|
|
|
| Authored by: kuroshima on Monday, April 16 2012 @ 02:18 PM EDT |
Everyone is MySQL this, MySQL that, but the real competition,
feature-wise, to Oracle is PostgreSQL. That is a serious open
source database, fully ACID compliant (Most MySQL databases
are configured to use the crappy MyISAM, that doesn't even
allow referential integrity!), yet you don't hear much on it.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 16 2012 @ 02:28 PM EDT |
Yep, MySQL was the real jewel, specially since it was very popular and had
potential to become a serious competitor if it had the right backing. Also don't
forget Solaris and all the technologies it brings with it (file systems,
security systems, etc). That was really important to Oracle since a significant
amount of their existing customers used Oracle products on Solaris. They didn't
really need to buy Sun to gain access to Java, since they already have access to
it. Gaining greater influence over the JCP could be part of it, but I doubt they
would have wanted to pay that much just for that. That's only the software side
of course.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 16 2012 @ 03:12 PM EDT |
I think of "hedging" as a game of three-card monty. You can expect to pay
your broker for it, but don't expect it to net you anything of
value.
It's possible that when hedging was first conceived - along the
concept of diversifying your investments - it had value.
But... when used
in the concept of "hedging your potential bet by betting against yourself" - the
banker wins every time. Money for nothing!
That's my humble opinion on
hedging - something Wall Street seems to value that I certainly do
not!
Caveat: this doesn't mean Oracle didn't value it... I simply point
out that there could be other value not identified by the analysts....
especially if they are analysts like MOG, Enderle and Mueller.
RAS[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 16 2012 @ 04:09 PM EDT |
not convinced.
-What MySQL did do is stop it adding features that made it more of a competitor.
Yet it brought little money in to sun, and being GPL wasn't something Oracle can
take away. All Oracle could do is stop anyone making money by selling a non-GPL
version, and force anyone adding more features to MySQL to fork. Which is
exactly what Facebook have done.
-Buying Java should have given Oracle more control over Enterprise developers.
They've still got IBM to contend with, the OSS "Spring" framework is
an excellent competitor to Java EE (the "standard"), and works very
well with MySQL and open source message queue tools. Plus it helps to have
goodwill from the Apache Java projects, which they've just lost.
What Larry did buy was a hardware group that was good at bringing to market
high-end machines, with the weakly-OSS Solaris OS. Linux and x86 had almost
destroyed this business, as together they destroyed the value proposition of
Solaris "it's a good Unix" and "Sparc servers are what you
need". SUNW have never been able to compete on price with Dell, HP &
IBM on mainstream x86 servers, and HP and IBM beat them on Oracle performance.
What Oracle are doing in the DB land is trying to "vertical" by having
the only hardware that runs Oracle. They're in a lawsuit with HP about dropping
support for the high-end HP servers (which were faster than the sun ones, what a
co-incidence), and are probably eyeing up IBM's contracts too.
That's what Larry bought: the opportunity to get into the vertical HW and
database model, get all the money and support revenue from both, and remove from
his customers the ability to go to other vendors for anything. And remember:
once your data is in Oracle RDBMs, it stays there. You code for, it you
optimize for it: Larry owns you.
The biggest threat on the horizon is no longer MySQL, it is
<i>NoSQL</i>, which says "you don't need a SQL database for
storing a big proportion of your data", and implicitly "build this
stuff out of low cost hardware"
The main open source stack for this, Hadoop, is Java based. But who owns the
code: Apache. And who owns many of the patents in the area (and have granted the
ASF the rights to those patent in their software)? Google. Together this makes
it hard for oracle to co-opt Hadoop or bring out a competitor. As their enemies
are in a position of strength. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 16 2012 @ 06:13 PM EDT |
I've seen it written that the main point of Oracle buying
Sun was to prevent them collapsing, and causing customers to
migrate from Solaris to other OSs (meaning they might well
ditch Oracle DB server at the same time, since Oracle DB and
Solaris go well together)
As a secondary consideration, they probably wanted to
control the complete software stack for their application
server, but that has to be as far as the value in Java goes.
If Ellison seriously thought Java was worth the kind of
money they paid... Well I'm glad I don't have shares, put it
that way.
OpenOffice, MySQL, and now Java. All heading the way of the
dodo if Oracle have anything to say about it. Not a great
record.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
|
|
|
|
