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Oracle Linux?
eldavojohn writes "There have been rumors floating around of Oracle working on their own distribution of Linux. If this is true, it is widely believed that this enterprise edition of Linux would be in direct competition with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. What is spurring the rumors? Well, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said, 'I'd like to have a complete stack. We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux.' I know that Oracle has been doing a lot more than databases recently, will they go the extra mile and create their own stripped down Linux kernel? If they do, will companies switch to database solutions that are running Oracle only software for the benefits of support and (hopefully) stability?"
If this trend continues I wonder how many orgs would be willing to go along for the ride? Imagine a mail server running on Debian, your web server running on Sun Linux, your database server on Oracle Linux, your application server on Red Hat, etc.
All similar but different enough to drive an IT guy batty. Too much of a good thing?
I'm a bit surprised that they're not considering OpenSolaris. Linux is nice, but Oracle has been supporting Sun Solaris for far longer. Using Solaris as their base kernel would allow them to provide a large number of enterprisey (lt;-technical term) features out of the box.
Not to say that 2.6 doesn't have bunches of enterprisey (<-technical term again) features, but Solaris is still a leader in that space.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Since we are in Japanese mode, how about Baka Linux?
10 flame warrior experience points and a puff of karma to the first one who figures out why I should be modded down for that suggestion.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I'm posting anonymously because I'm an Oracle DBA ('nuff said). Oracle does a make a nice database, but it is hugely bloated for most purposes. And everything else they write is just pure unadulterated crap.
If you look at what it takes to implement their ERP or Pharmaceutical Suite you will realize that they will only ever be a niche player with their own Distro. They write software to require the maximum amount of administration and consulting possible. Their consulting division make a ton of money and they willl never release anything that might endanger that. Also, they have a lot of "faithful" DBA's (like me) that make a really good living keeping the giant house of cards that they call an "application stack" running and recoverable.
Companies with deep pockets will buy it because it's Oracle and pay high salaries to people like me to maintain it all. I'm not complaining, because it's a pretty nice gig, and I might recommend "Oracle Linux" for my company because all the extra crap equals even more job security for the (somewhat scarce) senior level DBA's that have a lot of Linux experience.
With this news, I better get rid of my Redhat stock. This news cannot be good news for ReaHat or any other Linux vendor. I hope I am not too late.
If Oracle began to distribute and support Linux, it would mean good things for Linux in general, while Red Hat deploys Linux to the enterprise sector, they are a Linux based company, whereas Oracle is a much wider known and respected brand, their adoption of Linux for Enterprise could cause a slew of companies to adopt as well.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
I use Oracle 10g everyday at work. It's a good database and does the job nicely. Unfortunately I have to use another solution made by them: XSQL. I can honestly say that it's probably the worst framework I've ever used in my life. Sure, some parts of it make for rapid development and deployment, but other parts of it are a complete nightmare and sometimes I wonder why they bothered.
Basically I'm wondering why Oracle want to pinch consumers away from Fedora and Ubuntu instead of just working with them to help intergrate their databases more seamlessly into these distros?
Summation 2
What Oracle should do instead is take RHES4U4 or whatever and merely tweak it for oracle performance and release that. I think they'd do well to just get into conjunction with Redhat and make a "RedHat Enterprise Oracle optomized" version of the OS.
Yeah, it would be a subtle fork, but Oracle has enough trouble keeping track of it's DB. I don't think they clearly understand the headache involved in maintaining an operating system.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Linux is free but you pay a premium for the Oracle brand name.
Admittedly, I don't follow or know a whole lot about Oracle, but wouldn't a move like this open the door to them selling a self-contained Oracle Appliance for small- and medium-sized businesses? Of course, they could also supply a list of supported hardware for people to run it on machines purchased elsewhere or built by the company's hardware guru.
This guy's the limit!
