-31 08:54 · Score: 3, Interesting

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!

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~.Evanrude

Re:Oracle still not open.. by sql*kitten · 2002-02-01 00:10 · Score: 2

Oracle may be moving their backoffice to Linux but what about the database software itself? It is still a closed source proprietary application.

I hate to break it to you, but Larry Ellison doesn't give a crap about Linux. He only cares, is consumed and obsessed by, his ongoing feud with Bill Gates. Linux is a pawn in his game, nothing more.

maybe they'll support more distros? by cheesyfru · 2002-01-31 08:56 · Score: 2, Informative

I'm sure this is just wishful thinking, but having just gone through the absolutely painful process of getting Oracle to run on RedHat linux, perhaps this move will eliminate the need to use a certain version of a certain distrobution to make it run. *shrugs*

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Josh Woodward

larry larry larry... by Mr.+Quick · 2002-01-31 08:57 · Score: 4, Funny

.. i wish he would stop dancing around topics all the time, and just be blunt for once...

It's all about the customers by MichaelJ · 2002-01-31 09:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

I don't know anyone who would want their production Oracle database on Intel hardware. You can't just keep throwing faster cpus into the same outdated backplane and expect to get the kind of throughput performance that a db requires.

Additionally, who with a production system isn't going to want both the hardware & software reliability and 24/7 support of the caliber that Sun provides?

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux & use it as my primary platform. But I wouldn't deploy my db back-end on it. We used Suns at my last job for very good reasons.

He may take the Sun out of Oracle, but he won't take the Sun out of the users, and if Oracle starts slipping on the Sun support, there's always Sybase.

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Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?

Re:It's all about the customers by geekoid · 2002-01-31 11:55 · Score: 2

perhaps a push to get SUN big iron with linux on it?
Sun would be fooloish not to do make Linux releases for there Iron.
Anybody in charge of an IT dept that needs 24/7 reliability and scalability will still demand Big Iron hardware. Perhaps IBM will replace SUN as Oracles bed buddy?

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The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Re:It's all about the customers by Erris · 2002-01-31 17:12 · Score: 2

I don't know anyone who would want their production Oracle database on Intel hardware. You can't just keep throwing faster cpus into the same outdated backplane and expect to get the kind of throughput performance that a db requires.
Additionally, who with a production system isn't going to want both the hardware & software reliability and 24/7 support of the caliber that Sun provides?
Yeah, you had better keep that old Sparc Station around. Linux != x86.

--
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.

great! by Syre · 2002-01-31 09:01 · Score: 3, Redundant

Great... first replace all the proprietary operating systems with open source systems like Linux and FreeBSD. Run your ultra-expensive Oracle on that.

Then replace the proprietary Oracle with open source systems like Postgres and MySQL.

Now we're talking!

And then Ellison backed up his claims... by Multiple+Sanchez · 2002-01-31 09:01 · Score: 2

by betting the world a million dollars.

Re:And then Ellison backed up his claims... by Multiple+Sanchez · 2002-01-31 09:22 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

An astute move for Oracle, great for linux by msoldo · 2002-01-31 09:02 · Score: 3, Insightful

Oracle has been losing a significant amount of marketshare to Microsoft's SQL server because SQL server is much cheaper. By putting their full support behind linux, oracle has a lower cost platform on which to compete.

This should also go a long way towards bolstering the impression of Linux in the IT world. If Oracle is running linux, then it must be able to handle mission critical apps (so the agrument would go).

Re:An astute move for Oracle, great for linux by mgblst · 2002-01-31 11:51 · Score: 2

Maybe they just realised that microsoft will be including and implementation of their database incorporated into their next OS.

It seems that only when companies are directly targeted my MS will they try and consider other OS's... often when its too late. Lets hope the industry wakes up to this.

Re:50 on karma so here goes.... by Chang · 2002-01-31 09:03 · Score: 2

I agree with your points, but if Oracle Corp actually does move their business systems off Sun and onto a Lintel cluster then it's news no matter if Ellison is a dork or not.

Hell, it's news for him to even announce that they are going to try.

Heh, no kidding by DG · 2002-01-31 09:04 · Score: 5, Interesting

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

http://autocross.dsm.org/books.html

--
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book

Re:Heh, no kidding by Ryan+Amos · 2002-01-31 10:54 · Score: 4, Insightful

Yeah, except anyone that would be paying out the nose for Oracle is willing to pay the money not to have to go through the process of switching to a less secure, less featured and slower database. Also, the reason you pay for Oracle is the same reason people buy Cisco support contracts. If something fucks up, they will fix it immediately, it doesn't matter if it's 3am on a Sunday night, someone who definately knows what they're doing will be there within 15 minutes. You don't get that with PostgreSQL, or any other "free" software.

What I'm saying here is that the many thousands of dollars per month large companies pay for Oracle is worth the absolute assurance that their database will be usable 24/365(6). Sometimes, it's just cheaper to pay the money than lose out on $100,000,000 worth of money transfers during the hour you're down.
Re:Heh, no kidding by johnnyb · 2002-01-31 14:04 · Score: 2

So buy Red Hat database. That's what its for. You get the benefits of free software, and it is fully-supported by Red Hat.

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Engineering and the Ultimate
Re:Heh, no kidding by jonbrewer · 2002-01-31 16:24 · Score: 2

And then somebody discovers this "PostgresSQL" thing....

And they laugh their ass off.

I wouldn't switch from Oracle for any relational database on the market or in the pipeline. It runs, and there are plenty of good DBAs for it. Last time I looked at resumes for DBAs, I didn't see too many listing PostgreSQL experience.

And Oracle runs fine on Linux. We do it frequently for dev instances. It's kind of nice not to have to fuck around with Solaris quirks or deal with the performance of NT.
Re:Heh, no kidding by scrytch · 2002-01-31 16:25 · Score: 3, Funny

So buy Red Hat database. That's what its for. You get the benefits of free software, and it is fully-supported by Red Hat.

Redhat, one of the most trusted and experienced names in the database industry...

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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Re:Heh, no kidding by johnnyb · 2002-01-31 16:45 · Score: 2

I was specifically referring to the comment

"Also, the reason you pay for Oracle is the same reason people buy Cisco support contracts. If something fucks up, they will fix it immediately, it doesn't matter if it's 3am on a Sunday night, someone who definately knows what they're doing will be there within 15 minutes. You don't get that with PostgreSQL, or any other 'free' software."

With support contracts from vendors of free software, you get the benefits of both worlds. You get full competition (you don't have to gut your enterprise to switch vendors or do it yourself) and the ability to do ANYTHING you can dream, and you get a vendor who is at your beck and call.

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Engineering and the Ultimate
Re:Heh, no kidding by scrytch · 2002-02-01 04:27 · Score: 2

The point I was trying to make was that people buy Oracle to get Oracle. The database, the dev tools, the support. None of which Redhat has established any kind of reputation for. I agree that Oracle is often way overkill for many of its applications, but I just don't see myself running payroll on one of Redhat's experiments in new markets. (I see myself running it on DB2 actually, but that's another story)

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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.

Standard Distros by Geeyzus · 2002-01-31 09:04 · Score: 2, Informative

They will have to support only some standard distributions of Linux, with no modifications or modifications limited to their "supported" subset they will create.

Otherwise, it will be too big of a hassle figuring out where the problem lies with a custom distribution. This is not really that good of a thing for either Oracle or Linux... because either Oracle will have to have their own distribution, which you can not alter if you want to keep support, or you will have to go with a RedHat, Debian, Mandrake or some other flavor and keep it to their specs...

Interesting to see how this turns out....

