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Oracle To Finish Linux Makeover This Year
An anonymous reader writes "According to a CNET News article: 'Oracle will finish switching its 9,000-person in-house programming staff to Linux by the end of 2004, the database powerhouse said Wednesday. In October, the company finished the Linux transition for the 5,000 programmers of its Oracle Applications software. Now the transformation has begun for those who work on the database product, said Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux engineering, in an interview at the CeBit trade show in New York.'"
Anti-Linux zealots have been predicting the death of Linux since 1998, yet Linux is only getting stronger and stronger.
But I guess this, along with all the other switches (like the City of Large), won't make them stop flaming Linux all day.
An interesting question is, how much revenue is MS going to lose as a result of much of heavyweights of the IT industry (Sun, Novell, IBM, Oracle) moving their many or all of their staff to Linux?
Seriously - all those companies pay MS considerable sums each year in licencing fees. Now MS is effectively losing all of the key players in an important sector of US industry. That's got to hurt a bit, hasn't it?
If you are spending the kind of money necessary to have a licensed copy of Oracle the cost of the hardware involved is not significant. You could run Oracle on low-end hardware but why? If you are going for a budget solution then use Postgre or MySQL.
Putting Oracle on a low-end box is like putting a $3000 stereo system in a Yugo.
I'd have thought it would be less to do any direct loss of revenue and more to do with smaller companies saying that if Linux is good enough for "Sun, Novell, IBM and Oracle" it should be good enough for us.
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We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
I have developed several large applications that involve an Oracle database as one of their components, but the idea of actually having to install Oracle anywhere sends shivers down my back (and not from joy). If this keeps up I can see future work centering around PostgreSQL, just to avoid the endless hassle associated with the installation.
Really, I like Oracle a lot, but I wish they would fix the endless installation issues...
Microsoft sometimes claims that it has more full-time programmers working on Microsoft software than there are working on Linux software.
How do they know?
It will be interesting to see what happens from Redmond HQ...if you cant beat em, join em?
Do you need a website upgrade?
Migrating development from Solaris to Linux is not that hard - they're both Unices, and in my experience, Solaris as a dev platform... to put it politely... not the best out there. For a long time there's been no decent C++ compiler, their IDE is so-so, and for compilation speeds, a Linux workstation is beating Solaris unless you are prepared to pay some serious $$$ for a large server. Now migrating development from Windows is another story - there's MS Visual suite of tools, which are generally very good (and requires a different mindset at that). Getting people of that camp to work on Linux would be much harder.
Its not the quantity of programmers that's important but the quality of the programmers...
More significant, I think, is the impact on the jobs market. On one side, people looking to get jobs in these big, relatively secure (yes, I know, nowhere is secure) companies will ensure that they have Linux skills on their resume. And at the other end, people looking to move on from these companies will be trained up in Linus, ready to act as advocates in their new employers or startups, and pressuring hirers to use Linux because the skills are available.
This is not a major event, but it is a good straw in the wind. At the moment everybody uses Microsoft because everybody uses Microsoft. When it is obvious that not everybody uses Microsoft, people will put more thought into what they should uses - giving Linux a level playing field.
And yes, I have read that Oracle is dumping Solaris, not M$. But it is not the jumping off that matters, it is the jumping on. They are still giving more credibility, both as an employer and as a software manufacturer, to Linux).
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
MySQL is bound to be faster than oracle because compared to oracle it douse very little. MySQL is a small lean RDBMS whitch douse the basic stuff fast. Oracle douse a lot more and as a result of this is not so fast. This is why MySQL is very popular for holding web content and Oracle for complex business aplications.
As completely inexplicable as such things are, they do happen.
;)
Not inexplicable at all. You noticed it, and remembered it. It made an impression. Exactly what was intended.
What were the skies like when you were young?
They will be working "on" Linux ( that is, they will be running it on their desktop ), but they will not be working "on" Linux ( writing code for the OS ). Oracle developers will be working on Oracle software.
err, no. Oracle is switching to Linux because that's it's next potential market, given that MS is selling and heavily promoting SQL Server as the database for Microsoft Windows.
I'm sure MS have a ton of guys, very skilled guys working on the next version of Office to add a ton of features that no-one wants.
Switching the programming staff from Solaris to Linux is no big deal. I'd be much more interested to hear what Oracle is doing with the PHBs, secretaries, marketers and other non-technical staff. I bet they're still on Windows.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
No it will not.
However, I normally use about 30 minutes to install the software on my Linux box (Gentoo, not supported) and about the same time to create a database from scratch, not using the pre-seeded starter database that comes with the software.
