Oracle: Proud, Self-Reliant, Increasingly Isolated

jfruhlinger writes "One of Oracle's stated purposes when it bought Sun more than two years ago was to create full-stack appliances: SPARC servers running Solaris or Oracle Linux and Oracle's suite of app servers and of course its omnipresent database. Its new T4 processor is a reaffirmation of that strategy. But has the company painted itself into a corner? While it's cautiously embraced the cloud, its cloud services don't work with Windows or other companies' offerings, which kills much of their potential value; meanwhile, they've managed to alienate open source developers and big swaths of the Java community. It seems that Oracle's inability to play well with others is locking them out of the multipolar future."

Comments

Uncle Larry is not in the "giving stuff away" biz

[symbolset]

He's in the "all the traffic will bear" business. Get over it. Get to forking.

Oracle:

[Daetrin]

The only company that's ever made me actually happy to use Microsoft's competing product instead. Now if only this self imposed isolation will convince everyone else to ditch Oracle SQL so i can stop supporting it =P

Re:Oracle:

[goose-incarnated]

You could, and you'd both be right ;-)

Anecdote....

[TheCarp]

So we had some problems with how Nagios stock plugins interact with Solaris Zpools...under certain circumstances, it can read a filesystem as full even when it has plenty of space (less than half full). In looking for a solution, I found a check on the exchange that was written to use the zpool tools to check. I found a minor bug in the check, fixed it, deployed it, and sent a patch to the original author.

His reply? He thanked me, but informed me that it was of no use to him anymore as his company migrated everything off of Solaris rather than deal with Oracle.

So I would say yes, this sounds about right.

Migration to MS SQL Server

[jazman_777]

Is Microsoft better than Oracle? I kind of see it as the East Front: Nazi Germany against Communist Russia. Can't they just destroy each other completely?

Re:Migration to MS SQL Server

[inglorion_on_the_net]

Is Microsoft better than Oracle?

I would say that if you're migrating anyway, why not do it right and migrate to PostgreSQL or EnterpriseDB? That may even be an easier transition if you're coming from Oracle, too.

Oracle and multipolar

[jbolden]

I'm having a hard time seeing where Oracle isn't multipolar. Their absolutely core technology is a database. All their business offerings on the next layer generally support databases other than Oracle. Oracle is usable by business products that conflict with their offerings. Going to their Sun acquisition it gives them a hardware platform they can control. The ability to buy an "Oracle box" which Oracle is responsible for maintaining, top to bottom.

As for OpenOffice I'm not sure how that fits with Oracle's model at all, it is a Sun asset they can't really make use of. MySQL they seem to be protecting fine keeping it focused on the low end, along with Berkley DB, which is also theirs.

Oracle Linux is silly. I think Oracle will likely start licensing RedHat as it gets more difficult to support. Once they start writing checks their problems with RedHat will be over.

I don't agree with the author.

Re:Oracle and multipolar

[afabbro]

Oracle Linux is silly. I think Oracle will likely start licensing RedHat as it gets more difficult to support. Once they start writing checks their problems with RedHat will be over.

I don't agree with the author.

Their stack is: bare metal, Oracle Linux, Oracle ASM (fs/volume mgr), Oracle Cluster, then DB, app, etc.

In other words, from bare metal (which they also sell :-) to app (and they sell some giant ones - Peoplesoft, Siebel, Oracle eBusiness, etc.) they can sell you the entire stack. Everything below the DB is reasonably priced (compared to Veritas, RedHat, etc.) and exists mainly as a way to sell you the DB and up, where the real money is (because OS, cluster, etc. are commodities at this point)

I'd be really surprised if they'd yank one one layer of the stack (OEL).

They may merge in some Sun tech, though - right now that is a whole different stack.

Re:Uncle Larry is not in the "giving stuff away" b

[crunchygranola]

... To me, Oracle wants to acts like they have that stick when in reality, it's just too small.

You heard here first folks. Larry Ellison's "stick" is too small!

Re:The future doesn't look that multipolar

[SmurfButcher Bob]

Yes, because when life safety and big money is on the line, our first action is to introduce MORE fragile complexity that only benefits a held-harmless 3rd party who's sole goal is to insert themselves into our revenue stream.

Reality much?

Oracle and the Java Community

[karianna]

FYI - I'm the London JUG co-leader, we have a seat on the Java Standards Body (aka the JCP) and I've seen first hand the Oracle and Java community challenges :-).