Except as a platform to run Oracle on. Oracle doesn't really understand fairness or openness, in large part because its founder doesn't. I'm not saying that they can't figure it out - IBM, after all, went from the most closed of corporations to one of the main sources of energy into commercial open software - but I've always considered IBM to be kind of a special case anyway. Regardless, I have a hard time seeing the industry embrace an Oracle-controlled linux distribution.
It is possible that an acquisition of Novell could bring in enough fresh blood to turn this around... And it would bring in an already-respected Linux distribution.
On the other hand, it makes a whole lot of sense that Oracle would start shipping a Linux LiveCD that runs the Oracle installer, which can be a bitch to get running anyway, and upon which you can run Oracle if you install it to the hard disk. After some time they could switch it to be the only supported platform for Oracle. If you don't want to run it directly on the iron, run it in a virtual machine - although unless you're on ESX or something (whatever it's called now) that's probably going to come with a dramatic performance penalty.
Regardless, it only makes sense for Oracle to provide their own Linux. Why help Redhat? Redhat makes competing products.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why bother with GPLed code when they could just grab FreeBSD, customize it any way they want, not release the source code and not have to worry about the GPL?
Larry likes to expand Oracle's reach by purchasing competitors. Consider the world of ERP, where he bought Peoplesoft and JD Edwards. It makes little sense for Oracle to build their own distro to compete head-on with Red Hat. It makes a lot more sense to threaten to build a Linux distro in the hopes of driving down RHAT shares, thus facilitating a takeover. Larry wanted to buy JBOSS, but Red Hat beat him to it. If he buys Red Hat, he gets JBOSS as well. And all of Red Hat's customers. Buying Red Hat would make Oracle the #1 Linux company overnight.
Besides, if Oracle tries to build their own distro, market it via their existing sales channels, and support it via their existing system, Oracle Linux will truly suck. The pricing will be outrageous, the sales process will be the "car dealership" model, and the support will be the offshore model that is not all that great. Oracle makes a great product, but they are their own worst enemy sometimes.
If I were Larry, I would create a great deal of hype about doing my own Linux distro, to soften up the price of Red Hat in anticpiation of a takeover.
Everyone is pretty familiar with the "quality" they get from commercial software. How bad can the amateur software be? After all, most of the customers were made by amateurs in someone's bedroom.
I hope not to start a flamewar but, BSD tends to be more stable than Linux for enterprise purposes (uptime, high load, etc.) even if not by a lot, why wouldn't you choose BSD over Linux for something like this? The other reason I think this would be a good thing is for licensing: They could keep their proprietary tweaks to the BSD architecture as a proprietary edge over other vendors.
Mind you, crusaders, that I am posting this from my Linux-enabled laptop.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
Regardless of whether it was Linux or OpenSolaris as another poster commented, this would be a **VERY** good thing for people who have to install and maintain an oracle. Especially if Oracle puts a decent updater similar to RedCarpet or RedHat Network. No more fiddling with kernel shared memory parameters, no more worrying about patchsets, no more worring about "if I update the OS, will it break Oracle" (which is the whole point of the OS installation anyway- to support the DB), and no more juggling java versions ( now managed during the install/update). They could just do the "eveything on one disk" software approach, or perhaps they could move into hardware/appliance plug-and-play clustering - just add a node and it configures and integrates.
Suppose Oracle supports their own, reduced, version of Linux (with any performance enhancements that they deem necessary). If they "partnered" with a hardware vendor, you'd have a single stop for your database server needs.
You'd get your BIOS updates, OS updates and database updates from a single company that could afford to do the testing so the load on your IT department would be reduced.
You could even order it in a cluster configuration.
But what good is a database server on its own? With a bit more work, you'd be able to buy a webserver box (hardware, OS, Apache, etc) pre-configured to hook into the database server they sold you.
From Oracle's point of view, this would be a great way to get even more of the market and to stop any gains from MySQL or others.
From the corporations' point of view, this would be a great way to reduce IT costs by reducing the load on your internal IT department.
If Oracle does it right, they'd even be able to offer you dial-on-demand DBA services for their products. Why pay 6 figures to hire an Oracle DBA when you can pay 5 figures for a DBA service contract with Oracle?
One
Raging
Asshole
Called
Larry
Ellison
This seems like an move for Oracle to be able to offer a "database appliance": prebuild boxes with Linux and Oracle, and sell those to PHBs as "drop in" solutions. Many in management would fall for it.
Oracle is a database. What separates them from the rest is that they do thing correctly. They fix errors even in documentation quickly, and make things works "as they should". Having been an Oracle DBA, i loved it, and i do not know of a comparable RDBMS support structure.
So, even if they made ice cream, or pocket-protector protectors, i'd have to take a look.
In Linux, i use Debian. They also try to do thing correctly, though they have their pitfalls. I'm a bit suprised Oralce didn't choose Debian, but i'd have to guess it'd be similar to it, just not so open to packages.
Have you read my journal today?
I doubt it is terribly bad news for Red Hat. Even if Oracle create their own distro I doubt they would get away with ceasing to certifying their products for any other Linux distros. There are simply to many people with already established contractually sealed working relationships with SUSE and Red Hat. Of course Oracle will recommend the use of Oracle Linux® (can they even register that as a trade mark if it contains the word 'Linux'?) and all updates to Oracle products will appear for Oracle Linux® first and only 2-3 weeks later for SUSE, Red Hat etc. but that's about it.... unless Larry wants to piss off every last one of the sizable number of IT professionals world wide that haven't been assimilated into the Microsoft collective yet. Even if they do stop certifying Oracle products for anything but Oracle Linux® I doubt it would be much of a problem to get Oracle products working on un-certified Linux distros. It would simply take a bit of debugging and howto files for Oracle instalations on un-certified Linuxes are easy to find.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
As much a fan of Linux as I am, I would dearly love to be able to dtrace to track down performance bottlenecks on my Oracle server.
sqlplus sysdba@myserver/tiger
update SYSV_INIT.INITLEVEL='6';
commit;
(or something like that. I'm a SysAdmin damnit, not a DBA)
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Oracle could work with an ISP and mail out a CD or DVD with the OS, allowing home owners to try it ala AOL. While I am sure that they are thinking of a server space, this would get users AND semi-geeks use to it. While AOL is derided here, this approach apparently worked for them. The time for Oracle to push this is while they have a good name. Otherwise, they will become like Aol, Novell, or Wordperfect and then be unable to do this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If Oracle can deliver a stripped down, optimized version of Linux or, specifically, Red Hat, then they can simply deliver the instructions to configure a stock system. Then any SA can configure, document and maintain the system (and/or similar system), rather than a special "Oracle Linux SA".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
You see, the people who BUY oracle are not in the vast majority of cases the people who USE oracle. Mixing magic buzzword pixie dust into oracle lets some C-level bumblefuck put on his resume that he "bravely integrated cutting edge solutions with the whitespace of synergistic proven data management technolgies in the enterprise to improve our core competencies and effiencies for increased shareholder value" or similar. Linux, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, anything new and Shiny will do. Journalists for eWEEK or whatever other industry rag will write glowing articles, POs will be written, and a great round of back-patting will ensue. Somewhere a poor bastard will have to figure out how to actually manage/integrate/use the terrible bloat to do something useful for the business, but fuck him anyway, he's expendable.
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Why not BSD?
/etc/rc) is really a pain.
1) Lackluster commercial support - Linux tends to have better hardware support, drivers, etc.
2) SMP support on the *BSDs is still young and immature. Linux, in comparison, is quite mature, and does very well on an 8-way system. BSD *might* do it, but much beyond 4-way is a sail into uncharted waters. I'm already running a cluster of 4-way boxen, so 8-way or more is not very far off, given our company's annual 2x growth curve.
3) "It's different". Yeah, it's very similar, but if you're already used to the "Linux" way, having to rediscover how services get initialized (a la
4) Linux is "good enough". It's obvious that whatever metric is needed to be able to be "enterprise ready", Linux has passed it. Granted, nobody agrees on what that standard is, but most people agree that Linux can do it.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.