Oracle Versions

A funny/sacrcastic post from Tom kyte regarding the urban legends around which Oracle versions are more “stable”. Mr. Kyte’s point being that there is absolutely no hard evidence that any one production release is “better” than another. It is just urban legend.

Ask Tom

To add to that point, let’s look at the idea that the R2 or R3 is the “best” release to use.
Any one the following scenarios could have been the numbering scheme for the current releases of Oracle. It was largely a marketing decision which scheme was chosen

10gR1 10gR1 10gR1
10gR2 11gR1 10gR2
11gR1 11gR2 10gR3

The current 11gR1 release could easily have been 10gR3 or 11gR2. Would that somehow have made it magically more stable?

The lesson being to avoid getting caught up in the folklore about what release is “best”. Instead pick the release that best meets your needs and test it appropriately. That will be your “best” release.

And a prediction, the next release will be 12c. c is for cloud, cloud computing will be called the next step beyond the grid. I’m not counting on seeing a 11gR2 and I expect Oracle will simply drop the release numbers to get around this whole “which release is best” nonsense.

The End may be Closer than You Think

The end being the “End of Corporate Computing” as Nick Carr has called the utility computing model.

In his blog, Brian Cinque, the chief datacenter architect for Sun Microsystems IT, sets a target of 2015 for SunIT to shutdown all of its data centers in favour buying IT from central utilities.

Sun may have a vested interest in pushing this envelope since they want to sell lots of new servers to these new utilities but that’s still only SEVEN years away.

Given the lifecycle of data center servers can be 5 years or longer, your next upgrade cycle could well be your last. In fact, if you just refreshed, you might be done now.

Let the great data center tear down begin.

My Sun SQL

The bottom end of the database market may get a shakeup now that Sun has bought MySQL. We’ll have to see what sort of support models Sun comes up with but this should remove enterprise class support as a concern, especially for customers already on Sun systems.

For price or license sensitive customers,  paying no license at all is obviously appealing. Just removing the hassle of tracking licenses is an incentive itself. Will the bottom now drop out of the bottom of the market? Of the big three, I would suspect SQLserver is most vulnerable since it is sold on price more than Oracle or DB2. Anyone buying Oracle Enterprise licenses can’t very price sensitive, I don’t see much impact there and Oracle already gives away low end versions.

If Sun has success with MySQL, will it drag PostgreSQL up along with it? PostgreSQL is already “commercialized” as EnterpriseDB and RedHatDB but I haven’t seen much traction in the market so far.

I can’t help thinking this is a bit of a shot back at Oracle. Oracle now supports Linux, undercutting Sun’s preeminence as the Oracle platform of choice. So Sun shoots back by supporting MySQL.

I never understood why a software company like Oracle would encourage open source software. For Sun (or IBM or HP), using open source software to possibly drive hardware sales makes some sense but for Oracle? I don’t get it.

EnterpriseDB

THis isn’t news but I just recently gave EnterpriseDB a spin.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Larry Ellison’s giant ego will be getting even bigger.

EnterpriseDB bills itself as an Oracle compatible database. It is PostgeSQL with a PL/SQL and SQLPLUS layer on top of it. Most Oracle PL/SQL apps and scripts are said run on it.
The focus is on the app side. The administration is still largely PostgreSQL though some of the Oracle DBA views are replicated.

With Oracle giving away low end versions, Express and StandardOne, I don’t see a lot of incentive for the Oracle compatibility. PostgreSQL on its own has enough merit that this is still worthwhile though. Some Oracle compatibility is just a bit of icing perhaps.