The Open Sourcing of Oracle 134
Thanks to Simone for pointing out this article by Andy Duncan regarding Oracle and its relationship to Open Source. The article starts out with background, and the metaphor to the Italian Renaissance is a bit odd, but I do think that this is a path Oracle is looking to walk down - what do you all think?
Re:Has to be said.... (Score:1)
The Oracle and the Matrix (Score:1)
O'Reilly to become the next Microsoft? (Score:1)
The gamble seems to be that no matter how FREE software becomes, programmers will NEVER be able to write clear documentation. We'll always need O'Reilly to turn GeekSpeak and man pages into meaningful sentences.
Have you paid your O'Reilly Tax today?
LAMP? (Score:1)
MySQL is a glorified desktop database. It is not truly relational, it lacks some very important and basic features
that databases need for high end business use (transactions, triggers, and stored procedures spring to mind).
It's good for displaying web page content and not much else.
Oracle, despite its complexity and expense, is a robust, full featured database.
It does a lot that mySQL doesn't do and probably won't ever do.
Postgresql is a much closer contender for the space that Oracle fills in a business
(i.e., databases for something other than flat web content display, etc.).
You would be a big moron to replace Oracle with mysql for your inventory tracking system, for an order database,
really for anything that involves anything except spitting out data with occasional, single user updates.
Re:unlikely. (Score:1)
It isn't that simple (or silly). I worked a company that shipped a product on MS-SQL after literally getting a payoff from Microsoft.
Turns out that the IT customerbase is very sensitive to the DB platform you choose. If they are on Oracle, they will only buy Oracle-based products. If they are a total Microsoft shop, they will only choose MS-SQL-based products. Part of the reasoning is licencing of course, but a huge part is the operational impact of a new platform. The company found the door slamming on the salesmen at larger companies purely because we were running on a non-politically correct DB.
Your product is on Oracle. That means you've got 0 resistance from Fortune 1000 companies that generally have standardized on Oracle and have the DBAs and servers set up already. Put it on Postgres or Interbase or Sybase or Microsoft, and then you'll have to fight your customer all the way to get your box into their datacenter. Maybe your bosses don't have this insight, but they'll find out.
Re:Open Source Hubris... annoying (Score:1)
Simple: BIND.
The closest is Apache, but while it is on a lot of servers, it isn't as well represented in the top traffic sites. Apache is the closest to leading its field of any package
Nope. Apache has something like 62% market share. Bind has a virtual monopoly.
Re:unlikely. (Score:1)
They would not have to purchase, set up, or support the database regardless of what it was. The database is integrated into the solution. If we were selling a product that worked with databases, your agrument would make perfect sense - in fact it would make the most sense to use odbc or jdbc or at least provide adapters for several databases.
Re:unlikely. (Score:3)
At the small silicon valley company where I work, which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, we (well, the bigwigs, of course, I'm not this brain-damaged) have decided to base our offerings at least initially on oracle rather than one of the myriad Free and non-Free alternatives simply because the thinking is that customers would think it odd if we used anything else. Never mind that other databases cost less and perform better, and the the database is in our case invisible to the customer. It's just that silly. I shit you not.
Quite true, but (Score:1)
- performance
- reliability
- managability (distributed)
- maintainance
- parallelism
If you need proof, you need to graduate college.
wal mart (Score:1)
10%??? (Score:1)
By what measure?
The Fortune 500 are much less than 1% of the business world. In terms of economic power, however...
Re:Quite true, but (Score:1)
the point (Score:1)
let's not forget that
a) Oracle is the #2 software company in the world in revenues
b) Sun makes as much revenue as Microsoft.
So.... it's not about propaganda, it's about hard, tangible numbers of what people use. Of course, you'll just say that "they've been duped into buying crap", but they people doing the purchasing probably know better than that. Hey, we use Linux, because we know its great for many tasks. Generally most places I consult for don't use MySQL or PostgreSQL (though I think we have a small intranet system somewhere using OpenBase and one that might be in Postgres...)
Re:Oracle is too expensive. (Score:1)
The above products, while not shabby themselves, are simply not in the same league. They are different solutions for different problems. Compare a Solaris box to an S/390 IBM mainframe. Different tools for different work.
