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."

Comments

Pros and Cons of Appliances

[businessnerd]

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

Re:Pros and Cons of Appliances

[eln]

Focusing on what you do best and letting the other people in the stack do what they do best works great for a one-product shop like MySQL, and in fact most other companies. Oracle, however, has been spending the past few years basically buying up the "best of breed" in each level of its application stack. Now that Oracle owns what it believes to be the best software at each level of the stack, they are working on the so-called "Oracle Fusion" product which will marry them all together. Integrating the OS layer, being the only layer they don't already own, is the next logical step in this process.

Re:Pros and Cons of Appliances

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a lot of people would rather keep their heads in the sand (yeah, flamebait, whatever) but the prospect of this sort of "Linux appliance" makes me think that the threat of "tivoisation" is far more immediate than some people like to claim.

Re:Pros and Cons of Appliances

[atomic777]

Although I am no fan of Oracle, I must admit that this is a good idea, and one that is suprisingly overdue. Databases like Oracle and DB2 require a great depth of skills and experience to administer, and they are among the applications that stress operating system limits to the max, so integration between OS and DB is cruicial. A DBA or a DBA team has to bridge the wide gulf between sysadmin and business analyst. If you lessen the tedious task of tweaking and tuning a database to perform optimally on a given OS and hardware, you allow the DBA to focus on more important things, like deciding how to manage the data.

While these appliances would never replace a skilled DBA for a performance-critical system, there are many small/medium-sized businesses with modest DB requirements that would benefit greatly from such a device, and put many a useless, lazy DBA out of work.

Re:Pros and Cons of Appliances

[gbjbaanb]

Hell, with Oracle, just having someone else install the damn thing and all the patches, would be worth having an appliance.

For things like MySQL, sure I can see why they would prefer to be a installed db - they do it very well for one thing so they do not need to make an appliance, but Oracle is almost never installed on a server along with other things, you buy a server to run Oracle on. Given that, its a simple step to have the OS get installed with the DB, and keep it updated regularly with patches that have already been tested by Oracle support people.

A skilled DBA would be able to tweak the system anyway once installed - just because its an appliance doesn't mean it has to be fixed in stone, so I can't really see a downside for Oracle on this one.

Re:Pros and Cons of Appliances

[supersnail]

Before I say my 2c worth first a confession I am a BAD BOY I have already moderated a comment in this
discussion and I am not supposed to comment.

However I would like to comment on the Oracle buying "Best of Breed" while this is strictly a true
statement, a more correct statement would be:-
"Oracle buys the best of the competition and ..... "

If anti-trust legislation was interpreted even very loosly Oracle would be in breach for buying Siebel and Peoplesoft. Oracle would like to be Monopoly Capitalists, and, they already have 3 Hotels on "Park Lane" ( I think its "Marvin Gardens" on your board) selling database,plus application, plus hardware without anyone else get a penny for the OS must be quite appealing.

Remember "Open source insn't just for geeks billionares can use it too!"

Doesn't really make sense

[porkThreeWays]

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.