Re:Standard Distros by Jason+Earl · 2002-01-31 09:40 · Score: 5, Informative

Actually, they will probably only support one or two major distributions of Linux, and they will probably subcontract out to the Linux vendor some of the Linux problems.
This actually makes a lot of sense for Oracle. After all, they want you to spend as little on your hardware and operating system as possible. After all, they are selling a database and applications, not Solaris licenses. If they can cut Sun out of the loop that is billions more in potential profits for them. Their solutions become less expensive (and more competitive) without any loss of profit margin.
The fact of the matter is that the operating system is quickly becoming a commodity. In a few years even Microsoft won't be selling their operating system (that's why they are so desperate to move to a service and support type business).
Re:Standard Distros by spudnic · 2002-01-31 09:55 · Score: 4, Interesting

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
Re:Standard Distros by Drake42 · 2002-01-31 10:04 · Score: 2

The operating system IS a commodity. Everyone needs one. Most people don't really give a crap about it.

Take water. You absolutely must have a clean supply of it, but who gets it to you and how they do it you only give the vaguest care about. MAYBE if you're a health nut, you put a water filter in line, but most people don't bother. Once you have the water you'll buy lemonaid mix, washing machines, sprinklers, etc. You really care about those applications, not just the water itself.

Same (is || will be) true for the OS. It has to make it possible for my software to talk to the hardware. Beyond that all I really care about are applications. (Note that I'm considering the shell an application, not an intrisic part of the OS)
Re:Standard Distros by AtrN · 2002-01-31 12:12 · Score: 3, Interesting

Excellent point. And to allow this to be the case AND get a healthy, free market we need standard, open interfaces, i.e, what Unix is these days. We shouldn't have it in the hands of a corp, especially one that behaves in the manner of Microsoft.
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?
Re:Standard Distros by Malcontent · 2002-01-31 18:24 · Score: 3, Informative

Solaris is free. I quote from the sun web site.

"Now you can use the Solaris[tm] 8 Operating Environment at home or at work -- without paying a license fee. For only the cost of media ($75 U.S.) plus shipping, you can use the software on an unlimited number of computers with a capacity of eight or fewer CPUs."

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War is necrophilia.
Re:Standard Distros by Jason+Earl · 2002-02-01 02:23 · Score: 4, Insightful

It would appear the Solaris on Intel has come to the end of the road. Here is the quote from Sun's website.

Please note: Sun is deferring the productization and release of the Solaris 9 OE for Intel IA-32. We will continue to sell and support Intel versions of the Solaris 8 OE. Per normal lifecycle policy it will remain available and supported under normal terms until mid CY2004, and supported under contract for up to five years beyond that date.
At this time, we have discontinued Solaris 8 OE for Intel downloads. While we have discontinued the download program, we have also slashed the price of Solaris 8 OE for Intel media kits by 40% to $45 US (plus S/H).

However, even if Sun wasn't end-of-lifing Solaris for Intel, there are obvious reasons why Oracle can't base their future business plans on the availability of a low-cost version of Solaris on Intel based hardware. The most obvious of these reasons is that Oracle doesn't own Solaris. If Oracle were to start suggesting to their customers that they run Oracle on free copies of Solaris for Intel (instead of Sun's Sparc hardware) then Sun is bound to notice, and they would almost certainly change the license for their Intel version. After all, they can't really let their free Intel version of Solaris cannabalize sales of their Sparc hardware.
Linux, on the other hand, is safe because Oracle has as much control over it as they need. Since Oracle has access to the source code they can easily customize Linux to their particular needs.
Larry is right, it sucks to be in the operating systems business right now. Especially if you are trying to sell a Unix-like operating system (although Microsoft is feeling the pinch as well). Linux on commodity hardware continues to improve at a remarkable pace, and you can't beat the price.

Natural Move for Server Vendors by medcalf · 2002-01-31 09:05 · Score: 4, Insightful

This is a natural move for server (as opposed to host) vendors. Applications like Oracle typically are the only things on the server, or run with only minimal software designed specifically to run with them. (LDAP servers are another example, at least in the corporate space.) By using an existing OS that they can modify as they wish, they can optimize the system for their database, and vice versa. Because the OS is in use elsewhere, there are a number of available tools for administrators to use on their systems. At once, Oracle makes itself independent of large companies like Sun or Microsoft, and can potentially make a better product in the bargain. My guess is, there will be a specific flavor of Linux and specific supported hardware, once Oracle releases this into the marketplace.

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-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits

grain of salt by Telastyn · 2002-01-31 09:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

Wasn't Ellison the one who put the big push into 'thin clients' as well? I dunno about you guys, but I've got *tons* of those hanging around.

Re:grain of salt by Telastyn · 2002-01-31 11:44 · Score: 2

And in an ideal world Oracle should be a boon to Linux, and vice versa... Linux will get many more deployments, Oracle will get more press, and a OS they can tweak to support their systems.

But we do not live in an ideal world...

One Question.. by 1stflight · 2002-01-31 09:05 · Score: 3, Interesting

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

Re:One Question.. by WildBeast · 2002-01-31 09:16 · Score: 2

Well, Linux is more popular than Solaris. That alone is good enough. He wants to gain marketshare.
Re:One Question.. by jgerman · 2002-01-31 09:43 · Score: 2

Besides marketshare isn't indicative of quality. MS holds the market in business desktops but it's certainly not the best quality. Personally I can't stand Oracle, you can take your ridiculously expensive memory and your 8 processors elsewhere, I'm sick of the downtime and horrible performance.

--
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Re:One Question.. by kindbud · 2002-01-31 10:01 · Score: 2

Well, Linux is more popular than Solaris.

In bed.

That alone is good enough. He wants to gain marketshare.

Solaris is the most polular platform for Oracle. People buy big Sun machines so they can run Oracle on the platform where it runs best. If Oracle keeps producing a Solaris version that meets customer needs, customers will continue to buy big Sun machines to run it on.

If Oracle produces a Linux version that does not meet customer needs, no one will buy it no matter how low the TCO.

--
Edith Keeler Must Die
Re:One Question.. by WildBeast · 2002-01-31 10:17 · Score: 2

They're talking about Linux everywhere, so it's probably more used than Solaris.

Yeah but now that Oracle is using Linux, the people buying those big Sun machines may change there minds and go with Linux in the future especially because it costs less.

I'm totally unbiased here, I'm just telling what I'm noticing.

typo by niekze · 2002-01-31 09:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

I think there's some typos.

"We'll be on Linux no later than the summer, so we'll be running our whole business on Linux."

I think he meant to say: "We'll be owning Linux no later than the summer, so we'll be running the whole business of Linux." I can't really back that up, unless you take the fact that Larry Ellison said it as proof ;)

Seriously, this would be good for Linux in the big picture. Most of us would stick with our MySQL and PostgreSQL servers, but with Oracle...Enterprise credibility goes up. Additionally, all the industry behemoths (AOL/TW, Oracle) would fare well to bolster Microsoft's competetors.

I might burn some Karma for saying this, but Linux is symbolically a pawn, being used by the giant corporations for leverage against their current giant corporation rivals.

I also wonder how market share affects this. Linux is growing in the server market. Oracle isn't being used in these machines. Which means less money for Ellison. I wonder how this will work out. Any suggestions?

--

Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not

Re:typo by Mike+Schiraldi · 2002-01-31 10:19 · Score: 2

I also wonder how market share affects this. Linux is growing in the server market. Oracle isn't being used in these machines. Which means less money for Ellison. I wonder how this will work out. Any suggestions?

Oracle for Linux. Not as a "yeah, you can also run in here if you really want to but why would you", but as a first-class system, the way IBM is pushing Linux.

--

--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Re:typo by mgblst · 2002-01-31 11:53 · Score: 2

Additionally, all the industry behemoths (AOL/TW, Oracle) would fare well to bolster Microsoft's competetors.

Lets hope they realise this before its too late...

This isn't a win for Linux... by ceswiedler · 2002-01-31 09:07 · Score: 5, Insightful

...it's a win for Intel. Larry says nothing in the article about the capabilities of Linux except that it's better than Windows "if you're on the Internet."

What he really liked, apparently, was the fact that the hardware was cheap and easily replaceable. It's a win for clustering, certainly, but is it a win for Linux?

Re:This isn't a win for Linux... by ocie · 2002-01-31 13:05 · Score: 2

What he really liked, apparently, was the fact that the hardware was cheap and easily replaceable. It's a win for clustering, certainly, but is it a win for Linux?