Re:This *is* about opening the database, guys.. (Score:1)
Re:Listen up fuckstick. (Score:1)
Re:Maybe (Re:unlikely.) (Score:2)
If one is paying the massive amounts of money for Oracle, then they are either
a) buying a system that relies on Oracle as being there for the backend
b) Planning on using some more development tools than PHP - possibly writing things as stored procedures in the database
c) know enough of what the hell they are doing that it doesn't matter.
Having something like PHP working with it is probably the least of their worries - that is until after they get it all installed and find the app they bought doesn't provide everything and need to develop some more stuff for it.
I run a large Oracle database and two smaller ones. The big one is used by a student records package (Banner). All the interaction is done via Oracle Forms or stored PL/SQL procedures. There are a few scripts here and there written in Perl for automating some things.
One of the small databases is used by Remedy helpdesk software, and the other is used for any web applications people want to develop (normally with ASP/ODBC).
Re:This *is* about opening the database, guys.. (Score:1)
Oh yes it is:
I predict that the Oracle database server itself will be open source within ten yearsMaybe (Re:unlikely.) (Score:1)
If this integration in OSS continues, products like Oracle and Informix will find it harder to provide added value since integration with other products will eat in to that and the OSS competition will seem even stronger.
So, the difference between OSS:ing and simply adapting pricing to competion is to get into the OSS integration framework. If developers start to think equaly about PHP+MySQL as PHP+Oracle, more people will knock on Oracle door to ask how to solve various database related problems. This is allready a large revenue stream for Oracle (I guess) and the question companies like Oracle have to answer is wheather to climb onto the chimney of what _may_ be a sinking boat or redefine their business into service and consulting and try to make a living out of that.
Just a thought
/jarek
Re:O'Reilly to become the next Microsoft? (Score:1)
And I don't see that O'Reilly has a monopoly on technical books.
Some people will NEVER understand that some things are actually worth paying for.
However... (Score:2)
Re:I disagree (Score:1)
--
"In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL."
Re:Quite true, but (Score:1)
--
"In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL."
Re:I disagree (Score:3)
Pardon me for spoiling your FUD, but:
Maybe you should try using these databases before discounting them. Just because MySQL does not have transactions or row-level locking does not mean other 'free' RDBMS do not. As far as your claim that 'you tried'. What, exactly, did you try? Maybe the 'experts' you hired were stupid or incompetent. Maybe your architecture is inefficient. Maybe a hundred other things caused these problems and you incorrectly thought it was the fault of the database.
--
"In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL."
Yeah, right. (Score:1)
Oracle makes their money from a simple value proposition: "No matter what the load you need to handle, no matter how much clustering and fancy data synching you want, provided you hire a good DBA we can get you 24/7 uptime, 356 days a year, with perfect data integrity. If you have a problem, they will know how to fix it or work around it. For which, we expect you will be willing to pay through the nose, or other bodily orifice of your choice."
That ain't going away anytime soon.
--
Oracle and Open Source *NOT* Oracle becomes OSS (Score:2)
From the page: "In Oracle & Open Source, we concentrate on: Where to get today's open source base technologies and application tools; how to install them; how to connect them to Oracle; and how to modify them, should you wish to do so, to suit your own requirements"
In fact they "didn't try to address the future of open source, particularly in terms of its relationship to commercial software"
But I guess you cant expect the /. editors to check up on the facts can you. And after all you are only here for pro Linux/OSS and anti MS bias aren't you ...
Insight to Tim O'Reilly's Strategy? (Score:2)
> even put "not any time soon" in the intro.
I found this article interesting not for the insights it allegedly provides for Oracle's relationship to Open Source, but for how Tim O'Reilly apparently is trying to sell the suits on Open Source.
O'Reilly appears to be attempting to act an ambassador between the hacker community, & the suits. Look how he involved himself in the Amazon 1-click contraversy, on one hand decrying the abuse of the patent system, while on the other providing Jeff Bezos a face-saving way out of this mess. Likewise, he has hired Larry Wall, who maintains the Perl programming language, as a full-time person.
It would appear that the subtext of this article is that O'Reilly is attempting to persuade Ellison to play nicely with Open Source, to act like a Renaissance prince & patronise Open Source. And if Ellison fails to get from this suggestion the ego strokes needed to make this work, then at least the idea is planted like a seed in the minds of other software moguls.
And if this seed falls on fallow ground? Worst case is that O'Reilly gets to write an ``I told you so" article when these proprietary companies slip into Chapter 11.
