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Comments: 91 + - Developers: Dell and HP To Sell Oracle Operating Systems on Friday July 30, @01:55PM
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angry tapir writes "Oracle has announced that rival hardware vendors Dell and Hewlett-Packard intend to certify and resell its Solaris and Enterprise Linux operating systems as well as Oracle VM on their x86 servers. The announcement 'demonstrates Oracle's commitment to openness,' company co-president Charles Phillips said in a statement."
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Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Because if Joe Smoe Computer starts selling Oracle Linux and their hardware and support is crap it reflects poorly on Oracle. With Sun out of the picture, there are only three Enterprise hardware venders left: IBM, HP, and DELL. And Oracle sees IBM as a direct competitor. So that leaves HP and Dell.
"Demonstrates..." (Score:5, Insightful)
demonstrates Oracle's commitment to openness...
[Pause for evil laughter omitted]
...and will provide Dell and HP customers with new levels of support...
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Oracle makes Apple look open.
They also, amazingly, make Apple look bad at sales/marketing. I've worked on dozens of projects that used Oracle as their database, and of them, I would say one actually needed something that expensive/heavyweight. The rest could have done just as well with something cheaper or most likely free-as-in-beer. Instead they were paying Oracle a boatload of money for software and spending another boatload of money on Oracle DBAs who largely performed tasks that were handled by deve
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Re:"Demonstrates..." (Score:5, Interesting)
I really can't see much of a use for something like Oracle. Either you are writing a small/medium sized application where something like MySQL/PostGres would do just fine out of the box, without any modifications, or you are doing something really large, which you end up writing your own custom storage solution for, which does exactly only what you need it to do, and is very finely tuned.
Perhaps, but most shops find it's cheaper to license Oracle, DB/2, etc. than to write their own storage system from scratch, particularly if they need high multiuser concurrency and MVCC.
Even large and busy sites like CraigsList use MySQL and other free products to handle their data.
Craigslist does not have to manage a very large single image database. The data that appears for San Francisco does not have to be in sync with the ads that appears for Chicago. I imagine all of the ads for San Francisco (probably their biggest city) could fit in memory for a MySQL database. It's just easily compressable text and ads are short. Also, they don't keep more than 7 days. Given those requirements, MySQL is easy.
Facebook does not really use MySQL but rather MySQL they've rewritten to use as a backing store for their gazillion memcache servers.
At the other end of the spectrum, Amazon and telcos use Oracle, primarily because they need one consistent data image everywhere. Banks, airlines, shipping companies, etc. use DB/2 on the mainframe or Oracle for the same reason. If Facebook misses a post or doesn't update your home page, who cares...if a bank allows a payment because it's not looking at an up-to-date view of an account or Amazon 500 copies of a book when it only has 450 in stock, that is a problem.
Oracle also has better features for minimizing or eliminating downtime for maintenance, recovering from user errors, disaster recovery, etc. And frankly, Oracle performs better under high workloads and scales further owing to better design. For now.
Oracle is overused perhaps but it (and DB/2) still do things the free versions don't. The free versions are catching up...Postgres is at about Oracle 7 or 8, depending on which feature you look at. I do think they'll eventually catch up, but it's silly to say there is no use for something like Oracle.
BTW, what drives overuse of Oracle is not laziness or tradition but scaling down of big solutions. Company X develops solution Y for $GIANT_CUSTOMER. They then sell it to smaller customers but have only tested it on Oracle, so smaller customers use Oracle. Vertical integration dictates software (and to some extent hardware) architecture in many cases.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
If you need good MVCC (busy OLTP environment shared with reporting, long-running transactions, multi-table reports, etc.), I'd recommend Firebird (or Interbase) or PostgreSQL. Interbase essentially pioneered MVCC. My experience with both Oracle and MS-SQL has been that they didn't really grok MVCC very well, and their hacks to back-port it aren't nearly as good as a DBMS built with it in mind. Oracle requires that you preconfigure INITRANS "just right" and it's not pretty if you don't. MS-SQL doesn't really
Re: (Score:2)
My experience with both Oracle and MS-SQL has been that they didn't really grok MVCC very well, and their hacks to back-port it aren't nearly as good as a DBMS built with it in mind.
Oracle has done MVCC since 1983 (Oracle 3). The original academic work on MVCC was 1981ish. Saying that the current version of Oracle (11) has back-ported hacks to support MVCC is ridiculous.
