The long reach of Oracle

[eugene.gorelik-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org (Eugene Gorelik)]

I agree with Rich and share his concerns regarding Oracle involvement in the
open-source. It is quite surprising for me to hear about Oracle's commitment
to the open-source development.

In the past few years Oracle was mostly growing though acquisitions and from
my personal experience many of the software
products acquired by Oracle suffered significant quality issues in the
subsequent releases.

I think Oracle making strong emphasis on sales and marketing following "good
enough to sell" strategy when developing software.
With some of the acquired Oracle products my impression was that the only
development which is still active are patches and bug fixes.

This is just my personal opinion, but I think companies like IBM, Google and
Microsoft have made significantly larger contributions to the open-source
and computer science in general.

Talking about MySQL, I don't believe that it was the main target of the
Sun's acquisition. Oracle is trying to become a one stop shop for customers
and therefore it needed Sun's expertise in Servers hardware, Java, OS and
Storage. But MySQL acquisition will certainly make Oracle more competitive
when competing with Microsoft SQL Server for small and medium businesses.

-- Eugene Gorelik

On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Richard Pieri <richard.pieri-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>wrote:

> On Jul 11, 2010, at 10:15 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> >
> > #1 MySQL doesn't compete against oracle database.  They're different
> > products, and whenever somebody chooses one or the other, the other
> wasn't
> > really an option.  They each satisfy different needs.
>
> Correct!  MySQL isn't competition for Oracle, never has been.  MySQL and
> Oracle scale differently.  MySQL scales out horizontally: you put a huge
> server farm in front of the database backend to improve MySQL performance.
>  MySQL is very, very good at this, which is a big part of why it's the "M"
> in the LAMP stack.  Oracle, on the other hand, scales vertically: you just
> keep adding more and more connections until you run out of resources at
> which point you transition to a bigger server.
>
> Why would you scale vertically instead of horizontally?  When you need
> access to hundreds of terabytes of data and you need it *now* because a
> delay of 1 second costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars or a city power
> grid loses power (shameless plug: take a look at what local company Enernoc
> is doing).  This is the meat of Oracle's business, large databases that need
> to scale up.  You hardly ever hear about these types of installations.  The
> organizations that run them tend to be very quiet about the details of their
> operations.  They are out there, however, and they are the meat of Oracle's
> business.  MySQL doesn't even dream of operating at this level.
>
> The flip side of that is that Oracle doesn't scale well horizontally.  You
> can do it but Oracle just can't do it as elegantly as MySQL.  And that is
> why, or a big chunk of why, Oracle bought Sun: to get MySQL.  Not to kill
> it, but to fill in the gap between Berkeley DB and Oracle DB.
>
> --Rich P.
>
>
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