Oracle is buying Sun, the owner of Java, MySQL and Solaris.
Oracle is now the enterprise equivalent of Apple: a single vendor with a start-to-finish closed loop from the hardware to the OS to the applications.
Another way to look at it: they now own a top-to-bottom development stack like Microsoft’s:
- OS (Solaris, and no, I don’t include their rip-off of Red Hat Linux)
- Language (Java)
- Databases (flat files, MySQL – oh, wait, yeah, Oracle too)
- Lots of business applications
- Enterprise licensing savvy
I’m no analyst by any means, but it would seem like a pretty interesting investment. I couldn’t see why IBM would be that interested in Sun, but Oracle, that makes sense.
I did get one big chuckle out of the press release line that says, “Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other open platforms.” I couldn’t help but think, “Exactly – you were never that committed to Linux other than as a revenue stream for support.” I’m probably wrong, but I just found it funny.
Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.
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I don’t usually talk about Quest product stuff here, but there’s one new product out that I wanted to put on your radar. LiteSpeed, the backup software for SQL Server, is now available for Oracle too.
The product is called LiteSpeed Engine for Oracle (LEO), and like the name indicates, this focuses on the engine itself. Those Oracle guys are pretty smart: they like scripting all their stuff instead of using pretty point-and-click GUIs like us SQL Server guys. (That’s the spin you have to use when you talk about Oracle guys – in private, we say things like “they haven’t figured out how to use a mouse yet,” har har ho ho.) As far as the engine goes, it’s the same stuff you like about LiteSpeed – faster backups, smaller backup files, encryption without overhead, yadda yadda yadda.
It runs on the major *nix flavors like HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Red Hat and SuSE, but not Windows – yet. (Dang, okay, now I’m getting jealous. The Oracle guys get all these platform choices.)
The product managers are really encouraging us to learn Oracle so that we can have better conversations about the product. This ties into my blog earlier about learning different database platforms, heh. I’m torn – I’d love to take this opportunity to learn more about Oracle, but Microsoft has so many cool things coming too. Only so many hours in the day!
Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.
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I don’t have much insight to add here, but it’s something my readers are probably into: Oracle now supports running on Amazon EC2. They’ve got prebuilt EC2 instances that you can just turn on, a cloud management portal, and licensing options.
This is such a cool time to be a database administrator. I can’t wait for the day where people don’t make bad architecture decisions just because they can’t afford to get a real database (and I don’t just mean Oracle by that, of course) from the get-go.
Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.
Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts
