I was  just read again the article at ITNews about how Larry sees the future of Oracle under his stewardship. I can only say that for someone that relies on the Oracle ecosystem for my bread and butter I can’t be happier. The business that will keep me going with employment is in the middle of this and will require myself and many others that want to be involved for some time to come. I must say I am surprised by the Exadata figures, $1billion in the pipeline is pretty impressive and shows how the future of the Sun Oracle relationship might improve the livelihood of those people that relied on the old Sun ecosystem and that there is a lot of life in the old Sun dog yet and that can only be good for them. Interesting the statements about Silicon it makes sense, there is a number of technologies that Oracle has that will excel as embedded technologies in the silicon. These would include database functions for data handling, already doing this in the Exadata, but expect it to become more widespread as time goes on. There is crypto capabilities in some of the inherited hardware for Sun and this will become more tightly coupled for Advanced Security, SSL on the middle tier  and other functionality where crypto is required in some measure. Embedded databases using say Times Ten might become a reality Coherence embedded in the network layer., so caching is very close to the network adaptor.

What else did Larry say of interest EMC is vulnerable, thats interesting they have a great product group and solid products with a strong market share in virtualization and yet Larry has in effect said watch this space. Interesting fight ahead is what I see.

See ya round

Peter

EU says U.S. comment on Oracle, Sun deal unusual | Reuters

The line in this article made me wonder as to what it was that the EU was trying to really protect with this deal. I originally thought it was SAP, as they had an arrangement with MySQL, however I see that they may have closed that arrangement in 2007, cant keep up with all the news. You have to wonder though at the comment “It could be very difficult for a competitor using MySQL codes to sufficiently replace the competitive constraints currently exerted by MySQL in a timely manner,” What competitor are they referring to if its not SAP. What other application companies such that there existence or failure would have ramifications within Europe to suggest that Oracles management, I wont say control of MySQL, would impact a competitor. Does BAAN use MySQL or some other EU application developer with a sufficiently large market share?

But then just as some were not entirely happy with Suns management of MySQL they forked the codebase to do as they wanted. The same will happen under Oracle if Oracle cannot manage the product for the betterment of MySQL and the community. Many will then commence migrating their websites etc to the fork as word extends of Oracles troublesome ways. MySQL will move on and Oracle will be left with a brand and there own version. Don’t forget and old adage, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”. This would seem to be a great example of where Oracle will need to work hard to do just that.

I think it is a load of rubbish and the EU is stalling for an EU company and regardless SAP would seem to be the one with the most to loose.

If I was a shareholder of SUN stock I would be seriously questioning this and whether the damage that it is inflicting on the company warrants a lawsuit.

So EU fess up as to the real motive or step out of the way

See ya round

Peter

Ok I am sure others are thinking things but I am going to be bold and list my predictions for the world as it may be post the Sun Oracle Merger. I have been telling this to people around the office and I thought well lets make a real fool and try it out there in the big wide world.

This is my take on how the Sun products fare after the merger, here we go:

Why you ask, MySQL has a huge base in lightweight databases across the web supporting many Open Source projects and millions of websites. Oracle cannot sell Oracle databases licenses to all those Most cannot afford it and many will just migrate to a new free product. Instead Oracle will increase support for MYSQL doing what it does best. It will look to leveraging from those customers so that when they need to scale up to something bigger for a project, they will look to Oracle for the Oracle database to support that project. Oracle already a couple of years ago bought a transaction engine for My SQL, so that will dovetail in nicely. One of the first things I expect oracle to do is get the MySQL people together to understand the issues with the fragmentation of the code base and forks that have developed and bring everyone back to the same single code base. It is to Oracles best interest to have the efforts singularly focused to utilise MySQL as a great feed product into the use of the other products and Oracle Support for your MySQL databases.

Prediction: It’s staying and will get bigger and better

This is probably the real baby oracle wants out of all this. They have been major contributors for a number of years to the development of Java. Oracle has a huge investment in Java and its future, They will tend and care for it well as if they convince IBM of their unworthiness of holders of the flag IBM will make their life hell. It probably will not help either and be a benefit to Microsoft more than any other. FX will have a lot of effort poured into it to develop rich Java applications this is something Oracle will see great benefit in not only for their own products but for many other products. Expect to see a lot of good stuff come from the Java team to support all Java developers to build fast rich and easy developed Web Applications.

