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Oracle Open World: Ellison Preaches Cloud Religion

Posted by samzenpus on from the silver-lining dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Oracle CEO Larry Ellison used his opening keynote at Oracle Open World (OOW) to unveil several initiatives to accelerate the cloud, including its own private cloud, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and its latest database version—which, coincidentally, can be stored in memory within Oracle's latest Exadata database machines. Ellison also paid tribute to Oracle hardware partner Fujitsu, which had earlier announced 'Project Athena': a server designed with a UltraSPARC chip that (he claimed) can run the Oracle database 'faster than any microprocessor on the planet.' Ellison opened OpenWorld with four key announcements: that Oracle is now offering infrastructure as a service; that it will complement the IaaS offering by allowing customers to run that same infrastructure behind their corporate firewall as a private cloud; the launch of Oracle database 12C (where the 'c' stands for 'cloud'); and, finally, the new Exadata servers, which barely use disk drives at all in-favor of in-memory storage, with flash memory as a fallback."

34 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. He's got a couple keys to that kingdom, eh? by Medievalist · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If I owned Java and mySQL I'd be preaching the gospel of "The Cloud" too.

    1. Re:He's got a couple keys to that kingdom, eh? by jellomizer · · Score: 2

      The cloud is the sliver lining for Oracle.

      The trends were towards going to smaller PC hardware, with systems like Microsoft SQL and MySQL that are designed for the smaller Database. There is less of a demmand towards the ultra big and heavy gear anymore. You are not going to want to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for an oracle license, for a database that has under a billion records in it. And your down time isn't going to cost you enough to make up for the expense.

      However with Cloud systems, it bring back the big iron again. You are dealing with Huge Datasets, and even a small amount of downtime can cost your millions, plus the bad press from the Rabid Anti-Coud group.

      The Cloud is the Silver Lining for Oracle. However it is what is hurting Microsoft.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    2. Re:He's got a couple keys to that kingdom, eh? by slashmydots · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think internally though they refer to it as a ball grabber product line since once part of your data and operations are on the cloud, they'd got you by the balls, lol. I know when I look for a software suite, complete lack of control over parts of it that are offsite, slow performance, need for an ungodly expensive fast internet connection, and zero failover options are all big perks.

    3. Re:He's got a couple keys to that kingdom, eh? by SDrag0n · · Score: 1

      Microsoft SQL Server definitely isn't designed for smaller databases... maybe you're thinking of Access?

      --
      I don't have time to make a sig
    4. Re:He's got a couple keys to that kingdom, eh? by Forty+Two+Tenfold · · Score: 2

      Microsoft SQL Server definitely isn't designed

      Agreed.

      --
      Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
    5. Re:He's got a couple keys to that kingdom, eh? by SDrag0n · · Score: 2

      Scope is important, however there is a common misconception that SQL Server can't handle anything bigger than a few Gigabytes. The largest single SQL Server database I've ever heard of is about 70TB. I'm sure 200TB would find it cramped but it also depends on how you're defining a database.

      --
      I don't have time to make a sig
    6. Re:He's got a couple keys to that kingdom, eh? by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      I am talking about the billions or records database.

      I don't bring up access, because if you use access for a production system you are either suck in the early 1990's or an idiot.

      Microsoft SQL server can work for huge data sets... However it isn't it optimal design range.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    7. Re:He's got a couple keys to that kingdom, eh? by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      There is a difference between Can't handle, vs. not handling it well.

      SQL Server and mySQL share the same data set range.
      A few million records per table. A million record table is a lot of data, more than what we need for most applications, and organizations.

      Oracle is a billion records per table.
      That it a lot of data. This is for serving data for a good percentage of the population.
      Can you get SQL Server to handle that data. Sure you can, however you are going beyond it optimal design. I can sustain 100mph with my prius... However I will get better gas milage if I used a sports car, for that job.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    8. Re:He's got a couple keys to that kingdom, eh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Oracle is a billion records per table.
      That it a lot of data. This is for serving data for a good percentage of the population.
      Can you get SQL Server to handle that data. Sure you can, however you are going beyond it optimal design. I can sustain 100mph with my prius... However I will get better gas milage if I used a sports car, for that job.

      There is no billion records per table limit... unless you've ran out of disk space. I'm staring at one table right now that is > 58 billion rows and grows by ~70+ million per day. One reason Oracle leaves MSSQL and others in the dust is more so due to the performance you can gain with all of the instrumentation exposed to you as a DBA and a developer. The next reason is PL/SQL. As someone who works on both, it's not really fair to compare the two. You're getting what you pay for.

      NOTE: I'm aware of how fanboy-ish this post may sound. Not a single shit was given :)

    9. Re:He's got a couple keys to that kingdom, eh? by SDrag0n · · Score: 1

      I regularly feel like the power of almighty Oracle is slightly overstated. SQL Server has a bad rap from around SQL Server 2000 and under but today it's pretty powerful right out of the box. With that said, I don't have any hard data to back it up, but my guess is its a lot of misconceptions and design flaws. Throw a giant team of people and a boatload of hardware at each solution and I bet you could get similar results, its just that people expect to spend a stupid amount of money on Oracle, not so much on SQL Server.

      --
      I don't have time to make a sig
  2. Do you trust Oracle? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Some of the tech sounds good, but the fact that Oracle wants you to use it is reason enough to be wary.

    * captcha: troubles

  3. The revolution will not be kerberized... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

    C'mon Fujitsu, isn't the Hellenic pantheon large enough for you to leave Project Athena in peace?

  4. I'm unable to read this article by binarylarry · · Score: 1

    All I can think about is seeing Larry Ellison have a debilitating stroke as Oracle HQ comes down with a zombie plague and burns to the ground.