What I think he really liked is that it could result in the same number of sales of databases and fewer sales of Microsoft OS. Larry hates Microsoft with a passion. He tried to use network computing to attack it and didn't really get anywhere. It must keep him up at nights thinking that Oracle installations running on NT are providing money to Microsoft to develop and market their own database products.

--
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere

Mixed blessings. by nesneros · 2002-01-31 09:07 · Score: 4, Insightful

As glad as I am to hear that a big company like Oracle is making the move to Linux, I think that without the "core" Linux community remaining vigilant, it could result in problems down the road.

On one hand, having a larger user base is definately a GOOD THING. Proving that Linux can provide the infrastructure for one of the world's top companies is a GOOD THING.

Problems arise in the mid to long term possibilities. Will Sun ultimately lose so much business that they're driven out of the software market? Despite the fact that they seem to be sunsetting, they're still a software/OS player, and the more players in the field, the better the products (my belief is that Linux has achieved so much partly because it had Sun, SGI, Be, MS to prove itself against) all around. Its not like MS can provide Linux with any great technical challenges to overcome...

And am I alone in worrying that having so many big companies like IBM, Oracle, God forbid AOL/TW using Linux may end up with them pushing development away from the needs of the average user? Sorof like getting a loan from the Mafia, you never know when or how you're going to pay up.

--
Some men spend their entire lives trying to kill themselves for having been born. --Ross MacDonald

The answer is... by 2Bits · 2002-01-31 09:07 · Score: 2

NO!

Canibalism by javacowboy · 2002-01-31 09:08 · Score: 5, Insightful

Some of you may disagree with me, but Sun has contriubuted a lot to the OpenSource community. They have programmers working on the Mozilla, GNOME and most especially OpenOffice projects. All of these projects seek to provide highly usable and OpenSource alternatives to Microsoft software, namely, InternetExplorer, Windows and MS Office, respectively. They have (in a highly restricted way) opened up the source code to Java and have offered the JDK and all other Java API's for Linux.

Now, ironically, Linux is eating into Sun's market share, to the delight of OpenSource zealots, who decry Sun simply for being a for-profit corporation. I get the sense that many OpenSourcers are rooting against Sun, and I believe that's an entirely counter-productive position to take.

Microsoft is the enemy of OpenSource, not Sun. Sun may not have open-sourced Java and Solaris, but, hey, they need to make money just like everybody else. Sun has many OpenSource products and has contributed much to the community.

OpenSource and Linux will lose a great deal if Sun goes out of business, and not vice-versa.

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This space left intentionally blank.

Re:Canibalism by Codifex+Maximus · 2002-01-31 09:59 · Score: 4, Insightful

> Some of you may disagree with me, but Sun has
> contriubuted a lot to the OpenSource community.

I don't disagree with you.

> Now, ironically, Linux is eating into Sun's
> market share, to the delight of OpenSource
> zealots, who decry Sun simply for being a
> for-profit corporation. I get the sense that
> many OpenSourcers are rooting against Sun, and I
> believe that's an entirely counter-productive
> position to take.

To say that Linux is eating into Sun's marketshare is to say that Sun is primarily a software company. It is my understanding that Sun is a Hardware company that provides certain software that is optimized for their hardware.

So, if Sun drops Solaris and adopts Linux, how can that be a loss? They can, after all, begin putting more of their development efforts into making Linux a more native OS for Sparc CPUs.

> Microsoft is the enemy of OpenSource,

Once again, I have to agree. OpenSource is the anathema of Microsoft's way of thinking.

> OpenSource and Linux will lose a great deal if
> Sun goes out of business, and not vice-versa.

Yep. No doubt about it. I figure that the days of UNIX differentiation are close to an end... the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. A beginning of a new time of easy interoperation which will benefit everyone - after all, Sun, IBM, HP, Compaq/Digital, SGI and all the rest can still make the High-End cutting edge hardware and software applications/middleware optimized for their hardware platform.

Maybe Sun can put even more effort into Java to make it faster - maybe even revisiting the hardware implementation angle. What about a drop-in Java Virtual Machine in hardware implemented on a PCI card or something?

--
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Re:Canibalism by johnnyb · 2002-01-31 13:46 · Score: 2

Sun's problem is that they are too wishy-washy when it comes to open source. Had they open-sourced Java and the Solaris kernel (or just patched the Linux kernel until it worked as well as Solaris), they would have had the entire open-source community knocking at their door to buy hardware from them.

Yes, they contribute to open-source. However, when you go with a Sun solution, a good portion of your system is going to be closed. If you go with Red Hat or another Linux vendor, you get the whole benefits of open-source, and not just a teeny-tiny portion.

I'm glad that Sun is helping the open-source community. However, if they were willing to be more open, they could turn that into even more revenue. Remember, they are a hardware company, and the software isn't really a big game for them. I would have loved to run Wolfram's web systems on Sun boxes when I was there, but I wouldn't have gotten the benefits of open-source, which is why they are still running on Red Hat/Intel.

--
Engineering and the Ultimate
Re:Canibalism by Doomdark · 2002-01-31 13:51 · Score: 3, Interesting

Maybe Sun can put even more effort into Java to make it faster - maybe even revisiting the hardware implementation angle. What about a drop-in Java Virtual Machine in hardware implemented on a PCI card or something?
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.

--
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

It's 2009. And the sole corporate survivor... by cooperj72 · 2002-01-31 09:10 · Score: 3, Funny

is Microsoft as all of it's main competitors
successfully destroyed each other as they tried
to take down Windows.

It all started when Scott McNealy in a rash of
unintelligent banter retaliated toward
Oracle by announcing "oh yeah! Well... well...
Solaris will only be supporting Linux
from now on too!"

-J

A bit saddening... by pmz · 2002-01-31 09:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

Intel-based servers may be cheap and all, but I do not look forward to a future where the RISC-based manufacturers, such as Sun, IBM, and SGI, are totally displaced.

Reality is that traditional RISC-based workstations and servers, such as Sun's higher-end Ultra and Blade workstations, are really a joy to work with. They are amazingly robust and flexible, since they typically are the result of long and thorough development and testing efforts. They tend to have useful lifetimes of about a decade, where they keep finding new roles and finally get mothballed after enjoying a last hurrah as a print server. They have genuine firmware, so you don't have to jump through flaming hoops to bootstrap the system they way you want to. Their enclosures are very well engineered for easy maintainence, fewer moving parts, and good airflow. And on and on...

Whenever I see the inside of an Intel-based server, I am a bit disappointed. Working with one tends to be disappointing as well. Truth is: you do get what you pay for.

I hope Oracle doesn't learn too many hard lessons these next few years.

--
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin

Re:A bit saddening... by system5 · 2002-01-31 09:47 · Score: 3, Insightful

I think that you are absolutely right, but hopefully, it will not be too long before we see at least a decently thought-out Intel-based server. Let's face it, with AMD's latest line of processors (the XP and MP's), there is enough processing power and bang for the buck to rival most larger scale systems from traditional UNIX vendors. Obviously, the weakness is in the bus architecture, BIOS-design, etc. A lot of this is due to the fact that comodity hardware vendors must still allow legacy software/operating system/applications (we know what these are) to run properly on their systems. I think that we will see some positive developments now that folks such as IBM are involved. Let's face it, IBM hasn't always had the latest and greatest, but quality and robust design has always been a staple of their products (at least from my experience.) Besides, if we really look at it, a PC is not too far from being a reliable server: a good solid power supply (redundant perhaps), a real bootloader rather than the BIOS, 64-bit PCI slots (and/or 66MHz ones too), and a well engineered rack-mountable case are some of the tweaks that come to mind mind at least, that can get a PC over the hump and be a reliable Linux server. I do agree that Sun hardware is a blast to work on. However, I'll take Linux hands down any day over Solaris in terms of usability. Solaris is a fine system, but over the years I've found that Linux has been able to adapt to *my* needs, rather than the other way around. And as for Linux on non-x86 architectures, I think that is excellent too. But there is a certain aura to the grass-roots nature of Linux on an x86 platform that is hard to match. I also think that if one builds a server from scratch, one can pick high quality components and make wise decisions, even with commodity hardware. There is decent gear out there for reasonable prices, you just have to give it some thought. Finally, I am very hopeful that we will see more and more projects and technologies which will allow us to build Linux-based commodity servers that begin to rival the robustness of their much more expensive RISC-based cousins. I would even be ecstatic the day that I can boot an x86 server without video :)
Re:A bit saddening... by Space+cowboy · 2002-01-31 10:29 · Score: 2

I don't know actually... I work with SGI's a lot, and their engineering has always been top-notch. Go look inside a large 0rigin 2000 and be impressed, but even down to the more-or-less defunct O2's. They're nicely made and give the feel of quality.

