There isn't a real arguement at all: it's recently come out that a/the objector to MySQL going to Oracle was Microsoft. I strongly suspect it's a put-up job, astroturfing the EC to hurt a competitor.
--dave (who want the deal to complete so he can get more capacity planning gigs) c-b
The objection to Oracle owning MySQL came in part from Microsoft, a competitor, and other as-yet-unknown parties. Wanna bet it's just a way of throwing a wooden show in Sun's gears, for all the flack MS used to get from them?
Indeed, Oracle put time and money into working on innodb performance, as Larry claims that anything which popularizes sql is a good thing for him (;-))
Any competitor in either software or hardware, who sees Oracle + Sun as the
kind of full-line business that IBM used to be in the mainframe business.
Right now, Sun sales are down as people wait to see if the deal will go through, and the competition is going door to door saying "buy from us, Sun is going out of business".
For books like "Using Samba", you can have the electronic form of the whole book for free. Nevertheless, people still send money to O'Reilly for the dead-tree format.
Back when we did the first edition, we found that even hard-core electronic-everything folks wanted the physical edition. You could read it in the bath or the subway, make notes in the margins, and read a page with two fingers stuck in at two other pages you were referring to. And the printed form was small enough to hold easily in one had, something that wasn't true if you printed it yourself on 8 1/2 x 11 paper.
Conversely, the electronic form was easier to search, which helps if the word you want isn't in the index. You can stick a copy on your latop, for whenever you're away from your bookshelf. And you can print out excepts to leave with customers so they can figure out what the heck you just did.
So both forms are valuable, but for different things.
E-books are horribly primitive as of the moment, and not exactly waterproof, so I'm seriously doubtful that they will compete with paper books for long time, if ever. Instead they will complement them, just like the copy of Using Samba on my laptop complements the copy on my bookshelf.
As I understand it, you commence a class-action suit, name Apple and your provider and have your solicitor invite the provider to join their suit against Apple with yours (;-))
The first is trivially true: If I've been using Oracle, I probably want a service contract, and would buy the "enterprise" MySQL.
Monty's second point is puzzling: he seems to have information the the EC normally keeps very close to their chest.
Monty Program AB has certainly recommended divestment, but since they're doing the current fork I'd have to lump a flat claim that Oracle has refused to divest in with the rest of the lobbying by Oracle competitors including SAP AG and Microsoft Corp as possible FUD.
Alas, we're not talking about normal open-source politics. This is plutocrats trumpeting at the tops of their lungs, and MS-like tactics seem to be the norm..
Anybody running Oracle E-business with more than a few hundred users will, and some just did, for whom I did a capacity plan. We did the sums: a large Sun/Fujitsu was significantly cheaper than a rack full of small boxes, all under-utilized except for the few that were overloaded already.
If you're a small website actioning off things like eBay (;-)) you need the biggest box Sun (or IBM, or in principle H-P) makes to get enough horsepower to do the TP.
The MySQL issue looks like a red herring to me, although I suspect it's a wonderful source of FUD for anyone who wants to delay the deal.
The Wall Street Journal actually noticed the elephant in the room: MySQL is free software, and can't be shut down by an evil monopolist (like one we all know and love).
Hey, there's a ton of FUD out there about Sun and Oracle. Reminds me of a company who claimed they had a copyright on Unix and that therefor Linux belonged to them (;-))
The funniest one here was Oracle buying Sun and then selling it to H-P.
Sun's competition is pushing real hard
to get customers to defer or cancel Sun sales in favor of their products. One way is FUD, suggesting that, for example, Oracle will cancel the Sun hardware lines.
I see this as an another FUD effort, suggesting that H-P, who only buys companies up to cancel their hardware, would buy Sun from Oracle.
Another tactic is to start rumors that the U.S. DoJ and the EU will have to investigate.
The longer they can get people to defer Sun purchases, the better chance they have of selling their products in lace of Sun's. So expect lots more rumors to be "placed", with slashdot being a target for this kind of FUD.
P.--dave
Sorry! I wasn't assuming this was a genetic issue, I was actually thinking about learned behavior. I had to take "girl lessons" from my wife when I held a quasi-management job, and I noticed she had a rich set of organizing and coping skills...
I keep seeing insurance-company ads about texting when driving, and wonder if anyone actually sends text messages at the wheel, as opposed to reading them or texting while a passenger?
My father was an insurance detective, and often commented that the companies were constantly warning about quite imaginary perils...
No, not that kind of multitasking! I mean have they corrected for the difference between men and women?
In our society, and in the hunter-gatherer societies that far preceded it, men's jobs demanded concentration and women's demanded social interaction. This may introduce a sex-linked bias into the experiment.
It certainly was at the time: the e25k was something like 72, and the approach has subsequently spread to smaller, faster crossbars, sometimes used in pairs to decrease latency and increase bandwidth.
Indeed, or selection biases (;-)) I know both the Sun and Dell systems were using the disk vendors' "enterprise" lines, but I don't know about the rest of the Intels.