    Fuck Oracle.

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
  5. Headline might be news if it was 2003 or so by shoppa · · Score: 1
    "The cloud" being pushed by a tech company's leader might have been news a decade ago. Today in 2012 it just seems a little lame.
    Although of course what is behind the headline is more interesting. Interesting that Fujitsu is involved. Maybe the Japanese "Fifth Generation Computer" vision is finally coming together? Like 30 years late.

    Fifth Generation Computer vision of the Japanese in the 1980's

    You don't see many headlines about "Fifth Generation Computing" anymore although they were all the rage in the 1980's!

  6. A brand new religion! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Because Christianity is far too much mainstream.

  7. sounds great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    nice data you have in our cloud, shame if something was to happen to it

  8. I recently learned that ORACLE is an Acryonym. by PerfectionLost · · Score: 4, Funny

    I recently learned that ORACLE is an Acryonym. It stands for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.

  9. Successfully ditched Oracle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    never looked back. are they still in business?

  10. Cojones, I tell ya... by jenningsthecat · · Score: 1

    FTA: “We own it, we manage it, we upgrade it—you pay a monthly fee for what you use,” Ellison said.

    Gee, Larry, by "it" are you referring to your cloud platform, or to my data?

    I've heard of paying a 'fee' for the return of a hostage, but asking people to voluntarily hand over both the hostage AND the ransom money up front? You've got some big balls there Mr. E!

    --
    'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
  11. If he really wants to enable "the cloud" by afidel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If he really wants to enable "the cloud" he would immediately change the licensing doc so that the vCPU boundary is recognized as a hard partitioning scheme thus enabling almost every Oracle workload that is today tied to hardware to run in a VM. Oracle's stupid licensing policy wrt VM's has been the one thing keeping any significant percentage of my environment on hardware (we're ~80% virtualized today and will be 90+% by the end of the year but Oracle licensing will keep that from reaching 99% like we would like).

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    1. Re:If he really wants to enable "the cloud" by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      It's almost as though he would really prefer to enable his cloud, or maybe your cloud on his hardware...

    2. Re:If he really wants to enable "the cloud" by afidel · · Score: 1

      After running into all sorts of bugs with Oracle VM there's no way in hell I would run any production workload on it, let alone core ones. The biggest one we ran into was if you pressed the restart host icon and then clicked cancel on the warning dialog you would put the host into a limbo state and the only solution was to reinstall the management machine from scratch!

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    3. Re:If he really wants to enable "the cloud" by whitelabrat · · Score: 1

      +1 parent

      Yeah, you know they're using Oracle VM. There's no polish for that turd. I wouldn't put anything there that I care about, unless I want to loose my job.

    4. Re:If he really wants to enable "the cloud" by jsolan · · Score: 1

      We've been using Oracle VM in production for years with very few issues. Their management software is total garbage, but it's still xen underneath which has been very solid for us. We've used xen for our virtualization of non-production servers well before Oracle came out with their product, so I use the command line to manage vm's more than that horrible web app. When Oracle offered support their database running on what amounts to xen with Oracle branding, we moved over and haven't looked back.

  12. Oracle suck balls! by Vince6791 · · Score: 1

    Larry Ellison is scum. He has an ego to feed. His first Oracle database was a complete shit and he was also in the business of selling his customers vaporware, products that did not exist but might exist in sometime in the future. Now look at the shit his playing with the Java run-time platform(or api's) suing anybody who is using it or something similar. No wonder c and c++ still going to be popular in the future.

  13. relevant? by sticks_us · · Score: 1

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvLikiVraHE&feature=related

    --
    "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
  14. As a PostgreSQL user, I wonder... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Is Oracle a religion or a cult of some sort, where all members surrender all of their worldly possessions in exchange for a blessing from the Father RDBMS, the Sun Licenses, and the Holy Brand Name?

    Though I can sorta understand SQL Server, which is a part of that whole Microsoft catholicism, with its beautiful cathedrals that some people still admire...

    Oracle might make sense for "the five richest kings in Europe", but for the rest of us there's PostgreSQL.

    --libman

  15. faster? by pseudorand · · Score: 1

    > 'faster than any microprocessor on the planet.'
    Okay, Larry, one of us clearly misunderstands cloud (and possibly just about all) computing. Don't we want a computer that runs it cheaper, not faster?

  16. Larry Ellison bashing "cloud computing"... by flydpnkrtn · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Anybody remember this?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOEFXaWHppE

    Guess he's changed his tune...

    --
    Here's to the crazy ones
    1. Re:Larry Ellison bashing "cloud computing"... by Raenex · · Score: 1

      He didn't change his tune at all. There's actually another video where he bashes on "cloud" computing, but he says, "We'll make cloud computing announcements. Because if orange is the new pink, we'll make orange blouses. I mean, I'm not going to fight this thing."

      His main complaint is that "cloud" computing is just the latest fad term for existing technology.

    2. Re:Larry Ellison bashing "cloud computing"... by aralin · · Score: 1

      +1

      --
      If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
    3. Re:Larry Ellison bashing "cloud computing"... by flydpnkrtn · · Score: 1

      OK, well said. In the video he's bashing the new "fad term," but Oracle's not above embracing it. Fair enough.

      --
      Here's to the crazy ones
  17. Ellison...cloud religion? Harlan? by harvey+the+nerd · · Score: 1

    Larry? Oh, thought maybe Harlan had developed something.

  18. "Project Athena"?? by daboochmeister · · Score: 1

    Having just read Charles Stross' "Rule 34" ... this sounds ominous. (unless it's the best thing to ever happen to humanity - I couldn't tell, by the end).

    --
    "Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh ... never mind." Dave Bucci