Geoff
Why Larry Ellison will (probably) do fine (Score:1)
Considering that an enterprise relational DB is "boring" work compared to an OS, I don't think that either MySQL or PostgreSQL will ever grow as quickly as either Linux or Apache have. Making a full relational database which passes the ACID test is a non-trivial task, and while PostGreSQL of the two free RDBMS's has made the most progress towards this goal, I don't think it's capable of handling the terabyte-sized datasets that Oracle routinely does, and it will be a long time before anyone even thinks of even trying to do it. Why do you suppose there are only two serious contenders for a Free Software enterprise RDBMS (and up until recently, one of them didn't even fit that description entirely!)? An RDBMS is not as sexy as an OS or a desktop environment, not the sort of thing that would capture the imagination of the hackerly community. Finally, an industrial strength RDBMS like Oracle doesn't fill the needs of the hackerly community, but those of the business community. A site like slashdot certainly needs an RDBMS, but it doesn't manage terabytes of data, and neither will it be a major catastrophe if the database fails because either A, C, I, or D was not followed (it may cause inconvenience at the very most, but probably nobody is going to die or lose money as a result). Frankly, I think Larry Ellison is safe for the moment. Nothing that the Free Software World has to offer can really match Oracle at the moment. The same cannot be said of Bill Gates, though.
Re:unlikely. (Score:3)
I should hope not. Pedophilia is absolutely loathsome, and...
Oh wait. You forgot a comma.
Re:support is where the money is for Oracle (Score:1)
Ten years is a long time (Score:2)
As it stands, the postgresql project has been advancing very rapidly, and is getting extrememly close to beating Oracle in functionality. If Oracle doesn't react to this in the next few years, they're going to start taking serious hits in revenue.
Unfortunately, going open source is only *one* way they can react. Rather than going "open" they might go "free", that is, gratis. Using the db binary as a loss leader for other products (including support) wouldn't be the siliest thing they could do, and it would help to stay ahead of the *really* free competition for some time.
The Great Bridge benchmarks, Postgresql beat Oracle on speed slightly (Bruce Momjian confirms this in this interview: http://lwn.net/2001/features/Momjian/ [lwn.net]).
Version 7.1 has just been released, with the big news being the addition of outer-joins. I understand that replication is one of the next targets (and given the speed that these guys have been working at, I would expect it to be in the next rev).
From The postgresql site (http://www.postgresql.org [postgresql.org]):
Key New Features and Capabilities of Version 7.1 Include:
Lame article (Score:2)
Other than being an advertisement for some book, it looks like he's says that companies like MS and Oracle won't be historically reknown in the long run. Maybe he's right about that (although he didn't explain his reasoning), but it doesn't follow that Oracle should do it. Sometimes when someone's name survives on the lips of people centuries later, it has just as much to do with their failure as their success.
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Re:The Oracle and the Matrix (Score:1)
"Oracle, n:
2. a. A person considered to be a source of wise counsel or prophetic opinions."
From dictionary.com [dictionary.com]
Cheers,
Tim
Oracle trashed (Score:1)
Re:unlikely. -- (RTFM) (Score:1)
2 cents. (Score:1)
Re:Epic Film about Linus Torvald (Score:1)
Hollywood are you listening?
Re:Two unrelated points (Score:2)
However, Microsoft has made billions from it (and NT 4.0 before it).
They do this at a moderately low unit cost, why? Because once the development costs have been paid, they simply dump bits onto a $.10 disk and throw a cardboard box around it. The hologram is probably the most expensive thing in the package.
Microsoft, Apple, Sun, and IBM have all written (and bought, etc) OSes, of varrying complexity. Microsoft's isn't better than all of those, and it didn't cost significantly less. So why did they make money? They burned a few million copies more.
Wealth nowadays isn't necessarily from physical objects. Not to say it's not real and valid, but there is a difference between making ten physical items and making one piece of IP and running off nine copies.
Postgresql vs Oracle (Score:1)
That said, I'm sure there would exist apps where Oracle is more scalable, and Oracle probably has some 24x7 backup and support features that would be needed for some apps. But Oracle is not all its cracked up to be by any means.
Oracle and MacOSX (Score:1)
There's one key thing that Oracle has over pg and mysql, it performs VERY well. Not in one particular tiny thing, like mysql and its quickness on simple lookups. In the grander sense, it performs better.
Apple has that same thing, it does what it does REALLY well. It provides probably the easiest to use interface, and to some, the most asthetically pleasing interfaces. The hardware isnt' something to ignore either. But by opensourcing their non-key feature: a bsd operating system, which already existed before, but is customized to hell.
Will oracle do the same, and take in some opensource code to make part of their db? Maybe not, but pulling an apple stunt, giving away its code, darwin, just brings us closer to an opensource/closed source relationship we can all tolerate, if not endorce.
Btw, yes, darwin was originally freebsd, but a lot of work was done to make it something else, but apple has to take credit to improving on it in the ways that it did.
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Re:Epic Film about Linus Torvald (Score:2)
--
Re:Slow news day? (Score:2)
It was just an attempt to plug their books. The arguments were very weak. I mean, with all the Oracle developers out there, open sourcing their database products would just be a road to having their support sales gutted by a crop of instant competitors pushing their own erstwhile products. Oracle isn't that stupid.
Re:I disagree (Score:1)
PostgreSQL has all these things.
Re:Open Source Hubris... annoying (Score:1)
Time to upgrade.
Re:Quite true, but (Score:2)
Re:Inevitable (Score:2)
My guess is that in two years nobody will be able to charge for databases. MS-SQL server is being squeezed from the bottom by open source and from the top by oracle and IBM. I predict that pretty soon they'll pull an IE and give theing away in order to cut the air supply of oracle. Oracle will have to drastically cut their prices or open source it just to spite MS.
Re:Two unrelated points (Score:2)
What's wrong with that. You judge companies the same way you judge people. If somebody is a decent guy and but has a bad habit (maybe he smokes) you don't go around bitching about the smoking. If another person is an evil bastard who likes to beat up on everybody then you may mention the fact that along with being an evil basted he also smokes.
MS is an admitted enemy of open source. Oracle wants to be friends and is trying to get to know them better. Of course you would critisize people who call you communist, un american and hippies and would prefer to hang out with people who think you might be OK to go to the movies with.
Re:the point (Score:2)
Re:Listen up fuckstick. (Score:2)
Hemos wrote:
<i>Thanks to Simone for pointing out this article by Andy Duncan regarding Oracle and its relationship to Open Source. The article starts out with background, and the metaphor to the Italian Renaissance is a bit odd, but I do think that this is a path Oracle is looking to walk down - what do you all think? </i>
<BR><BR>
Now, "this" clearly refers to the article, not to anything else. So, yes, you are rude for insulting tcharron, and wrong for not reading Hemos's blurb.
Re:I disagree (Score:2)
Wrong: http://www.greatbridge.com/product/support.php
Re:Quite true, but (Score:2)
Oh? http://apachetoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-
If you need proof, you need to graduate college.
You mean, if I don't believe your corporate propaganda, I must be ignorant? Well, I guess that's what Mark Twain meant by "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
Hm, or maybe you're just not *allowed* to give proof, because Oracle refuses to allow companies to publish benchmarks of their software?
Make Life Easier for SQL Newbies (Score:3)
SuperID
Free Database Hosting [freesql.org]
Oracle Applications! Does anybody care ... (Score:1)
The other half is Oracle's suite of enterprise standard software, Oracle Applications, which is a huge and unmaintainable pile of spaghetti code that runs against Oracle8. If Oracle would ever opensource the Apps, nobody would even try and download this stuff, much less compile and run it. It's just not worth the trouble.
Insights? I'm not so sure.... (Score:2)
He only worked as an external, in the UK data center - that very far removed from the real
strategy and planning at Oracle. I worked for Oracle for 6 years, including working in their
HQ in Redwood Shores - and I can tell you, if you're not in the HQ, then you might as well
be working for a different company.
Really, this is just his personal belief, with no real basis. Not that I'm saying that one day
Oracle won't go open source, but there's no evidence for it at the moment.
My personal observations are that Oracle has moved on from focusing solely on the rdbms side
of things for their revenue, and they're putting more resource into building the applications side
of the business. Back in the early 90's, Larry saying (at least internally) that the database was
their main focus, and that their applications were only a side show. Recently, Larry has been
publically pushing Oracle's applications, focusing more of the company on sell apps.
