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Oracle Ready To (Continue) Linux Plunge
alphadogg writes "Rumors are swirling yet again that Oracle wants to get cozier with Linux and at least one financial analyst says customers can expect a tighter Linux-based appliance from the database and application vendor by the end of the month."
I for one think/hope this might give us a perhaps better distro of linux...I mean come on, it's not like we have more than one to choose from already...
First?
Be redundant? Troll, flamebait, whatever, but redundant is a cop out here.
They have at least one large bus at Oracle World with a giant Tux pained on the side of it. The text said something about Linux and stability.
Ok so before this discussion gets out of control with claims like "DUPE!" or "we arleady discussed this here" let me set a little focus to generate some more original discusstion.
Clearly Oracle is definitely going in the direction of creating a linux based appliance. Let's ignore the Oracle Linux Distro. debate and focus more one Appliances themselves. Does the greater slashdot community like the idea of an appliance or dislike. I remember in the MySQL interview last week, MySQL's CEO mentioned he did not like the idea of appliances because the company should focus on what they do best and allow the partners to do the same, thus creating a more robust stack.
Discuss...
Alternate topic: A peanut is neither a pea nor a nut
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
And when Larry Ellison re-launches the Network Computer for the third time or so, that will be recycled news.
Go, Larry!
Seriously, I can't see why Oracle wouldn't just make sure their product is highly portable across major distros. The Highlander play really only seems to work when you're cast with Sean Connnery.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
In certain sectors, we're beginning to really see competition arising from PostgreSQL and FreeBSD. This is especially true where reliability is a serious concern.
With a proper data backup strategy, several Opteron-based servers running FreeBSD and using PostgreSQL as the database can often be used to replace hundreds of Sun servers running Oracle. Often times we see vast performance increases, as PostgreSQL is a leaner product in many respects. If you don't need some of the more advanced features of Oracle, then PostgreSQL is often a perfect alternative.
The BSD licensing of both FreeBSD and PostgreSQL is often seen as a major win, as it allows for licensing costs to be reduced to nothing.
The only downside is that IT administrators can't just go and blame Oracle when things go wrong. But then again, PostgreSQL is far simpler to administer than Oracle, and the training time for DBAs is much less. The potential for problems is significantly decreased.
if Oracle had the sense to cozy up to the two commercial Linux distributions, that is, Red Hat & SuSE, make their personal edition freeware for NonCommercial use & have it as part of the base install, or at least part of the distribution CD's.
Rather than combine marketing & market penetration they're going to push 'Yet Another Distro'. What stupidity. The flavor of the month strikes again. Yet another example of Linux/Unix folks not having enough sense to unite in their fight against the dark side...
- Use Xen with this. This makes it easy to migrate to upgraded versions.
- Offer up a free DB license for every company out there with one seat.
- Create a Linux desktop and offer the Business apps on it.
- Offer each company x free seats (say 6). Even the big ones need it.
Why do the above? Simple. Small 1-6 ppl companies do not spend the money for Oracle or their apps. But if you offer it to them free, then an industry will sprout up around it. More importantly, once the company is on it, after 6 seats, they have to pay. I would also guess that these companies will want support. At some point, they will pay. Finally, this shuts out MS.The real mistakes that many of these companies make is waiting until they have no market before trying to move into something. Good examples include AOL, Word perfect. More likely than not, Intuit and Adobe will join them. As it is, Novell made a number of mistakes in supporting MS for so long and taking so long to jump on to SUSE. It will get worse for them before it gets better (but it will get better).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Let's see if they actually do something about it that's more impressive than just making their software compatible, this time. Frankly, I hope so.
:-)
I've seen Linux as a strategic platform for years. In 1998, using the initial release of "the slash" code base, I had a blog called "ontopofit.com". Before Pythian became successful in the dba managed services space, I used to write on there.
I posted on The Pythian Group Blog earlier this year, reprising and linking to an article that I originally wrote about Oracle on Linux in, get this, 1998! My conclusion:
"I'm calling it Linux and Oracle in the enterprise.
That's where the smart money is. What can NT do to compete with the features that Oracle coupled with Linux can provide? I invite those who may disagree, or who can add to this conversation, to post here with short comments or to submit a dissenting editorial if you like. The more I think about Oracle and Linux in the enterprise, the more I'm sure. Think about it."
Hilarious today, don't you think?