Take a look inside one of the Dell rackmount linux servers, and you'll find the same level of quality and attention to detail. The architecture (bandwidth etc.) may not be up to the standards of the big boys, but the engineering is true quality.

Just a happy customer.

Simon.

--
Physicists get Hadrons!

Re:50 on karma so here goes.... by Don+Negro · 2002-01-31 09:12 · Score: 2

According to the article, they're replacing HP boxen, presumably PA-RISC running HP-UX.

Maybe Oracle and Sun aren't as snuggly as we all thought.

--

Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall

Oracle already runs on linux... by zsmooth · 2002-01-31 09:15 · Score: 5, Interesting

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...

Re:Oracle already runs on linux... by Tim+C · 2002-01-31 19:55 · Score: 2

Indeed.

I work at a web agency, and we've been putting Oracle dbs on Linux machines (generally dual processor boxes with a gig or so of RAM running RedHat) for at least a year and a half now, and it may be closer to two years. I can't comment on support levels, as that's not my department, but I've not heard of any problems. Our CTO used to work for Oracle, though, so that may help ;-)

Cheers,

Tim

--
It's official. Most of you are morons.

Linux != Intel by fishbowl · 2002-01-31 09:17 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

Re:Linux != Intel by pmz · 2002-01-31 10:45 · Score: 2

I used Linux on a SPARCStation for a while, and I am aware of the ports to Alpha, PPC, etc. My comments above were mainly motivated by Ellison clamping onto Linux on Intel in the article.

--
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Re:Linux != Intel by fishbowl · 2002-01-31 11:51 · Score: 2

I did read the article.

Unfortunately for me, there is no version
of Oracle for a Sparc running Linux.

I'm not looking for a freebie, not by a long shot.
My company has about half a million invested in
Oracle licenses.

--
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.

Exactly. by Wntrmute · 2002-01-31 09:18 · Score: 4, Interesting

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?

Re:Exactly. by RFC959 · 2002-02-01 13:24 · Score: 2

Some of what you said is true, and some isn't. There isn't just one company making Sun parts - there's also Fujitsu and Tatung. (OK, if we're being pedantic, only Sun makes "Sun parts", but "Sun compatible", anyway.) A lot of the parts that go into a Sun are commodity anyway - they don't make their own hard drives, for example.
Another factor in pricing is simply "what will the market bear?" People won't pay $10k for a desktop machine, but companies will pay $30k for a small server that's hardly more capable than the desktop, because they can. And the producers then have little incentive to lower prices, because everybody's paying that much already... Then too, there's the issue that price can affect people's impression of quality - everybody like to think they're getting their money's worth, and surely that $30k server must be better than that desktop machine...
Sun hardware really is better than cheap Intel hardware, no doubt about it. You're not going to get four processors, hot-swappable drives, fault isolation, LOM, etc. on a budget. A lot of these factors are becoming available on Intel-based servers, but guess what? You end up paying almost as much for them as you would for a Sparc server.

I think it's healthy by kawaichan · 2002-01-31 09:22 · Score: 3, Insightful

I know it's probably gonna be a while until this actually would happen as big a**(TM) servers are still the way to go for super performance.

This would probably force the big server makers to bring more innovation to the lineups and lowering the price.

So at the end, Linux gains more marketshares, Windows gets even less in the server market and probably lower TOC for those big servers.

--

kawai

Re:I just hope McNealy doesn't bite back ... by questionlp · 2002-01-31 09:23 · Score: 2, Funny

Why don't you just root the boxes? That way you won't have to root for either side. :)

Replacing HP boxes with... ? by buckeyeguy · 2002-01-31 09:23 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

Take Larry with a MAJOR GRAIN OF SALT by Ars-Fartsica · 2002-01-31 09:24 · Score: 3, Interesting

He also committed Oracle to CORBA, Java, and most other hyped technologies to come down the pike in the last few years.

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.

Re:Take Larry with a MAJOR GRAIN OF SALT by johnnyb · 2002-01-31 13:58 · Score: 2

he's actually done a pretty good job of this with Java (not sure about CORBA, though)

--
Engineering and the Ultimate
Re:Take Larry with a MAJOR GRAIN OF SALT by nosferatu-man · 2002-01-31 14:14 · Score: 2

No, I think it's safe to say that he's lying. Ellison is a world-class loon, a psychopath, and basically as full of shit as a hog farm.

Peace,
(jfb)

--
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.

I think we should get Linus a Harrier by teambpsi · 2002-01-31 09:29 · Score: 2

it is after more versatile than a MiG ;)

--

Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.

Let's get this straight... by Hieronymus+Howard · 2002-01-31 09:31 · Score: 4, Funny

Let's see...

Oracle are saying that big servers will eventually die and be replaced by clusters of smaller servers running Linux.

IBM are saying that clusters of smaller servers will be replaced by mainframe-class servers running Linux.

Place your bets please, ladies and gentlemen.

Re:Let's get this straight... by WildBeast · 2002-01-31 11:02 · Score: 2

well my needs aren't that big yet, two web servers are doing the job extremely well for me.
Re:Let's get this straight... by geekoid · 2002-01-31 12:05 · Score: 2

I'll bet on... Linux!
What odds can I get? ;)

--
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Re:Let's get this straight... by scrytch · 2002-01-31 16:37 · Score: 2

Actually those predictions are not really opposites. That IBM big iron can run a virtual cluster of those linux boxen, it's not just one big linux box. I always figured if I ever started a hosting company, I'd just get a single mainframe and just run every server off that one (that's why I don't run a hosting company I suppose)

--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.

Re:It definitely *is* a win for Linux by SuiteSisterMary · 2002-01-31 09:34 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

--
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.

Linux hurts UNIX vendors, not MS by Skim123 · 2002-01-31 09:39 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

Re:Linux hurts UNIX vendors, not MS by inerte · 2002-01-31 11:10 · Score: 2, Interesting

They are helping MS (by hurting their competition) when they advocate Linux.

Falacy. Isn't Linux 'competion' for Microsoft? How como advocating Linux is good for MS? Sure it's bad for Unix. But if restricted help to only one competition.

That could be extend to any operating system that is not Windows and Unix. MacOS? Hurts. BSD? Hurts.

I think your point doesn't make sense (altought it began making ;-)

--
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Re:Linux hurts UNIX vendors, not MS by Skim123 · 2002-01-31 15:48 · Score: 2

Falacy. Isn't Linux 'competion' for Microsoft? How como advocating Linux is good for MS?
If you were to say, "Use Linux instead of Windows," then yes, it is bad for MS. But most people say, "Use Linux!" And the end result is that people stop using Microsoft's competition. Is Linux competition for Microsoft? Not if the majority of folks who move to it were already using Microsoft's competitors.
For example, assume that 20% of computers run Sun SOlaris and 80% use Windows. Ok. Now, if you say, "We'll take 50% of the 20% that run sun and move them to Linux," and "5% of those that use windows and move them to Linux," now 10% use Sun, 76% use MS and 14% use Linux. Who needs to "sell" their product to stay around? Not Linux, just MS and Sun. So Sun looses more and more market share and goes out of business, so where do those 10% that use Sun go? Maybe half to Linux, half to MS (the half to MS want the support/big company behind their OS and are willing to pay for it); now we have 81% MS, 19% Linux. In the end, Linux advocacy gave MS an increase of market share by 1%. Now how is that hurting MS?

--
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Re:Linux hurts UNIX vendors, not MS by MoneyMan · 2002-01-31 16:01 · Score: 2, Insightful

This reminds me of the "A vote for Nader is taking a vote away from Gore" argument the Gore camp was throwing around.

"That dog won't hunt"

A vote for Linux is a vote for Linux. Each and every competitor must stand on it's own merits. If Sun, HP, et al are losing customers, it is because their customers see an advantage in their competitors product. Evolve to meet the demand or die...

Darwinistic Capitalism... mmm mmm... Gotta Luv It!
Re:Linux hurts UNIX vendors, not MS by Spoing · 2002-01-31 19:48 · Score: 2
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've heard this before, and it does make sense on a few levels.
Here's another truth: While Linux matters in the short term, Linux doesn't matter in the long term. Linux by name might be around in 50 years, but if not a system spawned from a flavor of Unix will be around.
The same can't be said of Windows. With .Net, they're already trying to replace most of the existing APIs and much of the design -- and that's just the latest reworking. How much of the guts of DOS or Windows 1.x is the basis for Windows XP?
The reason for this is practical and unambiguous; any Unix-style OS and the programs that run on it are usually designed to be ported to different Unix flavors. It's an expectation. The user also doesn't have to relearn much on the software side even if the hardware is drastically different. At it's core, Unix may be obnoxious but it is also highly consistant even when there are substantal differences like SCO and OSX's file structure. DOS 1.24 (I had it) and Windows 2000 file structures and commands don't share anything except for the most minor of details. To verify this design stability and portability takes half a second.
1. * For unix systems: basic commands, the design of X11, a portable kernel, ... -- currently running on everything from PDAs to mainframes from multiple vendors.
2. * For Windows systems: Only one vendor. Even Microsoft's solitare runs on...well...x86 if you don't count the blip during the first few releases of NT. Even counting the different platforms, most apps (including MS Office) were poor ports that used x86 emulation layers.
--
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.

Hmmmm.... by jayhawk88 · 2002-01-31 09:40 · Score: 2

Must be increased sunspot activity, Larry's outlining paradigms for the future again. Call me when he has a plan that survives longer than 6 months.

Re:Yeah Right by garyrich · 2002-01-31 09:42 · Score: 3, Interesting

"Open source terabyte relation databases? Hello?"

Human Genome Project? Last I heard, PostgresSQL

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-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan

Earth to Zealots... by FallLine · 2002-01-31 09:43 · Score: 2

I don't necessarily buy into this argument, BUT...

Larry is almost certainly thinking of the advantages of commodity nature of the hardware (Intel) [once you get past some of the market speak] not to the nature of the software that happens to run on it (Linux).

Sun is focused largely on HARDWARE, not software. Oracle is primarily about SOFTWARE, not hardware. Oracle can quite easily port their entire line of software, ergo, you're comparing apples and oranges.

Re:Earth to Zealots... by Doomdark · 2002-01-31 14:02 · Score: 2

Well, I think the point was that when you go from expensive proprietary hardware to commodity hardware, you might start thinking of going from expensive proprietary software to commodity software?
It may be that PostgreSQL isn't yet quite up to Oracle, but it's not all that far away, depending on your needs. Thing is, unlike most people think, Oracle doesn't shine as much in performance side as in image, brand, reliability and status. It's not for nothing that they try to prevent benchmark results being published. So why isn't Oracle the fastest beast? Because their biggest selling point is reliability, conservative warm (fuzzy?) feeling about always being there, doing operations in predicatble way. Thus optimizations are not done if they result in uneven results; no bleeding edge things are added as that would be a risk etc. etc. etc.
The reason Oracle actually is a pretty good fit for big corporations is that big corps just love predictability and security; superb performance or latest features really are secondary issues. It's not that their product was bad; it's mostly "good enough", mediocre but reliable. Much like proprietary unix hardware. And both scale well; they are designed for each other. Big boxes for Big Databases.

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I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Re:Earth to Zealots... by Doomdark · 2002-02-01 07:08 · Score: 2

Yes, you are absolutely right there. There's whole software ecosystem based on Oracle as the foundation, lots and lots of 3rd party products (as well as products from Oracle itself). And like I said reliability is what sells Oracle, and diagnostics tools add to reliability ("even if it breaks, we at least know what happened").

--
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

most Oracle users.. by studboy · 2002-01-31 09:43 · Score: 5, Insightful

back in the day, many of our clients *insisted* on using Oracle for the most trivial of applications, like BBSes or a phone-lookup service. They thought that by paying truckloads of cash their apps would be faster or something. Hell, even mySQL and Postgres would be overkill for some applications... The clients would rather pay than think!

I left the industry after clients started using similar glassy-eyed statements about Java. Both Java and Oracle have their place, but considering Oracle's insane price and administration overhead, it needs quite a bit of research before deployment.

Re:most Oracle users.. by zsmooth · 2002-01-31 09:53 · Score: 2

I agree 100% - Oracle is definitely not the answer for everybody. In fact, I don't think it's the appropriate solution for most people. It costs a ton to license and a good DBA will cost even more. It's stupid to pay all that for a dumb message board. For mission-critical purposes though, you get what you pay for.

A cry in the dark by craw · 2002-01-31 09:50 · Score: 4, Funny

In the dark bowels of a cubicle farm at Oracle...
Programmers slouch in front of their computers...
And read these fateful words..
Spoken by their master...
Perhaps in haste and bravado...

We'll be on Linux no later than the summer,...

First there is silence...
Then, in one collective voice...
For all to hear...

"Oh shit!"

Ellison may be knifing his own baby by brainvision · 2002-01-31 09:56 · Score: 3, Insightful

Ellison appears to be pitching cheapness and flexibility to his clientele, which is not a philosophy that Oracle software espouses (Linux is cheap and the licensing is flexible). I think that this *is* a win for Linux and Open Source software, but could be a problem for Oracle.

By making this move, Larry will be exposing the high-end companies he courts to commodity technology ideas that they otherwise might not explore. Most of these companies have "more money than sense." Often they view free or open software with disdain for its percieved lack of support, or even for its percieved unAmerican philosophy. But after having their eyes opened in this fashion, they may start developing a keen awareness of how badly Oracle is screwing them.

At the least, Oracle may introduce to these companies a culture of thriftiness, which is probably not in Larry's best interest.

Replace Sun with PC, a win for MS at times by AHumbleOpinion · 2002-01-31 09:59 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

Re:Replace Sun with PC, a win for MS at times by Junta · 2002-01-31 13:24 · Score: 2

Interesting path with interesting implications. Especially if students are given a choice between NT and linux on the fly, and come into the college knowing Windows, then they would probably instinctively boot out of "that weird linux thing" and into Windows. Over time, some labs may do away with their linux option entirely. At my college I see something similar. A few years ago, it was almost completely Sun workstations. Then the NT labs started popping up, and at first were massively unpopular as the current students were familiar with the power of Solaris... What did happen was that freshmen. almost exclusively used the NTs because they wouldn't be bothered with anythin non-MS. So next year, Freshmen and Sophomores, and now, basically, not many people use them anymore and stick to NT. Linux, too, has made inroads (so much so that Library loaned laptops can dual-boot into Linux, but I have nbever seen anyone bother), but only in cases where they do not make NT available do I see students using Linux. Unfortunately, Linux is attractive not only for price, but also for easy path to MS apps..

--
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.

Why Sun will be preferable to Intel Clustering by MattRog · 2002-01-31 10:00 · Score: 5, Informative

Couple reasons why Sun still will be preferable to off-the-shelf, commodity Linux boxes for many a year (with or without Oracle's blessing) - and how to change it! (Disclaimer, we run Linux on our web and DB boxen and do NOT use Oracle (Sybase ASE in fact) and were burned by Sun in a deal we wanted for some 280's).