So, I'd say that Oracle is making the core database less important, revenue wise, these days,
and maybe they could open source it in the long run, but I don't seem them changing anything for
many years to come.
Slow news day? (Score:1)
Please let us know when it is some time soon, until then, post something more interesting.
Re:Oracle is too expensive. (Score:1)
Re:I disagree (Score:1)
It supports triggers, transactions, procedural languages and what not. And it is far easier to set up and maintain than Oracle 8.1.7 on a Linux platform.
Of course, right tool for the job. Oracle still wins when it comes to enterprise features as clustering, data integrity and advanced security.
But for how long?
Don't discount open source databases because you've evaluated them a while ago. Check again, 'cause you'll be amazed at the progress being made. Which in some cases means going for the free alternative and spending some of the dough you've saved on extra hardware.
Cya,
bBob
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Re:Epic Film about Linus Torvald (Score:2)
GCC being strict.
long k[]={0,178}; char*p=(char*)&k[1]; main(){while(p---(char*)k) putchar(72+((k[1]>>(p-(char*)k)*2)& 3|(!((p-(char*)k)&1)<<2) ));}
G.
Re:Quite true, but (Score:2)
That's not what he meant. I interpreted that statement as: if you need proof, stop playing with toy systems and try rolling out a large, real-world, distributed, scalable (insert as many other features as your application needs) production database, one which your business depends on otherwise you go out of business, using your favourite open source DMBS and a high-end commercial one like Oracle and see which one does the job adequately.
Of course, you may have to wait for a hardware failure, but that's okay, it'll happen within six months or so.
Inevitable (Score:1)
What was the benefit to Jim Barksdale to give away Communicator? Why would he throw away years of engineering for free? Netscape was a very profitable company too.. at the beginning.
Here's the point: it just doesn't matter what Larry Ellison wants-- it's what he'll be forced to do. Mr. Barksdale discovered that people became unwilling to pay for his browser when an equivalent or better product could be had for free (IE3+). As MySQL (and especially PostgreSQL) mature, people will begin asking the same questions of Oracle v. OSS alternatives as they already are now with Windows NT v. Linux, Solaris v. Linux, Apache v. IIS, Apache v. iPlanet, Windows NT v. Samba, Perl/PHP v. ASP, etc.
Popularity Versus Quality (Score:1)
You offer little evidence for this sweeping assertion, other than that you have got Oracle to work well at your clients. For real scalability, Oracle sucks.
Ask any Data Warehousing specialist who's tried to implement a multi-terabyte DW with Oracle: the fields are littered with the corpses of failed attempts using Oracle, since their one-size-fits-all OLTP architecture doesn't suit DW well at all. For example, Walmart's new joint-venture e-commerce business has its IT run by non-Walmart Oracleheads, who brought in Oracle to replace Informix for the project (Walmart itself uses Informix for everything), and as a result they were offline for a month, struggling to make it work. They refused to divulge specifics to the press, but we can take a rough guess.
Oracle trades mainly on its name and size, and buys key reference accounts like Amazon with free upfront licenses and consultancy. But it is far from being the best. It's just good enough, that's all.
Oracle and MS are often the default choice for the timid business, as Oracle and SQL Server DBAs are easier to find than DBAs for technically better DBs: ironic, as most Oracle projects that I've seen seem to require more DBAs than an equivalent DB2 or Informix implementation would have. This therefore becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
So please don't confuse popularity with quality. If PostgreSQL does catch up sufficiently on scalability, and offers better value than Oracle, people will start using it in droves, just as Apache beat the once-mighty Netscape Server.
Re:Popularity Versus Quality (Score:1)
So for a new project which you know will be multi-terabyte from Day 1, Oracle is not the best choice.
Less effort + fewer DBAs = better price/perf. All businesses like to do things for best value, not just Walmart. I'm speaking of real businesses here, not pretend tech-boom startups of course...
Re:wal mart (Score:1)
Oracle and Open Src (Score:2)
Simple. The same reason you go with Cisco.
So why on earth would Oracle go open source and give away their software for free?
2nd point. The article claims that Sun is moving towards Linux. I dispute this claim. Solaris is the flagship at Sun and will be for the next 5 years.
the myth of the great chasm (Score:1)
Look, I'm sure it would involve a bunch of paperwork for a bunch of lawyers, but the distance between where Oracle is now, and Oracle as a free software product is really not that great. It's simple: the owner of the proprietary license changes it to a free license. That's it. Done. Now you have an enterprise level database with a free software license. Impossible? Nonsense.
