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Can Linux help Oracle beat IBM?


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Can Linux help Oracle beat IBM? Oracle is duking it out with IBM for database market share, but Linux put Oracle over the top this year.By Owen Thomas, Business 2.0 magazine online editorApril 6, 2006: 5:14 PM EDT

SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) - For years, Oracle and IBM have fought over bragging rights for the $8 billion database software market - a key technological battleground upon which sales of almost all other business software depend.Linux as a competitive edgeNow Oracle (Research) seems poised to gain an edge in that battle, thanks to years of work spent adapting its software for Linux.

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On Tuesday, Oracle announced it was donating file-clustering technology to the Linux open-source project, a contribution meant to help make Linux a better operating system for running large databases.That's just the most recent investment Oracle has made in Linux. In its biennial survey of the world's largest databases, WinterCorp, a database research and consulting company, reported that Oracle dominated its list of 175 large databases. For the first time, databases running on Linux appeared on WinterCorp's list -- and all of them came from Oracle.While Oracle and IBM (Research) don't break out database sales in their quarterly results, the research firm Gartner estimates that the companies were neck-and-neck in overall sales for 2004, the most recent figures for which figures are available.Analysts are split on who will win the next market-share battle, but the answer may key on the growth of Linux. In Gartner's survey, almost 60 percent of respondents plan to move their databases to Linux. That stands to reason: The hardware savings alone are staggering.Indeed, Jefferies & Company analyst Robert Schwartz believes that Oracle will take share from IBM and outpace the rest of the database market precisely because of the growth of Linux.Jim Meredith, manager of information systems at tableware retailer Replacements Ltd., says he spent $218,000 to buy a Sun (Research) server four years ago that he has now replaced with four H-P (Research) Linux servers, which cost him $55,000 in total.Meredith is running a version of Oracle's database designed to run across multiple servers. That's a key change from Oracle's older database software, which was designed to run on a single large, expensive server.Wooing the Linux communityOracle started a project six years ago to adapt Linux to large servers. At the time, Linux didn't handle the swapping of large chunks of data well, a flaw which made databases running on Linux unacceptably slow. So, Oracle assigned a team of engineers to the task of improving Linux's performance, and now offers technical support on the operating system to customers running its database and other software on Linux systems.IBM, of course, isn't standing still. Databases are typically used in conjunction with other software, and it's been pushing hard to make its DB2 database software work well with products from other software vendors ranging from Adobe (Research) to SAS. IBM's most important software partner, of course, is SAP, which is Oracle's archrival in the business-application software market.When SAP (Research) sells business applications, it typically recommends IBM's database to go with it. Oracle prefers to sell its own database alongside its business applications, though its software can run with IBM's database.Can Oracle come out on top in Gartner's next survey?Consider that in the last survey, sales of databases for Linux jumped 118 percent -- far outpacing the sales of databases for Windows and Unix. And Oracle had more than 80 percent of the $655 million Linux database market.If those trends continue, Oracle looks set to take the database crown this year.

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At work I used to have to work w/ a database application in Oracle, it was the worst program I ever worked with and ALL my colleagues hated it from the deepest of their hearts. Visually it looked like it was written in win 3.11 days and it´s behaviour was even more primitive (WTF happened to right click menus!?), whilst in fact the app is now about 3 years old, never mind the database would keep locking up everytime, forcing me to call an admin to open the record up all the time and me losing all my data....

 

Never ever have I hated an application so badly, one of the MAJOR reasons to quit for me.

 

Oracle SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!

Edited by ffi
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I've never used it, but it's pretty easy to recover in the event of a disaster :P

 

Which is kind of where most of my expertise is, since I spent the last four years working in Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery full time, but the previous 6 years involved in it for the companies I worked for.

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The problem with patents is that it's not very "open-source" orientated. It stops people from trying to achieve what they want.

 

Remember Mandriva with the Mandrake name before they changed it? Then they had the lawsuit about Mandrake the magician. IBM patenting everything, means that if an open-source name shares the same name, then they will lose. Because as such, there's probably no patents in the open-source world.

 

So much for IBM embracing Linux, only to then force it to work in the same ways as every other piece of software such as Windows.

 

Sorry, does it sound like I hate IBM!!!!! :P

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The problem with patents is that it's not very "open-source" orientated. It stops people from trying to achieve what they want.

 

Not being able to patent stops companies from investing money for developing new things. But as it is now IBM has about 25000 people working on open source development.

 

 

Remember Mandriva with the Mandrake name before they changed it? Then they had the lawsuit about Mandrake the magician.

 

No, I´m from after days :P

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The problem with patents is that it's not very "open-source" orientated. It stops people from trying to achieve what they want.

I think you misunderstand. IBM donated patents to the open source world so that open source companies/projects could make use of the technologies in those patents without fear of reprisal from IBM.

 

The whole "patents are bad vs. patents are good" thing depends more on how the company makes use of them than the fact that they exist. IBM is using them in a good way, by basically saying to the open source community "you can use these and we won't sue you".

 

Remember Mandriva with the Mandrake name before they changed it? Then they had the lawsuit about Mandrake the magician.

that was copyright, which is different than patents ;)

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Cool, I learnt a bit more copyright versus patent. Thought it was alll the same :P

copywright is more often used in works of art (i.e. shakespeare). on the other hand, patents apply to scientific works/inventions (i.e. the lightbulb).

 

here is a good wikipedia article on the issue of copyrights and patents in software. that's inside the software patent article, and links to the software copyright article if you want to learn about both sides. here's an article that covers the differences between copyright, trademark and patent - if you just want a more general idea. :)

 

The whole Mandrake thing with the star, hat and general wizardry came because of a work of art (namely, a comic) that used the name Mandrake and all those symbols (Mandrake was a wizard ;) ). I think mandrake basically decided it would be best to just change the name and use a different logo of sorts. the buying out of merging with connectiva just made a good excuse ;) - but that's just MHO.

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