Odd, one of my customers reports the very opposite: they were constantly replacing Intel components during the eight months I was there at the very least weekly, and had one Sun board die. They said the disk failure rates were lower on the Sun too, but I don't know by how much.
I absolutely agree with your last sentence, although I see most of the Sun efforts to be toward reducing the latency, by not making the bus wait in between the request and the reply. That speeded up small memory transactions a lot, targeting the low speed of locking operations that have to go to memory and/or achieve global cache consistency.
I would like to see latency bettered, too. To me, it's at least an order of magnitude high.
My leaky memory says that 40% of Oracle's income (profit?) comes from Oracle on SPARC, and another 20% from
Oracle on other Unix.
If IBM had bought Sun and phased out SPARC like they did Sequent, then they'd probably own 50% of Oracle's market.
It's far better for Oracle to buy their own hardware supplier than depend on others: the Sequent was highly optimized for Oracle performance, and then disappeared in a little puff of greasy smoke when IBM bought it and
shut it down in favor of Power.
That's got to have been painful!
As other commentators have pointed out, Oracle is heavily invested in Java, and sees MySQL as a "channel" that brings them customers. You note that Oracle invested in improving the performance of
the transactional engine that MySQL uses instead of shutting it down...
I suspect Sun was a perfect fit: it complemented the things Oracle needed, and didn't have any important products that compete directly. Win-win.
That in turn could be good for me, as I'm a capacity planner & performance guy, working mostly on large systems, like the ones Oracle and Sun customers use.
Actually the advantage is a fast backplane, not the memory. You may remember they bought the rights to the
Cray asynchronous (really packet-switch-like) backplane quite a number of years ago, and have been expanding on it since.
It's easy to build a fast chip if it never has to maintain cache-consistency with anything off-chip. If it has to stay sane, even with only 64*4*2 = 512 threads banging on the same memory range, it not only takes an expensive bus, but it's also memory-transaction-rate limited.
That's why you read about transactional memory in Linux Weekly News: we all
need it, SPARC and Intel both.
If you're somebody like eBay, you
really really need scalabaility, as
you're doing hundreds on non-idempotent transactions a second.
One of my much smaller customers needs 128 cores to reach a reasonable rate of speed committing sales transactions for a single line of business, so this isn't limited to very large companies or those with large data, just anyone with reasonable sales volumes.
Slashdot Mirror
There isn't a real arguement at all: it's recently come out that a/the objector to MySQL going to Oracle was Microsoft. I strongly suspect it's a put-up job, astroturfing the EC to hurt a competitor.
--dave (who want the deal to complete so he can get more capacity planning gigs) c-b
The objection to Oracle owning MySQL came in part from Microsoft, a competitor, and other as-yet-unknown parties. Wanna bet it's just a way of throwing a wooden show in Sun's gears, for all the flack MS used to get from them?
--dave
Indeed, Oracle put time and money into working on innodb performance, as Larry claims that anything which popularizes sql is a good thing for him (;-))
--dave
Actually this is very similar to what O'Reilly did with Using Samba, and it was very successful.
I'm surprised some of the more au courant slashdotters's didn't notice (;-))
Drop me a line and we can compare notes.
--dave
Any competitor in either software or hardware, who sees Oracle + Sun as the kind of full-line business that IBM used to be in the mainframe business.
Right now, Sun sales are down as people wait to see if the deal will go through, and the competition is going door to door saying "buy from us, Sun is going out of business".
--dave
And especially to offset FUD from people who don't want the Oracle/Sun merger to happen.
--dave (who wants them to finish merging so he can get more consulting gigs) c-b
For books like "Using Samba", you can have the electronic form of the whole book for free. Nevertheless, people still send money to O'Reilly for the dead-tree format.
Back when we did the first edition, we found that even hard-core electronic-everything folks wanted the physical edition. You could read it in the bath or the subway, make notes in the margins, and read a page with two fingers stuck in at two other pages you were referring to. And the printed form was small enough to hold easily in one had, something that wasn't true if you printed it yourself on 8 1/2 x 11 paper.
Conversely, the electronic form was easier to search, which helps if the word you want isn't in the index. You can stick a copy on your latop, for whenever you're away from your bookshelf. And you can print out excepts to leave with customers so they can figure out what the heck you just did.
So both forms are valuable, but for different things.
E-books are horribly primitive as of the moment, and not exactly waterproof, so I'm seriously doubtful that they will compete with paper books for long time, if ever. Instead they will complement them, just like the copy of Using Samba on my laptop complements the copy on my bookshelf.
--dave
As I understand it, you commence a class-action suit, name Apple and your provider and have your solicitor invite the provider to join their suit against Apple with yours (;-))
--dave
The first is trivially true: If I've been using Oracle, I probably want a service contract, and would buy the "enterprise" MySQL.
Monty's second point is puzzling: he seems to have information the the EC normally keeps very close to their chest.
Monty Program AB has certainly recommended divestment, but since they're doing the current fork I'd have to lump a flat claim that Oracle has refused to divest in with the rest of the lobbying by Oracle competitors including SAP AG and Microsoft Corp as possible FUD.