The real question is whether or not such a move would be economically viable in the long run. Especially in the case of enterprise level databases, I think it would be. This is not the kind of software you merely install on a bunch of PC's and sprinkle around the organization. The database engine itself is only the beginning. For maximum impact, it needs to be installed on specialized hardware by trained technicians. Database applications need to be developed and/or customized to fit end user requirements. Data integrity must be ensured, and it's long term viability must be maintained beyond particular product lifecycles. This is not easy work. The people who can do it are not cheap to come by.
Can such services support multi-billion multi-national corporations? That I'm not sure about. But you don't need
Will it happen? Who knows. Could it? No doubt.
Re:Will it happen? NO (Score:1)
But a service play could work for someone else, a Great Bridge, for example. While I think it's true that Oracle is a more mature, more familiar, and more trusted environment; they also have a soft white underbelly. Even if open source solutions don't match all of Oracle's achievments (yet), they are more than adequate for many tasks.
Remember DOS? 80% of what people want for 20% of the cost. That was a winning strategy then, and I don't think things have changed much. But Microsoft had their sights aimed higher. And where was Microsoft aiming? The glass house: UNIX. And what happened? Linux. It's free.
Fun stuff to watch, that's for sure.
Italian Renaissance (Score:1)
... but not too too early (Score:1)
Re:Epic Film about Linus Torvald (Score:1)
What have I done wrong?
Oracle already is walking down that path (Score:1)
As to open sourcing their database that will never happen. Yes never is a long time but it's the best option out there for enterprise-level database needs. If anyone thinks the open source databases are going to catch up anytime soon they need to seek therapy ;) That isn't to say that the open source alternatives aren't good....they just aren't Oracle.
Re:Oracle and Open Src (Score:1)
Re:unlikely. (Score:1)
Listen up fuckstick. (Score:1)
That's not a discussion.
This is.
Got it?
Thanks, Cunt.
I disagree (Score:3)
And please don't bring up MySQL or postgreSQL (you haven't so far, and I am grateful). If you want cheap web transactions fine, but I am talking about true DB apps where you need row-level locking, rollback, transactions, etc.. all the things That the above mentioned RDBMS's have. I use MSSQL behind a server that gets about half a million hits a day, and it is fine. Granted the machines are dual proc powerhouses, but it runs great. I have Oracle at my clients who have several thousand employees accessing financials. Nothing else could be as solid and run this.
I say this because we
Anyway, you know what I'm sayin. Right tool for the right job in the end.
unlikely. (Score:5)
Re:Listen up fuckstick. (Score:1)
Why dont you try and be constructive, no need to resort to name calling just because someone didnt agree with your initial post.
Maybe your a new breed of troll
Re:Epic Film about Linus Torvald (Score:1)
Re:I disagree (Score:1)
Whenever the subject of open source databases comes up, everyone talks about the usual suspects:
No-one ever seems to mention SAP DB [sap.com]. I'm no database expert, and I would really like to hear what people think of it. How does it compare to MySQL, Postgresql and Interbase on features?
Open Source Hubris... annoying (Score:2)
We can even support our tools on MySQL, but we'd have to make a lot of changes because we have database appications, and we'd have to change them to MySQL applications because MySQL isn't really a database, it's a storage format that is retrievable via SQL.
However, Oracle kicks the shit out of these low-end toys.
Hands down, they are number 1, by far.
Open Source databases are not ANYWHERE close to catching up. MySQL is a simple database whose entire reason for existance is powering websites. If you are a programmer, NOT a database designer, and you think that a database will help you store your data better than files and AWK, you use MySQL.
PostgreSQL is at least a properly designed system, but it is limited.
However, despite NEITHER database approaching Oracle, we have decided that Open Source will overtake them?
This is arragance beyond belief.
I don't get it, what Open Source product has been SO successful that it dominates everything?
The closest is Apache, but while it is on a lot of servers, it isn't as well represented in the top traffic sites. Apache is the closest to leading its field of any package.
Linux? Not a shot in hell. Linux doesn't lead in ANY market. Desktop, Microsoft Owns that. Unix Server market: owned by Sun. Unix Workstation Market: MAYBE won by Linux, but Apple OS X is likely to own that by the end of the year.