Banks and others with lots of cash have traditionally enjoyed the "Let's buy a couple really really big boxes and replicate them everywhere" mindset and I don't think that will change. Clustering is way cool but I am not convinced the TCO is far less to cause large customers to switch their entire mission-critical, multi-billion dollar a day transactional systems to Linux.

They will stay with what works for a long, long time. Why Larry's pronouncement of 'support' is interesting is that Linux is, for the most part, unsupported. Sun has hundreds (if not more) of engineers around the world on standby -- if your E10K goes down at 4AM they probably know about it before you do (since they have all sorts of neat things built in) and are already on the scene. With Linux? Not so much -- but Oracle is going to try and push the fears of 'what if it goes down at 4am!' out of their minds by saying "That's ok, we can fix it!". Linux and Intel need to offer much of the same features - I know Compaq has neat little remote monitoring cards with their servers, something like that which hooks into Linux and is a commodity (like video cards, or RAID cards, etc.) would help a lot.

Yes, there is an inherent 'single point of failure' with big boxes. That is why they 'cluster' (in name only and not a special type of software) by replicating all their data from their master to several slaves. Currently Sun platform usually has MORE than ample room for growth and you buy 3 E15Ks simply to have warm-standby machines in case the first goes down (and you can always use the other two as readers).

From a TCO standpoint it is far easier, faster, and cheaper to replace a single machine (under warrantee) than it is to have 20 small ones go down at night. Yup - you need to have redundant supplies on hand for the 'worst' situation - and if you have 100 Linux boxes in a nice array and an earthquake hits you now have to order 100 new boxes to replace your destroyed ones. Sun can get you a replacement (or replacements) installed and configured long before the first truckload of new PCs arrives.

Further, you have to configure and maintain 100 boxes vs. a small cluster of Sun machines. I haven't had much experience in large-scale clustered Linux systems but I would surmise that making a kernel change on 100 Linux boxes would take more time and $$ than to 3 Sun machines.

Plus, Sun's 64 bit architecture beats the pants off of Intel -- and in a large DB app you NEED that extra I/O (which is why a 220R with 450MHz x 2 CPUs will spank any dual Intel system out there). I have yet to see any head-to-head comparisons of Itanium and UltraSparc III, so perhaps Intel can rip that from Sun someday.

--

Thanks,
--
Matt

Re:Why Sun will be preferable to Intel Clustering by AftanGustur · 2002-01-31 21:02 · Score: 2

Couple reasons why Sun still will be preferable to off-the-shelf, commodity Linux boxes for many a year (with or without Oracle?s blessing)
What you don't mention is "Does it work", my former company bought 3 Enterprise 10000 servers, optical disk array ,, the whole lot.. 2 Sun Cluster engineers spent a a month with us, installing and tuning (You should have seen the bill..), but it never worked..
Of course, those were very good servers, fast and stable, but, from time to time something happened that required the cluster to shift it's main server services to the other. And there were always some problem. Only after a few of those incidents did we learn that they are all to common with Sun clusters and very few have Sun clusters that actually work as advertised. Search google for "sun cluster problems"
From the article:
Things will move slowly," he said, adding that many customers aren't convinced yet that clustering even works.
IMHO, that is a lot Sun's fault.

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echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc

Re:What'll Sun do about this? by speedy1161 · 2002-01-31 10:01 · Score: 2, Interesting

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?

This is just another chapter in MS vs. Oracle by NateTG · 2002-01-31 10:07 · Score: 2

Larry and Bill have been butting heads for a little while now:
Passport v. Oracle DB
Unhackable v. Secure Operating Memmo

Wonder how Bill will respond to this one...

Maybe then someone will port it to MacOSX! by davesag · 2002-01-31 10:21 · Score: 2, Insightful

What's with all the Sun bashing going on here? What problem has Larry got with Sun? Sure Solaris is as dead as the dodo save for sun hardware, much like osx is only going to thrive on mac hardware. solaris for intel has always been a joke.

but really what love does anyone have for larry? i mean Oracle, excuse me? If it wasn't for the fact he hates Bill gates as much as /. does most of you gentle readers would dismiss him as another steve jobs only vastly more crass.

sun are to servers as apple is to the desktop. they both make great hardware, are beloved by their owners, and were founded by pot-smoking-soap-dodging-duck-squeezing-hippies.

but larry's just a jock and everyone knows it. bill's a gug, scott's some sort of spooky intellectual surrounded by his braniac hippie mates. steve's morphed into a gap-ad-proto-beatnik but it's been so gradual that no-one noticed. i challenge you now, go find old photos of yourself. 10 to 1 you can find photos where you are still wearing the same sort of clothes as you do now. with steve this is more like 99:100

but i digress.

so the best news for me out of all this is that oracle runnign on linux means oracle running on osx isn't far behind. larry will want oracle on some fuck off big unix box, and he's still on apple's board. steve will give in to pressure and release a proper rack mountable OSX server bundled with a full oracle developer suite.

but sun will do something new and cool and unexcpected. steve doesn't own the franchise on innovation. in the last few years sun have been innovating hard. java is a triumph, jini and javaspaces are pure genius, who knows, maybe sun will move into consumer electronics? they'd be damn good at it.

my 2c

dave

--
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it

Re:Maybe then someone will port it to MacOSX! by niola · 2002-01-31 12:19 · Score: 2

What's with all the Sun bashing going on here? What problem has Larry got with Sun? Sure Solaris is as dead as the dodo save for sun hardware, much like osx is only going to thrive on mac hardware. solaris for intel has always been a joke.

Solaris is dead? What the heck have you been smoking? Solaris is so much more robust and stable at this point and will continue to be the platform of choice for most RDBMS vendors for a while. The features that have finally made it into Linux over the past year have been in Solaris for years.

--Jon

Larry is lying his ass off. Linux-x86 isn't 64-bit by emil · 2002-01-31 10:39 · Score: 2

Everybody here knows that you need a 64-bit system, that can address large amounts of contiguous memory, for an effective VLDB.

In this realm, Linux and NT are still in the minor leagues, and guess what Larry said about NT today?

And Microsoft, which to date has not produced any benchmarks that scale beyond 300GB, is nowhere to be found in this high-powered performance arena.

(By the way - this record-setting TPC-H benchmark was set with a Sun E15K.)

Re:It definitely *is* a win for Linux by jayed_99 · 2002-01-31 11:08 · Score: 2

and Oracle likes raw disks; filesystems just slow things down, after all

Raw devices aren't significantly faster than cooked devices and haven't been for a long time. Device drivers and OS disk subsystems (not to mention improvements in disk drives and controllers) have almost totally closed the performance gap. You might eke out an additional 5% performance advantage with raw devices, but that's not guaranteed.

When you factor in the PITA (pain in the ass) factor of managing raw devices (don't even think about mv, cp, diff, rm, tar, gzip, chmod, chown...there are no files for you to directly manipulate via the OS) there is no overall benefit to raw devices.

It's almost always a bad idea to use raw devices. If you want to increase your system performance: tune the application; tune oracle, tune the OS...don't switch to raw devices.

Embedded Linux? by sharkey · 2002-01-31 11:15 · Score: 2

Does this mean that there is a chance our Oracle National ID cards will be running embedded Linux?

--

--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.

So, what about Red Hat's version of Postgres? by baka_boy · 2002-01-31 11:17 · Score: 4, Interesting

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?

Re:Larry is lying his ass off. Linux-x86 isn't 64- by Zachary+Kessin · 2002-01-31 11:31 · Score: 2

Well its not on the Pentium, but the Merced* chip yes it is. And Linux does run 64 bit on Sparc and Alpha (And maybe a few others). And With IBM Promoting the hell out of Linux on their mainframes it does make a lot of sense to do this from Oracle's point of view.

And lets be honest the box you run Oracle Linux on will be a linux box with most of what you expect to see on it (Apache/Samba/NFS/etc) gone. It will have Oracle and just enough other stuff to run.