Alas, we're not talking about normal open-source politics. This is plutocrats trumpeting at the tops of their lungs, and MS-like tactics seem to be the norm ..
--dave
Fujitsu makes SPARCs (really good ones), and H-P is where another poster said "CPUs go to die".
--dave
Anybody running Oracle E-business with more than a few hundred users will, and some just did, for whom I did a capacity plan. We did the sums: a large Sun/Fujitsu was significantly cheaper than a rack full of small boxes, all under-utilized except for the few that were overloaded already.
If you're a small website actioning off things like eBay (;-)) you need the biggest box Sun (or IBM, or in principle H-P) makes to get enough horsepower to do the TP.
Horses for courses
--dave
The MySQL issue looks like a red herring to me, although I suspect it's a wonderful source of FUD for anyone who wants to delay the deal.
The Wall Street Journal actually noticed the elephant in the room: MySQL is free software, and can't be shut down by an evil monopolist (like one we all know and love).
They seem to think the EC wants a (symbolic?) divestment ..
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204731804574390512306888466.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
As for me, I want the deal to go through so there will be more capacity planning gigs for me to do (;-))
--dave
Hey, there's a ton of FUD out there about Sun and Oracle. Reminds me of a company who claimed they had a copyright on Unix and that therefor Linux belonged to them (;-))
The funniest one here was Oracle buying Sun and then selling it to H-P.
--dave
Sun's competition is pushing real hard to get customers to defer or cancel Sun sales in favor of their products. One way is FUD, suggesting that, for example, Oracle will cancel the Sun hardware lines. I see this as an another FUD effort, suggesting that H-P, who only buys companies up to cancel their hardware, would buy Sun from Oracle.
Another tactic is to start rumors that the U.S. DoJ and the EU will have to investigate.
The longer they can get people to defer Sun purchases, the better chance they have of selling their products in lace of Sun's. So expect lots more rumors to be "placed", with slashdot being a target for this kind of FUD. P.--dave
Sorry! I wasn't assuming this was a genetic issue, I was actually thinking about learned behavior. I had to take "girl lessons" from my wife when I held a quasi-management job, and I noticed she had a rich set of organizing and coping skills...
--dave
I keep seeing insurance-company ads about texting when driving, and wonder if anyone actually sends text messages at the wheel, as opposed to reading them or texting while a passenger?
My father was an insurance detective, and often commented that the companies were constantly warning about quite imaginary perils...
--dave
No, not that kind of multitasking! I mean have they corrected for the difference between men and women?
In our society, and in the hunter-gatherer societies that far preceded it, men's jobs demanded concentration and women's demanded social interaction. This may introduce a sex-linked bias into the experiment.
--dave
Ouch! That really hurts!
--dave
It certainly was at the time: the e25k was something like 72, and the approach has subsequently spread to smaller, faster crossbars, sometimes used in pairs to decrease latency and increase bandwidth.
--dave
--dave
--dave
I absolutely agree with your last sentence, although I see most of the Sun efforts to be toward reducing the latency, by not making the bus wait in between the request and the reply. That speeded up small memory transactions a lot, targeting the low speed of locking operations that have to go to memory and/or achieve global cache consistency.
I would like to see latency bettered, too. To me, it's at least an order of magnitude high.
--dave
My leaky memory says that 40% of Oracle's income (profit?) comes from Oracle on SPARC, and another 20% from Oracle on other Unix.
If IBM had bought Sun and phased out SPARC like they did Sequent, then they'd probably own 50% of Oracle's market.
It's far better for Oracle to buy their own hardware supplier than depend on others: the Sequent was highly optimized for Oracle performance, and then disappeared in a little puff of greasy smoke when IBM bought it and shut it down in favor of Power. That's got to have been painful!
As other commentators have pointed out, Oracle is heavily invested in Java, and sees MySQL as a "channel" that brings them customers. You note that Oracle invested in improving the performance of the transactional engine that MySQL uses instead of shutting it down...
I suspect Sun was a perfect fit: it complemented the things Oracle needed, and didn't have any important products that compete directly. Win-win.
That in turn could be good for me, as I'm a capacity planner & performance guy, working mostly on large systems, like the ones Oracle and Sun customers use.
--dave
Actually the advantage is a fast backplane, not the memory. You may remember they bought the rights to the Cray asynchronous (really packet-switch-like) backplane quite a number of years ago, and have been expanding on it since.
It's easy to build a fast chip if it never has to maintain cache-consistency with anything off-chip. If it has to stay sane, even with only 64*4*2 = 512 threads banging on the same memory range, it not only takes an expensive bus, but it's also memory-transaction-rate limited.
That's why you read about transactional memory in Linux Weekly News: we all need it, SPARC and Intel both.
--dave
If you're somebody like eBay, you really really need scalabaility, as you're doing hundreds on non-idempotent transactions a second.
One of my much smaller customers needs 128 cores to reach a reasonable rate of speed committing sales transactions for a single line of business, so this isn't limited to very large companies or those with large data, just anyone with reasonable sales volumes.
--dave