Let's be real people. Open Source Products right now are getting better. Whenever they reach your "good enough" level, then you can use them. I need certain features, PostgreSQL provides them. As much as I acknowledge that Oracle is better, PostgreSQL meets my needs and is cheaper.
However, to suggest that Open Source will win and dominate everything is kind of silly. This Manifest Destiny, that we will in the long run own the world is kind of silly. It seems that the areas Open Source has "won" have been small servers/daemons (sendmail, bind, etc.) where the open source version does the trick, the needs are limited, and therefore there is limited value added options.
However, let us understand where open source packages are good and where they need work. The big-three software titans will be remembered as the Carnegies, Rockafellers, etc., of the early computer era. However, to be deifying Linus this early is kind of silly, don't you think?
Alex
Re:Open Source Hubris... annoying (Score:2)
Alex
Re:Latest Postgres 7.1 _is_ stable. (Score:2)
Alex
You don't want to see the code... (Score:2)
Most of comercial products are in this stage and the companies will think twice before releasing the code just to be exploited and thrown out. The only one who would benefit at this point are competitors.
We are following the open source movement kind of closely at Oracle and I am sure that if there would be a way how to gain any profit by open sourcing any of the great bunch of products, Oracle would do it immediatelly.
Of course any opinions expressed here are just mine and mostly likely different from these of Larry Ellison or anyone else in the company :)
Its too early... (Score:4)
But databases are NOT the point. Oracle is offering complete solutions. Its not just the database, its complete application server, soon also development environment, its CRM and ERP and everything tightly integrated and cooperating. As far as I would like to, I don't see open source products even started on this line.
For some parts of what Oracle offers you have open source alternatives, though still few years behind in the development, but there are whole parts of Oracle solutions where there are no alternatives in Open source whatsoever.
And I will tell you when will be the right time for Oracle to start to worry about opensourcing its database. At the point when first bank of the world top10 will adopt ANY open source database. Not sooner, but not even later.
Of course any opinions expressed here are just mine and mostly likely different from these of Larry Ellison or anyone else in the company :)
Re:When you have more than a couple million rows.. (Score:1)
Please don't rule out Sybase for large systems. I work for a large investment bank, and we use both Sybase and Oracle heavily. (As you would imagine a bank might..
Whilst Oracle does have the edge for indexing extremely large DSS systems (bitmap indexing..) Sybase is more than capable of holding its own - even for tables >20Gb in size with rowcounts in the tens of millions. People tend to forget just how much cheaper than Oracle Sybase is - IMHO it offers much more bang for buck...
If only its technical support in the UK did not suck rocks most of the time...
Ah well, Rant over.
When you have more than a couple million rows... (Score:2)
chug chug [nethole.com]
Re:Oracle is too expensive. (Score:2)
strategic partnership (Score:4)
However, i'm sure they want to keep charging a premium for their proprietary database and app server software, as long as they can.
Plus, it's a bonus for Ellison to stick it to Gates. It makes sense though, as long as Oracle stays significantly better than the open source alternatives.
Re:Epic Film about Linus Torvald (Score:2)
John
Re:Never happen (Score:2)
Whether it will happen anytime soon is anyone's guess, but if there's demand it will be done.
/Brian
Re:Lame Moderation (Score:2)
Look, to the idiot who modded me down: I'm one of you Open Source Zealots (tm). I simply have enough guts to admit when what I support isn't doing the job. And I still wouldn't be trying to run Linux on a single high-load server.
(I'm also a hardcore Mac junkie, and there's no way in hell I'd be running a database server off a pre-X MacOS either. LinuxPPC? Sure. X? Hell yeah. But there are things the Classic Mac simply doesn't do well (apart from network security).)
/Brian
Re:Never happen (Score:2)
And in any case, if a company needs it and can't get it, they'd hire someone to write it anyway.
/Brian
Larry's chance to prove he's not nuts... (Score:4)
Okay, now that I got that out of the way (and I probably won't be when I actually get this posted...)
I think Oracle probably holds the same place in the database world as Sun does in the server world. Open Source is a great thing, but it hasn't quite evolved to the enterprise-level capability that's needed. If I was doing anything involving heavy processing, you'd better believe I'd be running a Linux (or BSD or Darwin) farm to do the work. But if I needed something that was going to handle anything and everything I could throw at it, Solaris would still be my first choice (and you can get source anyway, even if the licensing is ludicrous).
