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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."
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
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.
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.
It's not a bad idea, but I think there's a few problems with it. If you were setting up a database for a small company with 1-6 seats would you pick heavyweight Oracle with it's higher costs to maintain, administer, etc, or would you pick PostgreSQL or MySQL which is cheaper to maintain, and doesn't have a mid-range expansion cost associated with it? I know I'd pick an open-source free DB way before I'd pick Oracle.
The reason is that the guys that have 1-6 seat needs are a long ways from actually needing Oracle. The expansion stage from dinky buisiness with very small DB needs to small-medium size is a lot more important (at least initially) than the medium-> large scale transition you'll need when you need the heavyweight stuff from Oracle (and some would even argue that PostgreSQL and MySQL are well used in large-scale businesses as well).
AccountKiller
Nah it could well be true. He just is not saying what generation Sparc they are using. I have seen a number of shops scrapping e250's left and right, so I am sure many places have large database setups running on much older sun equipment. My desktop [p4] runs circles around many of our old Sun boxes, granted those sun boxes have been working near flawlessly for well over half a decade. Many places did their 3-5 year server replacement cycle and used that to migrate off of Sun due to the higher reliability of some of the newer x86_64 platforms, I could see a 10-50x increase in performance on it. Also I have seen some really ugly replication setups for distributed databases so condensing it all on one higher powered box can give a nice speed boost. But I see it as less to do with omg bsd 0wnz solaris then it is with Moore's law. Also postgres is far more lightweight then oracle. Oracle can be tuned (and often is) really poorly, it is the same thing that we have seen with some of the microsoft TCO reports against Linux. A fully tuned Windows server with a series of add-ons and hundreds of man hours to tweak it, vs an out of the box install of linspire on a off the shelf desktop. Apples and Oranges. Oh and Oracle sucks.
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
I can see your point about Moores law — a new Opteron box with a RAID controller and Gigabit ethernet should certainly outperform an older Sun server running 100base-T and U160 drives. However, the biggest obstacle to a wholesale move to a different DB & OS platform is the actual migration costs. Any shop that's so big it has dozens of Sun servers running Oracle is going to have Solaris admins and Oracle DBAs. These people are not going to shrug their shoulders and say "OK, I guess I'm going to do BSD/PostgreSQL now". These people are going to raise hell, provide Incontrovertible Proof that making the switch will lead to Inevitable Doom, and need to be replaced. So now you're going to have to hire new people who don't know your business, and the first thing they're going to have to do is migrate all your business-critical stuff over to the new platforms. Better hope those departing employees weren't too disgruntled to document everything thouroughly (or kept the docs up-to-date if they were concientious). And better hope your new PostgreSQL DBAs know Oracle real well (or be prepared to send your developers to PostgreSQL training), or they're not going to be able to port your thousands of lines of PL/SQL code. Unless, of course, you want to hire some consultants (who may know your industry, but probably not your business) to convert your legacy software to new, untested code and then turn it over to the staff who weren't involved in the conversion to support. Super happy fun time!
So while it seems like a good idea, unless you're working under a mandate from the CIO to replace Oracle or Solaris, it's probably cheaper and less disruptive to just stick with what you've got. Just ask any of those people who still run OpenVMS — they'll tell you!
Just junk food for thought...