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Would you prefer kludge? Oracle certainly didn't lose its locking (writers-block-readers) nature when they added it -- which I didn't say was recently. Their implementation is still limited compared to other good MVCC implementations, and they really don't seem to care, nor encourage anyone to use it. Seems they treat it as something only a niche market needs -- which may very well be the case, considering the number of large-scale apps that weren't built to use it, and were never upgraded to either, and ar
Re: (Score:2)
Re:"Demonstrates..." (Score:4, Interesting)
- Dan.
Parent
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I've got to second that. It's not just that most of the projects which use it don't need it, it's that it's a kludge on top of a kludge on top of a kludge that makes IBM's zOS look good.
It's not just that DBAs perform tasks which would otherwise be done by developers or sysadmins. It's that Oracle seems to almost actively encourage the DBA as a profession. A trivial example is the autoincrement column -- even sqlite has one built in, but no, on Oracle, you have to create a sequence first, then that primary
Hey, Dell (Score:2, Interesting)
If you really want to demonstrate your commitment to openness, let us buy laptops with Ubuntu.
Re:Hey, Dell (Score:5, Insightful)
Why?
The Ubuntu laptop would end-up being more expensive (no subsidies from desktop adware or MSN). You're better off buying a cheaper, subsidized laptop with Windoze, and then wiping it with Ubuntu Linux.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Linux on a laptop is typically less of a "sure thing" than Linux on the desktop has become. Laptops have oddball setups and such that sometimes just don't work well with Linux. Given the much more limited ability to replace an individual component that isn't supported, it's also much more necessary to get all your components working out of the box.
Even for laptops that do seemingly work fine, you'll have other odd issues (such as significantly reduced battery life - this issue is actually the reason why d
Re: (Score:2)
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i would rather pay an extra 100 than have ms count one more licence for their shitty os sold. it costs them nothing to make that windows licence. you're not getting a physical product like a cd or manual.
if they were selling their product below cost like their xbox consoles and buying the product and nothing else cost them money then yes i would buy it.
yes i hate ms that much. hey it's slashdot! :-)
ymmv
Re: (Score:2)
That is short term thinking, and only perpetuates the problem.
The long term solution is to bite the bullet, pay a little more and run the others out of business.
Re:Hey, Dell & HP! (Score:4, Interesting)
It't not just Dell. I bought an HP dv8t Quad edition (core i7) for $2018.99 a few months back. After loading Linux on it, found out the ONLY way to update the BIOS is via Windows7. The ACPI in the BIOS that shipped with the laptop is severely broken, but because they have tied the BIOS update to the Windows 7 OS I have no way to update the system. I for one will NEVER buy another HP product again!
Parent
Re:Hey, Dell & HP! (Score:4, Insightful)
Same deal with a Samsung netbook that I purchased because of its semi-ruggedness (NB30). Out of the box BIOS was junk (ACPI problems, as usual, manifested as dropping keystrokes due to odd, periodic, momentary machine stalls), and the BIOS updater runs only under Windows. You can't even run the BIOS package (.exe) on another machine and manually extract the BIOS - updater recognizes that it's on a different machine and refuses to run.
Contacting Samsung was an exercise in futility. Tech support kept insisting I run the .exe and also told me that I needed to make sure that I installed the battery level monitor .exe beforehand. The tech support person could not grasp that I was running Linux, not Windows, despite my best efforts to persuade them otherwise. Unbelievable.
My mistake was not making this a dual boot machine, just to keep Windows around for such work. It's become standard operating procedure for me now to dual boot any machine that's likely to need a BIOS update (Dell, to their credit, is not one of these vendors). And with the tendency of vendors not to include CD/DVD restore media, I'll have to use some other install media to reinstall Windows just to perform what should be a simple BIOS update.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
HP is horrific. Of the 5 or 6 HP computers that I have owned or have performed "family tech support" for, each and every one of them has failed within a month after the end of the warranty period.
One of them was struck by lightning a month after I got it, it didn't matter that HP's warranty didn't cover it as an act of god because my surge protectors warranty definitely covered it. HP claimed that it was not struck by lightning, but instead someone had drenched it in soda, they offered to "fix it" at a cost
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>>>HP claimed that it was not struck by lightning, but instead someone had drenched it in soda
Do they hire monkeys for repairmen? I don't see how they could reach that kind of conclusion, if there's no soda present.