I can understand that you spend 3 days on the install, but that is not Oracle's problem, but yours. Oracle RDBMS is one of the most complex pieces of software commercially available and you need to have a certain lkevel of Orackle knowledge in order to install and maintain it, like maybe a 5 day DBA class and then some more. If you think this is a click and run type of software, you are wrong and that is what is causing you to spend time on getting it up and running, when it in fact is very easy as long as you can read and follow and installation guide and not sjip any steps.
3-dya install? Your problem, not Oracles!
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
It is my impression that Linux has momentum, but I think Sun is suffering more than Microsoft. To date, most of the major server migrations have been large companies switching from proprietary Unix systems to Linux.
However, it is effectively consolidating the Unix market into more or less a single front, which makes it a more formidable opponent to Windows in the long run.
My anecdotal observation shows a slow-simmering movement to open source in general by the "proles" of the IT industry: bread-and-butter IT departments for hospitals, industrial firms, etc, who don't really care about software religion, but just want to save money over the long haul. I knew when a friend of mine told me that the CIO of his rural hospital system was looking to migrate to OpenOffice/StarOffice to save costs, a slow movement based on raw economics was underway, techie religions be damned.
These types of migrations can stay under the radar for a long time before hitting a critical mass. Watching this unfold will keep things interesting, if nothing else.
There just isn't any financial incentive to not run MS operating systems when you get it free with every system you buy and financial reasons are the only ones that are going to persuade businesses to change.
you work in a really small shop dont you.
most corperations but windows TWICE. once on the PC they bought and once in the blanket license that guarentees that the BSA goons wont come knocking.
I know of NO corperation that is silly enough to try and maintain thousands of descreet software licenses... ONE blanket license is easier to take track of and is your protection money to keep from being raided by the software police.
Finally my company does NOT pay for windows from Dell. all of our pc's have NO OS installed and we set them up to baseline with an image file, then take the next 5 days patching,rebooting, upgrading..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Are they asking to get sued by SCO? We all now everyone is switching to Linux, but you have to be quiet about it.
That's commonly referred to Oracle's steep learning curve. Because the damn thing is powerful, it means you have to take time to learn it. The first time I installed it on linux it took several days. Now that I know better it can take a little as several hours to a week. Again, depending on what kind of database I want to setup. There are certain cases where auto configuration is not as powerful as an expert DBA with years of experience. For low performance stuff, auto configuration like Sql Server is fine, but once the loads are demanding you still need an expert to tune it. Take for example, Oracle can easily maintain thousands of open database connections with thousands of concurrent queries. Sql Server can't. Therefore, COM+ is used to throttle the queries so the inbound queue is manageable. If you didn't use COM+ to queue the queries, you would kill Sql Server very quickly. Don't take my word, go read up on it yourself.
I disagree. Whomever writes glibc should be taking backward compatability and code stability into account.
I can run Windows 3.1 programs written in 1992 on me Windows XP box... try doing that with a non-trivial Linux application without recompiling.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
You mean besides doing DBA and PL/SQL development on a daily basis?
Second, Oracle software can be installed as any user and group you please (except root, which I believe is still technically possible, even if not recommended). Third, rpm can very well install the software under any user and group it chooses, the same way it does with mailservers, HTTP server or database servers. The same holds for linking anything to anything else and setting up default configuration. Besides, rpm could easily handle dependencies.
Your claims are being contradicted by Oracle Corp. Did you install Oracle Database lately? They made it into ./runInstaller, click, click, click, OK, click, click some more, and run thing, as far as setting the software fast is concerned. You do not need to be fluent with names of v$ and dba_ views to run the database with OEM, 10g has ADDM, the SGA can be sized by the database server, ... Yes, as I've said, for production environment you better know what you are doing, but that is by no means unique to Oracle. Oracle is a piece of software. It is not a shame to make software easily usable
You mean all the companies that outsourced their development to India? The reason why its impossible to find a development job in the US so their CEOs cans have 3 airplanes. Sorry but I'll stick with Micrsoft who keeps all their platform software development in the US.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
I think you all are missing the point, which is not that Oracle is going to put Linux on their developers' desktops, but that Linux will be the platform upon and within which Oracle develops its database server code. This is extremely significant for the Oracle market, because it means that, from now on, Oracle will release its new versions and patchsets for Linux first and foremost, with all of the other platforms sucking hind tit.
Oh, and fact that having a GUI-only installer forces you have to either have an X windows client + server or rig up a GUI server to talk to the client libraries on a server in your DMZ is just plain stupid. The place where you have (often by company policy) text-only Linux installs.
Price considerations aside, PostGreSQL is better just because you don't need to fiddle around with special install and maintenance procedures that are contrary to most companies' security policies for servers.
Oh, and they should keep up with the GLIBC versions, too.
For a company going "linux first" they're doing a pretty piss-poor job of it.