I think Oracle's record with the Java community is turning around in the right direction. They clearly didn't know how to the deal with the community to begin with, but I'll give em credit for trying their damnedest to get better at it! For example:

• They offer amazing amounts of (no strings attached) support to the Java User Groups (we've certainly had it better than we did under Sun). They put their $/£ where their mouth is and offer logistical support for user group events to boot (again, no strings attached).
• They set a date for Java 7, and they delivered the darn thing.
• They're working on the JCP reforms, starting with openness and transparency (JSR-348) and they will have a follow-up JSR to address all of the legal/licensing etc concerns (promises to be a humdinger of a mailing list).
• They've gotten a number of major community players into the OpenJDK (some will argue dubiously, but hey having Apple, SAP, IBM, RedHat on board is not to be sneezed at).

Now before the sceptics spit out their coffee:

• Have they screwed up a bunch of times? Yeah sure they have, Hudson/Jenkins, the Java Web Start thing and a few others.
• Do they communicate in a way that the community would like them to? Definitely not always, they like to keep silent until they get the official ducks in a row.
• Are there issues around legal/licensing? Heck yes. and that's going to make for an interesting 2012, I suggest you become part of the JCP process so you can have your say.

So there's definitely stuff to work on, but they are listening and the community has worked with them on many occasions in the past year to get some really cool things done. Let's not forget they're mainly individual engineers like you and I trying to do the very best they can for the platform.

Now I'm off to put on my Kevlar ;-)

Re:Uncle Larry is not in the "giving stuff away" b

[John Bresnahan]

Almost every company for which I've worked had management that dreamed of being "tied in" to a big vendor. Makes me wonder if a prerequisite for getting into upper management is being into bondage.

I've actually seen director types get almost panicky when I've suggested a solution that bypassed the "officially approved" big vendor. They didn't even want to hear of the possibility of saving money or providing a better solution, because it would break that "special bond" they had with ${BIG_VENDOR}.

Oracle's got the market wrong

[Stonefish]

Oracle has really missed the boat in relation to user sentiment and understanding of the market. There is a perception amongst management that it any MS or other vendor solution is going to be cheaper than an oracle one, this is largely true and I'll give you a couple of examples.
The Oracle licensing model is bound to cores not CPUs, thus any other vendor can demonstrate that as infrastructure scales to more cores rather than CPUs Oracle licensing is going to bite you in the arse.
Oracles take on virtual computing is also meant to drive you towards Oracles virtualisation products however in reality it is pushing in the opposite direction. You must licence the product for all the cores in the cluster and so as agencies adopt virtualisation Oracle goes from being merely expensive to being uncompetitive.
I'm speaking from experience in this regard, in a recent project we slashed 25% off a 15m project by replacing some of the oracle software stack and using a combination of Redhat and MS, we changed the sys integrators design and the vendor is happy to support it. This was in a government environment where change is 10x harder than in the commercial arena. It should be noted that this saving was against a "discounted" oracle price.
Oracle's price = pissing off management in hard times
Oracle's open source strategy = pissing off the open source community which tended to oppose MS
Oracle Google/Android strategy = pissing off mobile users

Oracle has hard times ahead and they're current pissing on those who were standing with them.

Re:The future doesn't look that multipolar

[ScottyLad]

Yes, because websites will all be hosted in the magical cloud, which somehow transcends the need for servers, and nobody will ever, EVER want to host ANYTHING on their own servers. Idiot.

There isn't a -1 stupid moderation, so I substitute overrated.

When I was a young engineer in the early 90's most of my time was spent migrating services from mainframes to standalone servers. It was the epitome of progress - instead of these shared resources, you could have your very own dedicated resources, complete with redundant power, storage, memory, etc

At the time, one of the old engineers told me "we'll be changing all this back in 15 or 20 years, wait and see"

These days, I can appreciate the old man's wisdom. There are two trends which have been constant for as long as I've been working in IT:

1. A desire to centralise everything which is currently decentralised
2. A desire to decentralise everything which is currently centralised

Give it another 20 years, and I'll probably be seeing out the twighlight of my career dragging services back out of the "cloud" on to discrete hardware. Having your own dedicated resources will be the epitome of progress, compared to all that old-fashioned "cloud" computing.