Linux Helping Oracle
Mr. Fahrenheit writes "CNN has a story about how Oracle's effort to port their database to Linux may be helping them to out pace IBM." From the article: "In its biennial survey of the world's largest databases, WinterCorp, a database research and consulting company, reported that Oracle dominated its list of 175 large databases. For the first time, databases running on Linux appeared on WinterCorp's list -- and all of them came from Oracle."
The assertion that Linux is helping Oracle gain grounds on IBM isn't supported at all in the article. DB2 also runs under Linux, and if they said that Oracle on Linux is faster than DB2 on Linux then I could understand it. But just because Oracle runs under Linux, doesn't mean existing DB2 customers will jump ship to Oracle. Also new customers in the market for a database will not go to Oracle just because it runs under Linux because so does DB2. They'll compare the merits of the databases, and the costs that go with them.