--
Erlang Developer and podcaster

I'm waiting for the 'Got Linux' commercials by buckrogers · 2002-01-31 11:38 · Score: 2, Funny

I am picturing a person in front of a computer trying to get a critical peice of work done when the computer suddenly reboots. He looks up and screams, and the camera zooms into the blackness of his open mouth to a Linux logo with the words, "Got Linux?"

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-- Never make a general statement.

Its the bottom line that counts by Ars-Fartsica · 2002-01-31 11:50 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

Re:So how is this really an advantage. . . by geekoid · 2002-01-31 11:51 · Score: 2

This can be huge id Oracle won't support new releases on UNIX boxes. It would effectivily force corps to switch to Linux because there is no real Competitor to Oracle.
So I see Sun offer linux on its iron, like IBM.
If this holds true, Linux will be all over the place in a few years.

--
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Uninformed comments... by aralin · 2002-01-31 12:00 · Score: 5, Informative

These comments I could see in this article are the most stupid uninformed balast I've seen in a long time. Maybe its this way for all articles, but I know my ground here and can judge this.

Oracle is not replacing any Sun machines, but three HP machines.
Oracle development is done mostly on Sun/Solaris boxes, little time ago even the development environment was not even ready and ported for Linux. But whatever are the machines developers work on, there is a strong porting group to cover all the operating systems.
What moves to Intel-based machines is by no way the database (RDBMS), but the application server and maybe the business suite. Elisson himself said that he does not see RDBMS moving to Intel-based hardware in near future, though it might be possible one day.
Support should be done for Oracle Application Server on RedHat, which is quite feasible especially after contracts with RedHat, Inc.
When Ellison says that Oracle will run the whole business on Linux, it does not mean that every machine in the company will be replaced with something running Linux, but just that these few servers running the Business suite with Oracle business information will most likely move to Linux. I would bet it would be some IBM high end servers running Linux, though.
Trolls, flamers, cowards. Thats the crowd on /.

--
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.

of course by geekoid · 2002-01-31 12:02 · Score: 2

Most of MSSQL servers are on Intel Boexs. Larry wants to get that "level" of market from MS. This is a great way to do it. MSSQL can't even come close to Oracles performance.
Of cours I perfer Informix, but Oracle out marketed them.

--
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

What about IBM's x86 NUMA boxes? by Ars-Fartsica · 2002-01-31 12:06 · Score: 2

Don't they offer Sequent Intel-based hardware that is considerably beefier than your average 1U server?

Re:What about IBM's x86 NUMA boxes? by s390 · 2002-02-01 12:08 · Score: 2

These boxes are designed for scientific applications (think clusters for matrix calculations).

The machines IBM configures for robust RISC database servers are the pSeries (Power4 CPUs, onboard U160 SCSI RAID controllers and disks or fiberchannel SAN links to Shark RAID box(s)). These run AIX (or maybe Linux, by now) and can run Oracle, but of course IBM will prefer to sell you UDB (DB2) or even Informix. (UDB's advantages are lower database software licensing costs compared to Oracle and easy scalability up to mainframe platforms if workload demands ramp up significantly.)

(Disclaimer - I don't work for IBM, now.)

Out of touch by flacco · 2002-01-31 12:15 · Score: 2

Apparently Larry didn't get the memo that Linux is an unamerican, cancerous toy.

--
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.

PostgreSQL, not PostgresSQL by Frank+T.+Lofaro+Jr. · 2002-01-31 12:21 · Score: 2

It is spelled PostgreSQL, not PostgresSQL.

--
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!

Re:It definitely *is* a win for Linux by SuiteSisterMary · 2002-01-31 12:36 · Score: 3, Informative

Why would you EVER want to use all of those lovely filesystem utilities with a raw device filled with database data? You NEVER touch the database data directly. Want a backup? Have Oracle spit out a backup in your choice of lovely formats, from gigantic SQL statements to reconstruct everything up to your backup software of choice. One uses RAW devices for the same reason one doesn't use SCSI cards with no battery backup; because when Oracle says 'write this to disk' it really really wants it written to disk; not to a disk cache, not to memory, not to a buffer that'll be flushed when the OS decides to flush it. It's all part of the ACID requirements.

--
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.

Sun and Oracle by wazootyman · 2002-01-31 12:52 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

Re:Sun and Oracle by GoofyBoy · 2002-01-31 14:27 · Score: 2

Have to agree.

Its a pure political move.

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The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.

Re:Yeah, right...not by redzebra · 2002-01-31 13:09 · Score: 4, Informative

Ok, i'll bite: allow me ... #1) Sun's support organization. It is second to none. period, end of story. You have a problem, they fix it. I had a failed disk earlier this week, the support rep's first response was to send a tech on site that day.

Let me guess, you have a multimilion contract and they had a newbey which could use some training :-)...

#2) When they boast about binary compatibility frSo, as you can see, there is more to the decision than just cost. In the world that i work in, time is money, and the hardware cost is a very small percentage of the TCO.om $1,000 to $10,000,000, they are not kidding. I can give the developers a low end box and know that the app will still work on a mid to high end box

eeuh, 2 posibilities here : a) you're talking hw, and i don't understand you at all. The only one which did care for downward campatibilit was INTEL (also only reason why it stayed popular) b) you're talking about software and then it's just stupid. Just recompiling you're app for newer hardware gives you a better performing app. Binary compatibility is just a stinky way to be able to hide theire source.

#3) It just works. I dont get the "what glib are you using", "is that rev XYZ of that nic?" or any of that other crap.

... eeuh do you ever actualy USE their stuff ? It doesn't work any better then any open source stuff I've seen up till know. You have a SUN-solve- account ? Even the most basic stuff doesn't work and you can beg for weeks to get somthing done in a decent way. "is that rev XYZ of that nic?" is exactly the crap that half of SUN's legal department will try to nail you with if you don't stop complaining fast enough

#4) the hardware seems to last forever and ever and ever. And sun supports the stuff for a long time. Every try and get dell to support a six year old box? yeah, good luck.

Right, but for SUN's 1x price I can get a a newer box each year.

#5) did i mention the support?

Euch you mean the part where you get forwarded from helpdesk to helpdesk and finaly get a ticketnumber saying you're in their problem database ???

#6) it was built to be managed from a serial port and live on a network from day 1. I love the fact that i can put all of my servers in a colo, walk out, and do the OS install from home. I know that PC's are now beginning to get to the point where you can hook a serial cable up and get them to boot from the net and do an os install. lets face it, there are whole books on how to use jumpstart in the sun environment and do 100% hands off installs. It just works, and it is fully supported.

Correct yourself here too.. you are talking about the UNIX way, not about the SUN way. The same can easily and much cheaper be achieved on PC hw with a free unix like bsd or linux.

So, as you can see, there is more to the decision than just cost. In the world that i work in, time is money, and the hardware cost is a very small percentage of the TCO.

Please stop glorifying SUN, the only reason you need them is because they have an IT department with a legal department to back them up. (which is the key for most of their businesses) For the rest it's just a big corp not much diffrent from M$ : some brilliant guys and lot's of morron's acting important

--red

O.R.A.C.L.E by felipeal · 2002-01-31 13:21 · Score: 4, Insightful

This is slightly OT, but I can't find it anywhere else (i.e., Google), so whatever.

The true meaning of Oracle is:

One
Rich
Asshole
Called
Larry
Ellison

+1 insightful to the above... by Dave_bsr · 2002-01-31 13:34 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

This is something i've been wanting to say for a while, but you said it so i'll just agree. I don't think the Evil Empire of Microsoft has always had a devious plan to take over the universe and push everyone around. It's just that now, they have the power to _be_ evil. It's the same way in any other situation - power corrupts, or, put differently, you _will_ do what you _can_ do. In other words, what you can get away with.

Situation: what happens when linux has 95% of market share? You think that will Utopia? NO! I think it will be distro wars, and binary incompatibility, and Distribution Z running off with its code from Distributions X and Y, legal battles over the licenses cuz that linux kernel+software will be worth BILLIONS if that day comes - whoever controls it controls 95% of computing...you think that'll be fun then?