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Exactly. That is just how ridiculous their service was. It was an outright and unquestionable lie.
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Dell and HP still have to answer to MS because of market volume and legacy contracts, but with Oracle (possibly trying to be the new 800 lb gorilla in the OS market place) that might just change. That will still be tough, because Solaris is still a knitch market, and Linux is too competitive, with too much variety to choose from.
Friend/ employee hates Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a friend who works for Oracle. He's constantly bitching about them and their disorganization. He's trying to find someplace else to work, even if it's the Evil Microsoft. Wow. Must be really bad, if he's willing to do that!
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I think for him the shock is that Sun was not *as* disorganized as the new Oracle (which bought him out).
Quote: "In the Sun Solaris group, meetings moved right along and no time was wasted. In the Sun Cloud group, it depended on who ran the meeting. Under the new Oracle management, every f'ing meeting is a waste of time."
Re:Friend/ employee hates Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)
Oracle swallowed up a company that acquired a company that bought a company that had a technology I needed to use. I called Oracle and tried to find someone, anyone, who knew anything about how I could purchase it. Nobody had ever heard of either the product or the company. Finally after hours of searching I found the entire thing available fully functional for download deep inside Oracle's labyrinth of twisty little web pages, all alike. The text had disclaimers that you had to purchase a license to use the software. I called back and tried to find someone, anyone, who would let me pay for the software. No luck. I'm testing it now, but I don't know if I can use it in production. Neither does anyone else.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
What's the product? I could do some digging on the intranet and maybe come up with something...
Re:Friend/ employee hates Oracle (Score:5, Funny)
So, you use Solaris? Me too. And looking at alternatives now. It's a shame really, as the most stable gear I've run has been Solaris on Sparc.
Parent
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Solaris isn't what I was talking about, but yes, as it happens I run several file servers on Solaris. Best. System. Ever.
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Most people I hear from really enjoy working for Microsoft. It's their customers who are angry with them :)
Oracle sucks. (Score:2)
Sun allowing Oracle to buy them was the biggest mistake ever.
Oracle is taking a once great company and flushing them completely down the toilet.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Oracle Managment (Score:2, Funny)
never get used to this (Score:2)
Maybe I'm getting old, but I just can't get used to hearing things like Oracle Java and Oracle's Solaris.
Can they please just keep the old Sun name for me and just keep the revenue.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe I'm getting old
I'm 18, so I'm still considered to be relatively young by most, and even I cringe when I hear/see Sun replaced with Oracle.
Re:never get used to this (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry - I suspect you will not have to hear things like that for long. Give it five years, and those products will likely have died a slow, lingering death under the stewardship of Oracle.
Parent
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I hear that. Last week I was setting up a machine at home for Java development (I'm doing .NET work professionally right now, but I've also done years of Java dev and might well go back to it for a future project, so I like to try to keep my hand in) and seeing the Oracle logo on Java installers broke my heart.
I used Sparcs in school and I've had a soft spot for Sun since, even when they did stupid things. Oracle I've never liked and years of working with the Oracle database and/or Peoplesoft have not imp
Re: (Score:2)
No more hardware (Score:2)
I guess this is further confirmation that Oracle doesn't care to do much hardware stuff outside high end SPARC stuff.
FTW (Score:2)
Sun already did this (Score:2)
Sun was already doing this with HP, Dell, IBM...
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And in the article it said: IBM stopped doing so.
Thanks for the commitment Oracle!! (Score:2)
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er... so, if Oracle refuses to sell their OS (Solaris) to a HP, who makes a competing OS (HP-UX), that's anti-competitive behavior?
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OMFG! Call Obama! There must be and end to this NOW!
Why can't you be intelligent? Oh. Thats right AC.
Re:Ubuntu Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
are you sure this wasn't the EDS deal to resell solaris ?
when i was working for EDS, we and Sun were prety much in bed. after the acquisition by HP things began to sour a little betwen HP and sun.
now that sun is oracle, well... a completely diferent ball game. it's one thing to turn away from a nearly broken company 20 times smaller than you, but oracle is as big (at least in terms of market cap.) as HP, and they have a direct competitor to IBMs DB/2, something that HP lacks.