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

[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:Several smart moves for them

[Vellmont]

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).

Re:Competition from PostgreSQL and FreeBSD.

[xilet]

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.