Sorry if i'm getting too excited - but I think that what is of greatest importance is competition - linux isn't the second coming, as much as you'd like it to be. Free software's ideas are great - but linux is more than an idea - and it can be corrupted and misused and monopolized. Competition is what we need - and part of linux is that it allows competition (with itself, even) through it's openness, yes. Me, I'm looking for competition, not dominance.

--

Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?

Just Like The Network Computer by quakeaddict · 2002-01-31 13:41 · Score: 2

He is such a visionary. I mean just look at all of the Network Computers around that would "inevitably" kill PC's!

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I'm still working on a clever footer.

Re:It definitely *is* a win for Linux by johnnyb · 2002-01-31 13:54 · Score: 2

I'm not sure about this, but I think that using certain journalling filesystems or the -osync mount option will have the same effect.

--
Engineering and the Ultimate

No, no by GCP · 2002-01-31 14:41 · Score: 2

I'm not saying that PGSQL is already a match for Oracle, though often it is.

My point is that with sufficient (esp. financial) committment, PGSQL could be upgraded arbitrarily close to Oracle in functionality, so that eventually PGSQL could become an excellent replacement for Oracle.

All you would need is a major player with the resources to put behind it and a willingness to torpedo Oracle.

Until this announcement Sun had the former but not the latter. Now, I'm not so sure. ;-)

--
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."

Just like I said. by witz · 2002-01-31 15:44 · Score: 2, Interesting

More of Ellison talking out of his ass.
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/dailyar ch ives.asp?ArticleID=24116

Re:It definitely *is* a win for Linux by jayed_99 · 2002-01-31 16:30 · Score: 2

Sometimes you're copying a database from location A to location B and it would be nice to have an easy way to compare the files that arrive at B with the ones at A to make sure that no bits fell out.

Sometimes you have a database that grows ten gigs a month. It's a *lot* easier to add a new datafile to a cooked device than to it is to partition out some more space for a new raw device and mark it as a datafile.

You're argument about the SCSI cards with no battery backup is specious. You do not have to use raw devices for Oracle to be ACID compliant. If you're using redo logs and datafiles on cooked devices your transactions are just as safe as if you're using raw devices.

That's why Oracle has redo logs. A transaction occurs; it's written to the redo (and mriror) logs; when the redo log is full, all of the transactions in it are applied to the datafile (what you can think of as the *actual* data). The redo log gets archived and a new one is started. If any one of those steps doesn't happen, the database stops accepting transactions (sometimes it stays up, sometimes it crashes). This happens just the same way on cooked devices as it does on raw devices.

Re:It definitely *is* a win for Linux by johnnyb · 2002-01-31 16:43 · Score: 2

Right, but having the SYNC option on makes sure that those archive logs are actually written when the system says "write"

--
Engineering and the Ultimate

Re:It definitely *is* a win for Linux by jayed_99 · 2002-01-31 16:55 · Score: 2

This is why Oracle relies on redo logs for recoverability. It's a multi-stage process.

The initial write from the software is to a redo logfile. If the database can't write to one of it's redo logfiles, it stops.

After the redo logfile is full (let's say it's 40 MB) the transactions that it contains are written to a datafile and the redo log is moved over to become an archive log. If for some reason this can't happen (the OS has a file-handle open because of some pending non-flushed blocks) the database stops.

I suppose that it is theoretically possible that, when using cooked devices, some part of the chain somewhere won't flush the correct bit at the right moment. However, with modern OSs and modern device drivers and giant caches on RAID controllers it is so unlikely that it is only theoretical.

All of my Oracle experience is with SAP R/3. I'm used to working with large datasets (500GB to 1TB). Barring physical damage to a machine/drive, I have never seen an unrecoverable Oracle database. (I've seen some really damn hard to recover databases though). In no case have I ever seen recoverability or data integrity affected by the raw vs. cooked issue. I have never *heard* of anyone having a recoverability or integrity issue that was based on raw vs. cooked.

A lot of people who push raw devices are basing their decisions on experiences that are three or four years old. It worked then; we're sticking with it today. I'm saying that it works differently today, and you should really give cooked devices a try.

Free Software to Lary and Sun. by Erris · 2002-01-31 17:05 · Score: 2

Sun or Oracle, which to toss... Oracle. Sun can always adopt Linux themselves, and Postress MySQL too. Sorry Lary, I'm sure you will do the right thing and we will have you around for years to come.

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DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.

Re:It definitely *is* a win for Linux by jayed_99 · 2002-01-31 18:01 · Score: 2

If you have already squeezed every last little bit of performance out of your application, database, OS and hardware and still need more speed then you should look at cooked devices. Otherwise you should go for the big gains -- application, database, OS, hardware. You'll get a lot more performance boost by properly laying out your datafiles, or analyzing SQL statements and rewriting indexes than you'll get by using raw devices.

The number of organizations that reach the Nirvana of "we can tune the indices no tighter; our physical database layout is perfect; our OS never swaps out; we have a bazillion gigs of RAM" is pretty close to zero. If this is you, and you still need more performance, then -- by all means -- look at using raw devices.

When you use raw devices you limit yourself to manipulating Oracle datafiles with Oracle tools (or, in my case, SAP tools). You have to use a backup utility that understands raw devices. You loose an enormous amount of flexibility. Whether or not you need the flexibility is another story, but in my experience you'll generally run across a case where you say, "DAMN! It's not a 'real' file!!"

Re:Yeah Right by Malcontent · 2002-01-31 18:28 · Score: 2

sapdb?

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War is necrophilia.

After reading all the posts by jsse · 2002-01-31 20:40 · Score: 4, Interesting

I found the majority believe that:

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. :D

5) I failed to find a way to buy a cheaper Oracle for non-intel platforms, compare Mhz by Mhz. :) 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!!! :)

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.

Out the box Linux+Oracle by cca93014 · 2002-01-31 23:33 · Score: 2, Insightful

Is it just me, or is anyone else interested in being able to slap an Oracle based distro install CD in a drive, hitting yes a few times, getting a coffee, coming back and having an oracle server ready for them?

I'm a developer, not a DBA. The companies I have worked at (web development agencies) did not need a DBA. They did development, not support/maintenance. I've been er, lucky enough, to install Oracle 8i on Solaris, Redhat, NT and Win2k. Anyone else who doesn't like the first page of the install notes ("Recompiling the kernel for shared memory semaphores") will know the problems I mean. It's *hard* to install. Give me an ISO that installs right, is secure and runs Oracle right would not only get my firms cash, but it would also help establish Oracle+Linux as a solution.

I think Larry needs to turn some of his Charisma onto this sort of thing personally.

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Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting

Larry's not putting his money where is mouth is. by slashdot_commentator · 2002-02-01 00:28 · Score: 2

/.ers outside of the NYC area should note that Oracle does not have a booth presence at LinuxWorldExpo. Doesn't look like a strategic change in course. If it were, they would have decided this weeks in advance and then it would have made sense to be publicizing this from the show.

What a weasel. He wants to catch some buzz from the Linux stories, and he doesn't even spend the money for a floor show.

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There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon

Re:Just more of... by smagruder · 2002-02-01 04:22 · Score: 2

That "visual tool" was Developer 2000, and yes, it was C-R-A-P.

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Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist

What about hardware? by ehiris · 2002-02-01 05:23 · Score: 2, Insightful

This article states they will switch to linux, which doesn't necessarily mean Intel PCs.

I'd rather have a IBM Zseries 900, running an open source OS such as Linux then have any sun server.

The reasons for that are:

- IBM Zseries is faster and more scalable then any Sun server

- IBM Zseries can run multiple instances of Linux at once

- Sun's OS Solaris is closed source.

Re:It definitely *is* a win for Linux by johnnyb · 2002-02-02 13:38 · Score: 2

sync has nothing to do with what happens when the RAID controller gets it. It only has to do with the link from The OS's buffers to the SCSI device.

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Engineering and the Ultimate

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