Red Hat CEO suggests Oracle is feeling the heat 81
Rob writes "The previously rosy relationship between Oracle Corp and Red Hat Inc appears to have
soured following Red Hat's acquisition of JBoss Inc and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's
suggestion that his company could move into the Linux business. Red Hat's chief executive,
Matthew Szulik, has written in response to a recent interview with Ellison in which
Ellison suggested the company would be interested in distributing and supporting Linux.
"Is it possible that the dominant provider of databases feels pressure from its
long-time partner, Red Hat, because of our recent purchase of an open source middleware
company, JBoss?" Szulik asked, although
he also played down suggestions of a "showdown" between the two companies."
Link to the actual letter. (Score:5, Interesting)
There is also a no-reg-required mirror [zoss.org.zw] at the zimbabwe open source software society.
The most intersting part of the letter is where szulik puts a new twist on the (always perfect) car / computer analogyWell put.
Re:Nothing to worry about? (Score:1, Interesting)
Compared to JD Edwards or PeopleSoft, a pure RH acquisition by Larry would go faster than the could order his second Mamosa for breakfast.
I love when folks try to stir tech controversy that isn't there, like Apple threatening desktop share or OpenOffice beating Microsoft Office in features.
Cute, but totally misses the point.
Everything old is new again (Score:5, Interesting)
It dates from 1998, during the initial launch of Oracle 8i. Since then, and arguably for even longer, Oracle has had a consistent strategy of undermining the role of the operating system by taking on more and more of the critical duties into its own code base. Linux plays into this strategy marvelously well. Except, here's the rub. Redhat is not interested in the furtherance of this agenda. Redhat wants the operating system to remain a key part of the enterprise IT infrastructure.
I wrote an interesting article on my blog [pythian.com] titled "Oracle & Linux, Ancient History" on this subject last week, and the article links to the web archive of my original post about Oracle and Linux and Oracle's strategy to undermine the OS from 1998. The original article's title was "Why Oracle 8i Will Remodel the OS Landscape" and ultimately what we're seeing now in the tension between Oracle and Redhat is the materialization of Oracle's vision of the operating systems' role chafing on its longstanding partner.
Cheers,
Paul
P.S. Pythian DBAs post on our group blog at http://www.pythian.com/blogs/ [pythian.com].
Good idea for Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:mysql? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, nobody cares about most of the extra features. So let's change B) to: supports all of the features of Oracle that most people care about
Did you know that Oracle comes with something to do a text search on almost any document type, including those accessible through URLs? And that you can do fuzzy searches based on that, and that the database can learn to give better results via an expert system? It's a pretty nice search engine. Does MySQL come with a search engine?
Also, if I've said it once, I've said it a million times: don't exaggerate. The personal use version is free, and Oracle is $5k per copy for the one-processor, coarse-grained security model. The high-end one for clustering that you seem to be thinking of is $40k, not $200k.
My guess is that the market share of stupid people who buy Oracle when all they need is MySQL is dying. However, there really are people who want to do extremely sophisticated stuff that only Oracle is providing. Oracle's real up-and-coming competition for their real market is Google, I think.
If Google will do all the indexing and does a better job of managing your data without you having to even configure it, then why should you manage it with Oracle?
Re:Good idea for Oracle (Score:4, Interesting)
Oracle have since removed reference to it from their site.
Re:mysql? (Score:3, Interesting)
> a) is faster than Oracle
The only situation that mysql can beat oracle in is probably highly-indexed read-mostly content management use with its caching front-end. In reporting read-only environments mysql's lack of parallelism & partitioning means that Oracle can easily be *40x* the speed of mysql.
> b) supports all the features of Oracle
Don't even know where to start on this one. MySQL doesn't even support all the features of Postgresql yet, let alone Oracle. Of course, that's ok - nobody says that it needs to support all of the features. But it doesn't, and that means that there are plenty of uses for oracle that won't work well for MySQL. For example: financial auditing regulations and increasing government security requirements are driving quite a bit of features in oracle. It has extensive capabilities here that are completely missing in mysql. That are required for many applications in these industries.
> can be clustered easier than Oracle
wait, you mean to compare the mysql cluster that requires all data to fit into memory with Oracle RAC? Well, sure - Oracle's cluster set up is more complex. Then again it solves general real-world problems of uptime with zero data loss. The MySQL solution is only useful for a small niche of databases (tiny data volumes that can afford to lose data).
> it does not cost $200,000 per copy
yeah, neither does Oracle. Which can be free for small databases, can cost a few thousand for something a little bigger, can cost what? $32-40k list / CPU at the high-side. And probably $60k/CPU if you want some additional features. Sure that's a ton of cash, but that's list - with frequent 50% discounts and isn't $200,000 / copy.
> If anything, MySQL is largely responsible for this
No, i think jboss is responsible for this. It will compete directly with oracle application servers.
> Their market share is fading away.
Yeah, eventually. Eventually, Postgresql/MySQL/etc will be fast enough, have enough features, secure enough, etc. By that time Postgresql will still be free, who know's what the mysql licensing will look like. Or what storage engine they'll be migrating users to, or if oracle will own them.
Re:Good idea for Oracle (Score:2, Interesting)
I wouldn't be suprised if Microsoft does this to remain competative.
Re:Windbags (Score:2, Interesting)
I worked at a company with a large Oracle installation (8xCPU, 12 TB of data) running on RedHat. The machine would freeze every once in a while, requiring a costly reboot. We talked to RedHat who told us we needed to use a program to dump the machine state (there was no core file as the box didn't oops) so they could examine it. There was a way to do this through the serial port, but with 32 GB of memory dumping the machine state would take an eternity. They provided a workaround
We spoke with Oracle, who told us we needed to participate in some joint venture they had with RedHat for Oracle support in order to get high-level engineers. They were actually very nice about it. We did that, and the RedHat crew sat on our ticket for days before insisting there was nothing to do without the system dump that required an application that didn't work. They had nothing else to offer and kept closing our ticket when we tried to reopen it. Abominable.
The problem turned out to be related to a bad device driver for a fiberchannel HBA, but by the time we figured that out, management decided to move the system to AIX.
RedHat is not Linux and Larry knows it.