Paul
The real Paul Vallee is slashdot userid 2192, and, what do you mean it's not cool to point out your low userid?
The article cites one of the reasons for the appliance would be for SMB's that want something that just works really well out of the box. That's fine and dandy for a lot of software products. However, I don't think Oracle falls into this category. Sometimes people seem to forget that Oracle doesn't really do much by itself. Users don't directly type in SQL queries. It needs an application to be used with. Say the business wrote the application in house. I can almost guarantee that application was written for windows. If the programmer is smart enough to know how to port it to Linux, they are probably smart enough to configure Oracle themselves. If they don't posess the technical skills to port it, the appliance is useless to them. At the same time, most ISV type applications usually aren't written for Linux either. It would defeat the whole purpose anyway because you just bought the Oracle appliance pre-configured, and now you have to make adjustments for this application and install the app. You buy appliances so you don't have to do that sort of thing
There are only two scenarios I could see this actually being practical. One is if there's a seperate dedicated DB server and an application server. However, the loads that occour in the SMB environment rarely warrant this. Most of the time the database and application run on the same server. The second would be to pass the appliance off to ISV's whom install and configure their software and resell it. That doesn't really make a whole lot of sense either because then they are just paying an Oracle tax for something they could do themselves.
Really, the only reason I could see them doing this is to stick it to Red Hat and make PHB's get a boner.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
[n/t]
This is ultimately going to have a negative, and dumbing-down effect on their business. Suddenly experienced DBAs will be fighting for their lives against PHBs who think that they can buy an appliance, and have it just work. Since there was a 'create DB wizard' in the PHP-based GUI, the PHB will suddenly consider himself a DBA, and immediately begin figuring out how he can dump the 'deadwood' on his DBA team, i.e. all of them. Then the false economy of hiring 30K a year 'admins' will set in. The final stage will be hiring of consulting companies to come in and replace their 'appliance' DBs with real ones, completing the circle, except now the salary is turning into H1B funds and lining PWC's pockets, instead of being an investment in the people in the company that made the idiotic decision in the first place.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
customers can expect a "tighter Linux-based appliance from the database and application vendor by the end of the month."
I assume this is technical jargon beyond my own meagre abilities.
Quiet down there
Darl McBride (yep him) is crying have some sympathy Larry hates him too, its no fun being a McBride.
One useful thing they could do would be to put the old sleepycat.com content back up somewhere. There was quite a bit of useful information there about dealing with older versions of Berkeley DB, but now you just get redirected to Oracle's index page. While commercial vendors tend to think in "push the new, deny the old" mode, a lot of us have to deal with what's out there. For example, when you come across software written to an older API, it's nice to be able to go back and read the changelogs and release notes between then and now.
--MarkusQ
Here: http://malfy.org/
We've been down this path before. Oracle tried to put together an appliance solution for running 8i, but it never got off the ground. At the time, it was rumored that they were looking at Linux, BSD, and Solaris for the underlying OS.
There was significant pushback from hardware vendors and users for this sort of integration. From users because it was felt that Oracle would abandon the idea of a database that ran on whatever platforms it could, reducing choice in IT departments. From hardware vendors because it meant that only one provider would benefit, and everyone else was afraid that they'd lose the ability to sell Oracle certified configurations.
And Oracle had a hard time finding an easy platform to deploy it on. At the time, Linux and BSD were not as capable for scaling as they are now. And working with Sun would make integrating Solaris expensive.
Now conditions have changed. Solaris is open and modular. BSD and Linux scale more easily, and on more mature N-way platforms. So it might be a good time to revisit the issue.
However, one has to question the value of an Oracle appliance. Because while large companies are happy to dedicate machines to single tasks, smaller firms are more likely to want to have machines serving multiple roles, which may not come easily to an Oracle appliance (or may cost more if it is required to use Oracle-stack implementations of whatever the need is for).
Yet larger companies have budgets to test, configure, and roll out their own database servers anyway. And Oracle is looking at the small to medium sized IT market.
So I don't know if this is going to get much traction. They're going to, at least, have to create a generic server appliance that maybe comes tuned for Oracle, yet can be used for anything.
That might be a winner.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Oracle still doesn't support linux on the client side worth a shit.
As of the 11.5.10 ERP applications, Linux as client still isn't supported. It works for the most part if you spoof your USER-AGENT as OSX safari and use the Sun JVM for applet plugin support.
The death of jinitiator on the client is waaaay overdue. Their isn't anything that the apps are doing that necessitates a custom JVM. Heck, most of what the apps do can be handled with AJAX.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
Sorry but is anyone running that company anymore? Is there any vision or is it just about what everyone else dabbles in. Oracle database appliances that run Linux? Are they serious? And who is going to buy this? The 10 million customers who already have sweat blood and tears invested in running mission critical Oracle applications on big assed Unix server clusters? And after they buy it, who are they going to hire to admin yet one more OS? Because we weren't having enough fun juggling AIX, SUN, HPUX, Tandem and Teradata. Sure toss in a one off Oracleinux too. What the hell. And lets change DB ops and admin sufficiently to put a big obstacle and learning curve in our way and let's discover a whole new portfolio of patches to fix and weird interactive behaviors to accomodate.
Hope that Oracle gives a TiVo-ized version of Linux in a closed, non-hackable server appliance. That would be funny.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Unless you mean the trend for virtualization is one thing NOT in Oracle's favor in terms of marketing an appliance.
Maybe if the Oracle appliance itself supported virtualized hosts sharing the remainder of its capacity. That might be interesting...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I can see Oracle delivering an appliance a la Google, whereby your $40k db license includes a 1U box that slides into the rack, and through the web page you start creating databases. Add scalability by getting another box (discount after 5). Throw in a second nic that would be SAN ready and you've got a no-muss, no fuss database platform.
I think, though, the real key to something like this, and make its appeal greater is if Oracle supported the box themselves, remotely. Let *them* deal with patches, upgrades, etc., and they work with you to schedule downtime. The box is esentially hands-off except for the database itself, but for a lot of smaller shops, or shops where they don't want to invest in dba cost, I could see this being a rather attractive offer.
Also, it wouldn't compete with the db on other platforms, because what you're getting is convience and piece of mind.
Why are you assuming that the target for an Oracle appliance is the companies themselves? Sure, they will be the ones who will eventually use it... but they are not necessarily (nor likely) the ones who will be assembling it, testing it, selling it or supporting it.
An Oracle appliance has a whole lot of value if you're someone selling into a vertical market. Want sell your accounting software? Here - install it on this appliance, and you can sell it in it's own box, pre-configured for whatever business you happen to be in. No more worrying about which version of the DB you're running against, no more worrying about other processes on the box, no more worrying about botched installs or customer "fixes" to your database.... want to add parts inventory, web store, personnel management? Just add a couple of new applications. I wouldn't be surprised to see them come up with a product a small business support framework (if they don't have it already) - buy a developer's license for it, customize the business logic core, and resell it as part of your vertical business plumbing appliance. Think of the Oracle appliance as a core component of something like SAP for small businesses, and you get the picture.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Oracle lends itself to virtualization quite nicely. Many of the big shops do that. Don't know what your thinking or where you are coming from. Also seeing how this is aimed at small business the Oracle instance wouldn't be that taxed in theory. So running under a VM on the appliance would be ideal seeing as you prob have lots of spare capacity on decent hardware.
Charles Wyble System Engineer
these big shops are using a SAN with volumes being forwarded into the instance so Oracle can use ASM on them? Otherwise you get that double-caching silliness (disk cache of host + Oracle's block cache).
Also, until recently, I haven't been aware of any decent N-way virtualization implementations... ESX has only recently gotten support for it, and Xen is just breaking onto the scene what with Pacifica and Vandermode.
Unless you go for a cluster configuration. But I understand that's expensive.
It's a good fit for small businesses, but it certainly doesn't help Oracle any in their effort. Because virtualization frees you from having to stick with any vendor.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
But it happens more often in a small shop when there isn't much formal change control, dev/testing/production servers in multiple roles, etc.
CTO: Hey Rei, what's the load average of that database server?
Rei: (with caution) 50%
CTO: That's a pretty powerful box compared to that test server we aren't using, right?
Rei: Well yeah, that old box is two years --
CTO: Well I want you to put a few dozen ClearCase volumes on there because its really slow for our developers at site B.
Rei: But, uh... a few dozen... I see. (sad face)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
So guys, That is 100% true. I have some internal information. Right now Oracle has decided to move to Linux. They are seriously considering "Ubuntu" Linux distro. I do not why though. They should have chosen a better distribution. Cheers