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Why Oracle Isn't Part of the OSDL
darthcamaro writes "Some may wonder why OSDL, the self-proclaimed center of gravity for the Linux Universe and employer of Linus Torvalds, does not include Oracle as a member. Well, in a recent interview Wim Coekaerts, Director of Linux Engineering at Oracle has spelled it out in no uncertain terms. From the article: 'The thing that was really kind of revolting is that OSDL goes out and basically says that they represent the Linux community while there is no direct feedback line back to the community.'"
I also wonder, why isn't Apple or Microsoft in?
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No need to join because:
Oracle Still Diggs Linux
What he's saying is that they're fine on their own, and that they're trying to avoid some of the problems that the OSDL has.
Summary put a bit of spin on that one.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
This article is pretty frustrating, as it still gives no answers why Oracle is not a member of ODSL and why they should be? As far as I know Oracle makes database and middleware tools, wich is pretty distinct from operating system kernels. Maybe they require some specific kernel modules to get some better performance in some instances, but does that require them to be a memberof ODSL?
So in the end i think the PR department scored another media exposure without any news.
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The big three database manufacturers all charge pretty much the same for the same feature set. Oracle costs the same are sql server and db/2 within a percent or two.
The second tier database manufacturers (openbase, frontbase, mimer etc) charge significantly less.
Finally there are the open source databases and companies that try to sell them.
Personally I don't see how anybody can charge for databases these except to the largest organizations. The killer feature seems to be real and reliable replication and clustering. Postgres as fine as it is lacks a decent replication schema (slony can not be used over unreliable links). Mysql replicates OK for must common scenarios but the replication does not honor foreign key relationships or transactional integrity.
So if you need clustering and replication then pay otherwise use a free one. If you are going to pay then at least pay for something that does not tie you to an operating system.
evil is as evil does
The purpose of the OSDL is collaberation and sharing R&D. In a proprietary world, it doesn't make sense to collaberate or to share R&D, you are more profitable forking off a bunch of proprietary extensions to differentiate and fense off features from your competitors. But in the open source community that will get you killed in a hurry, hense OSDL. If companies have R&D to do, they are better off each putting $1 of R&D for a total combined R&D of $2, $3 or $4... then each doing their own independent R&D in parallel which would average out to $1 R&D in value.
In addition, Oracle is not a member of OSDL because their core is not open source, and they have no intention to be.
I don't think they are actually, not at the level that Oracle really cares about.
In the past five years I've worked for two corporations, and the software we developed was targetted at Oracle, MsSQL and Sybase (more or less in that order). The software was for other large corporations in the telecom and finance industries and most enhancements/bugs/so on were coming on the Oracle side.
Business entities at that level pay lots of money for (Oracle) software and I'm not sure they even look at MySql as a viable alternative.
Maybe that's just the ones I've come in contact with, though...
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
Carrier Grade means reliable enough that the phone company and other major data carriers would use it to run a switch. That means between 99.999% and 99.99999% uptime, or between 5 about minutes and 30 seconds of total downtime per year.
Sound excessive? Those switches aren't just carrying phone calls to grandma. They carry 911 calls. Realtime FCC flight control data. Multibillion dollar bank transfers. In other words if they fail, planes collide and economies collapse.
This is not my sandwich.
And Berkelet DB too ! Oh and grep ! Don't forget grep ! Amazing what you can do with grep, cut, sort and a couple lines of bash.
Who needs Oracle really. Bunch of crooks, that's what they are.
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Made from the freshest electrons.
> The big three database manufacturers all charge pretty much the same for the same feature set. Oracle costs the same are
> sql server and db/2 within a percent or two.
Not in my experience: db2 is often 50% the cost of Oracle, especially since partitioning is an extra $10k/cpu for oracle and a completely usable form of partitioning is included within the base db2 product.
Right now I've got a multi-terabyte data warehouse running on a db2 license that costs $1500/cpu. If I wanted it directly accessible on the internet then it would run $7500/cpu.
> Personally I don't see how anybody can charge for databases these except to the largest organizations. The killer feature
> seems to be real and reliable replication and clustering.
No, those are just the features that the open source community seems to want to target. But why? They're both typically used for failover, and the commercial products have far better failover solutions (and ones that actually work across geographical separated data centers).
Bi-directional replication is at best a pain in the butt and when used to actually consolidate data its lack of tranformation abilitities stinks.
Clustering can deliver either availability or speed. The oracle solution is geared towards availability, the informaix/db2 solution towards speed (it's like a beowulf architecture, but been around for ten years). The former is ok, but again doesn't work across data centers, the latter is ok - and ideal when you've got 20 TB, but otherwise overkill.
What about partitioning & parallelism? Why use a product like db2 or oracle? How about because they can save you huge dollars on hardware? Take this example: you've got a million rows of data a day for 365 days on a 4-way SMP with 8 gbytes of memory and four disk arrays. Users run a wide variety of queries for reporting & analysis. Assume that your hardware cost $88,000 (list) for high-end models of this type.
If you're using postgresql or mysql many of those queries are going to result in tablescans - in which the database has to read every single one of those 365 million rows. This is because btree indexes don't work if you're selecting more than 1-3% of the data. So, want to see all data for previous month for monthly reports? Fine, but you'll have to wait four minutes to scan all data.
On the other hand, if you're using db2 for example you'll probably want to partition (with MDC - available even in free product) on day. When you query on a month of data DB2 will scan just that one month - 1/12 of the table. Then when it does that it'll run the query in parallel - giving you 4x the performance of the single-threaded queries from mysql & postgresql. Then you've also got fine-grained memory tuning, a wide variety of optimizations and a fast optimizer - capacle of handling complex queries. Ignoring the performance benefits of the latter features (only because difficult to quantity) and just using the first two - you're going to get 48x faster performance from db2 than mysql or postgresql. That query that took 10 minutes on msyql? It'll run in four seconds on db2.
How much would you spend on hardware to try to get that mysql query to run in 4 seconds? Far more than the cost of oracle or db2!