Prediction: It’s staying and will get bigger and better

This has been a niche product for most of its life. It had many issues and Sun never saw it worth developing fully. I don’t see it going away instead I see the Open Source project being better resourced to garner product enhancements that go into the SPARC platform. Expect a solid X86 Open Source project, but don’t expect Oracle databases to run unless it develops code compatibility with Linux and its usage widens dramatically. Oracle has supported Oracle 10 on x86 but has seen little penetration.

Prediction: Will remain as Open Source

The Glassfish project will remain and will be open-source, the commercial end will go as Oracle focuses its efforts on Weblogic. Interesting and useful features and ideas will evolve in Glassfish and be ported into Weblogic.

Prediction: Its staying but only as open source

Particularly the SPARC business was always part of the main plan so it has a proposed long life ahead. X86 there is no reason to ditch it as it runs the Linux program of which there is a large investment on Oracles part. hardware not going anywhere and I expect further acquisitions to build out the Sun hardware product range over time to provide a Sun data centre.

Prediction: Its staying, but only as open source

Sun has a good business here and some of the Oracle product might end up dead instead, replaced by Sun product. Once again the open Source projects will be alive and well. Oracle has a great source of product ideas in all the open source project, They are great at the business end and will monetise it. Some will stay and some will be retired as oracle puts together a better solution out of existing and the new Sun gear.

Prediction: Some of it is staying

Netbeans is possibly going to fold. Oracle already has JDeveloper and supports Eclipse for Weblogic. I don’t see why this would be kept unless it has a substantial user base that is worth maintaining.

Prediction: I expect it to go.

This just doesn’t fit with Oracle, but could it I do think it has great value. Weave the oracle Instant client into the product in the Star Office version or just make it easily integrate and allow the use of Open Office base or any other part be able to integrate to the databases both Oracle and MySQL. I see further integration to other products in the Oracle suite driving a compelling reason for corporations to give Open Office some daylight in their product mix.

Prediction: Its staying

I also see Oracle working to develop a bundle for deployment that targets Microsoft from the bottom in the application server and database market using Linux/Solaris x86/Glassfish and MySQL as the basis of that offering. many of them would not have bought Oracle but will have to opportunity of buying Oracle support for their bundled server. Oracle only needs to add some great console tools similar to a CPanel product that web hosts already use and a well managed web driven appliance product is ready to rock and white ant the low end MS customer base

I think the new Sun driven Exabyte “Wow what a machine is showing the way of the future with the Sun Oracle Merger and unfortunately it doesn’t run Solaris for those that were wondering”

There will be some products that end, but they probably never would have lived with Sun as an independent business anyway.

So that’s my predictions

Anyone else willing to guess the future?

See ya round

Peter

Sun Is Said to Cancel Big Chip Project – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com So I wonder what Larry thinks of this, is it part of his plans or has Sun pulled to pin too early or is it a smokescreen that Oracle is putting about to take attention away and allow the team to do what it needs to do whilst sorting it out. I am not sure Larry would be too happy writing off the effort unless it really is so bad that they cant possibly produce a working reliable unit. Maybe this is what is needed to shake Sun up when Oracle does come on board. If this baby isn’t too bad, I wou

ld say to Larry to make it happen as it would be a major coup and show the Sun hardware business isn’t dead yet. It just needed better funding to light its way.

I am certain this will be one of Oracle biggest hurdles when it finally takes over Sun. It is going to have to fine tune the existing hardware lines and add to the future. If Rock isn’t all bad then maybe it is something Oracle needs to drop a wad of cash into so that Rock gets the life it was to have had. I am sure there is a lot of Oracle customers that would like to see those ships go.

On another note the Niagara based servers CMT  are screamers and perhaps Larry will have them optimize them as Grid is the future and potentially they are the basis of the Grid. A Quad CPU Niagara 2 has enormous thread processing power and if your application is based around short sharp bursts of processing, with very short transactions and the ability to run them in parallel when suitable then they will fly on a low speed CPU, only 1.2GHz. It is the threads that give these boxes there enormous throughput, but from my experience older applications are less likely to show these servers in their best light and bad queries in an application, basically if you serialize things you are shot on performance, else stand back. Another interesting feature of these servers is they seems to have a very flat and stable performance characteristic as you load the system with processing requirements. The overall time for tasks when plotted shows that the time ramps up a little then it is constant event though the usage is increased say tenfold and finally you get to flood it out and the response times rapidly deteriorate, unlike older CPU architectures which exhibit a fairly consistent exponential graph for users to degrading performance.

Anyway it will be interesting what Oracle makes of it all once the deal is done and they have had time to get a real good look at what they bought. I am expecting some interesting stuff,  that is Oracles way.

See ya round

Peter