Slashdot Mirror
Oracle Linux Explored
M-Saunders writes "Two days ago Slashdot reported on Oracle's move into the enterprise Linux market, and how it may challenge Red Hat. Red Hat's stock has already dropped, and there's a great deal of talk about the implications of this act. Linux Format got hold of the 'Unbreakable' distro to find out what's going on under the hood. Is it a breakthrough for Linux in the corporate market, or just another RHEL respin? See the article for all the info and screenshots — including an 'interesting' choice of GRUB colours."
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/?q =node/20
Yesterday I suggested Oracle entering the game would be good for the market by increasing competion among Linux vendors. Looking at this offering, I have to say: what a joke. I was completely wrong.
Oracle are pulling nothing more than a publicity stunt with this. I expect I would be correct in the speculation that some marketing executive asked some developers to slap together an “Oracle branded distribution”. They then took a release of Fedora Core and changed graphics and colors. Boom! Instant industry player.
Why bother.
That price sounds high unless you are talking the full Oracle Suite. Oracle has very good performance, is very stable, is well supported, has a clustering and failover (RAC) capabilities, built in messsaging for DB-to-DB communications, fully supports ODBC and JDBC connections, runs on almost any OS from mainframe to desktop, conforms almost 100% to the Relational DB model, supports high volume transaction rates, has row and column locking, supports encryption, can store binary large objects (BLOBs), and has a long history of success in the Enterprise. Downsides are it's hard to install correctly right out of the box, it is so flexible it is hard to "tune" for best performance, it is not something you can just "play around with" it takes some learning to handle it so good DBAs are not cheap, and it is expensive although discounts can be negotiated. YMMV...
Nope, parent is incorrect:
d f
http://www.oracle.com/technologies/linux/ubl-ds.p
That's $1199/$1999 *annually*, and "Lifetime" is defined as 5-8 years.
Take a look at this for an allegedly unbiased opinion (but who knows what is shilling and what is real these days?!).
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Back in 02-03 I worked for a small startup. We were running Oracle on Linux doing dev work. We called them up to inquire about licenses. I think we were quoted $32k for our setup. We naturally told them, nevermind, we'll port it to MySQL and they eventually came back and offered us a deal at $4k. Of course, our app was meant to be installed at several high profile insurance companies so that meant more Oracle Licenses for them in the future.
BTW, all those numbers are from my rather fragile memory. YMMV.
-- Jason
Remember that we are talking list price for one server.
I can speak from experience that Oracle's architecture is better than DB2, substantially better than SQL Server, and completely blows Sybase out of the water. Oracle 7 or 8 years ago was handling concurrency and large transactions better than Sybase does today. The CBO is much better than everyone's except maybe DB2. The hardware support is broader than just about everyone else with the exception of DB2. Locking is better handled. Indexes are efficient even on columns that aren't integers. VARCHAR support is clean. PL/SQL is quirky but less quirky than the alternatives. The trigger support is richer.
What generally happens is that a customer will go with Oracle for a handful of critical apps that justify the high price. Then once Oracle has their foot in the door, they'll come back and offer an expanded deal to host the databases that could run perfectly fine in any db, and do it all at a discount. The end cost is going to be substantially less than one would suppose by scaling up the quoted numbers.