Oracle's future is in positioning themselves as the Solaris of databases; when MySQL and PostgreSQL finally do catch up, they should be preparing themselves to go down the same route as IBM, opening up to the Open Source community while providing a rock-solid support network for their users. If Larry Ellison wants to prove to the world that he's not quite as much of a nutjob as everyone thinks he is, this is the sort of idea that should be on his roadmap.
/Brian
They don't do a lot, do they? (Score:2)
A quick scan of chapter one seems to learn that Oracle itself doesn't do anything Open Source, except supplying Oratcl, a scripting tool.. So it's all about what *other* people do concerning open source and Oracle compared to what Oracle itself is doing in Open source. The last part can be easily answered: not a lot, except the already mentioned Oratcl and porting Oracle 8i to Linux (but not free and open source I presume).
Re:"Oracle" is Blaphemous, Preposterous, Sacreligi (Score:2)
INNER JOIN Holy_Ghost ON Father.Holy_GhostID = Holy_Ghost.ID INNER JOIN Son ON Father.SonID = Son.ID
WHERE Divine_Revelation = True AND Gods_Other_Than_Me = False AND Teaching_Untainted_By_Quick_Buck_Evangelist > 0
Oracle: (0 rows returned)
Never happen (Score:3)
Be wary of what Oracle says (Score:2)
http://jamesthornton.com/acs/benchmarks-ora817-pg7 03.html [jamesthornton.com]
So much for "openness", although if you look hard enough you and draw your own conclusion about the name of a "leading proprietary database application" is you can see PostgreSQL can perform impressively:
http://www.angelfire.com/nv/aldev/pgsql/GreatBridg e.html [angelfire.com]
And they are known for dirty marketing tricks, where once they lock you in they jack up the price:
http://pub13.ezboard.com/fiwetheydatabases.showMes sage?topicID=76.topic&index=1
[ezboard.com]
Re:Inevitable (Score:2)
I'm not saying MySQL or PostgreSQL won't every be competitive with Oracle. I'm saying that they won't be for a long time yet. Even when they do become competitive it's doubtful whether Oracle would gain anything by opening their code.
Two unrelated points (Score:4)
This is a nice illustration of what I find so unappealing about the "Free everything!" crowd. There is an utter contempt for the skill, talent, labor and risk that go into creating the goods they want to redistribute. In this case, it's the idea that creating software is simply "blasting bits" onto media. In other contexts, it's a similar attitude towards the creation of music, pharmaceuticals, inventions, brand names, literature... The only professions worthy of respect are sysadmin, Linux advocate or seller of T-shirts and stuffed monkeys. I'm no Libertarian but people like this make me want to beat them over the head with a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
In an entirely unrelated point, notice that the same guy then sings the praises of Oracle for involving itself with free software, while they keep their DB entirely proprietary and shackled with the sort of licensing MS would be roundly denounced for.
Oracle has the same privilige games have on the desktop; they're cut total immunity from Open Source advocacy, probably because they're simply too important to the advocates to forgo. In fact, both Taco and Hemos seem to believe [slashdot.org] that as long as their their Windows partitions are only used for games, they don't really exist the rest of the time.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
OS Oracle - it COULD happen (Score:3)
This is particularly likely if they decide to re-engineer the product's kernel to be more object-oriented. Oracle's attempts at adding object features to its database started at 7.3 with user defined data types, got a huge boost at version 8.0 with user-defined object types, and another kick forward in 8i (8.1) with the internal Java engine. But it's all just grafted onto a relational kernel that hasn't changed significantly since version 7. (The rumor is that Oracle's developers are afraid to touch it for fear of breaking something, so all new features are bolted on using PL/SQL packages.)
So, let's say they rewrite the kernel from the ground up and give it a new name. It becomes the flagship product, and that clears the way for Oracle to release the older source code to whomever wants it. They'd be making most of their money on subscriptions to their online apps anyway.
MAKE KARMA FAST! (Score:5)
1) mod up the five slashdotters on the list below.
2) reply to the article (not this post).
3) copy this post into your new post.
4) Remove the top karma whore
5) add a link to your
6) post!
7) Paste the URL of your post into your
Within days you will receive at least 50 karma points.
People to mod up
--