What If Oracle Bought Sun Microsystems? 237
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister believes Oracle is next in line to make a play for Sun now that IBM has withdrawn its offer. Dismissing server market arguments in favor of Cisco or Dell as suitors, McAllister suggests that MySQL, ZFS, DTrace, and Java make Sun an even better asset to Oracle than to IBM. MySQL as a complement to Oracle's existing database business would make sense, given Oracle's 2005 purchase of Innobase, and with 'the long history of Oracle databases on Solaris servers, it might actually see owning Solaris as an asset,' McAllister writes. But the 'crown jewel' of the deal would be Java. 'It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Java to Oracle. Java has become the backbone of Oracle's middleware strategy,' McAllister contends."
Yahoo! + Sun (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yahoo! + Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it insulting when applications bundle unrelated crapware like browser toolbars, particularly when the installation selects the extra junk by default...
...software upgrades need to be elegant and streamlined. Bundling in a browser toolbar cheapens the whole experience because it starts looking just like so many other crapware applications that plague the PC industry.
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Makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
No it isn't. That's Postgres.
And with the current state of mysql, I wouldn't look at buying Sun for that reason at all. The other assets make far more sense.
Plus, Sun and Oracle have both been major open source supporters, Oracle probably one of the single largest kernel contributor. That would be a good pairing.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree. PostgreSQL is much closer to Oracle than MySQL is. Anyone that thinks MySQL is the best replacement for Oracle likely doesn't know much about Oracle.
It seems that sun has done a bit with PostgreSQL as well. Too bad they bought MySQL. They should have instead invested in making PostgreSQL better, at least developing better replication and clustering. That way, PostgreSQL would have been an even stronger alternative to Oracle.
Oracle used to have Solaris/SPARC as their main development platform, then they switched to Linux. That seems to have been a big blow to Sun. While Oracle still releases Oracle for Solaris/Sparc along with Linux, but the Solaris/x86 versions are always slow. I don't 11g has been released for Solaris/x86 yet.
If I was Jonathan Schwartz, I would have rather put the $1bln they spent on MySQL on PostgreSQL. I don't think it would have even really taken that much either. I'm still just baffled over spending $1bln on a company that I think made $50mln in it's best year!?!?!
Anyway... Oracle developers might not have been too happy about moving away from Solaris because they'd lose DTrace [intel.com].
I thought I heard something about there being some bad blood between Ellison and Sun but I don't know what that was about.
I still think Cisco should be more interested.
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SystemTap or LTTng might very well appear in the Linux mainline this year. And now they also support use of DTrace tracepoints.
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SystemTap or LTTng might very well appear in the Linux mainline this year. And now they also support use of DTrace tracepoints.
Is that supposed to be a joke? I didn't get much sleep last night so maybe I'm missing the sarcasm.
The blog post I linked too told of the transition in 2002. It's now 2009. That's 7 years and the best you can do is say some half-assed knock-offs might be coming to Linux this year?
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SystemTap and LTTng are actually more powerful than DTrace (no wonder, they benefited from the experience of DTrace). They're just not yet mainline-ready.
http://ltt.polymtl.ca/?q=node/12 [polymtl.ca]
That comparison chart is really wrong (Score:4, Informative)
That comparison chart is really wrong; I think it was done by someone who either never actually used DTrace, didn't know how DTrace works, or just hasn't used it well enough to be familiar with it.
DTrace instruments by placing an INT 3 (on other platforms, it's an illegal instruction) at the probe point and remembering where that was done. The trap handler then has a code path that knows about this, and shunts it over to DTrace for a probe lookup.
Pretty clearly, whoever wrote that chart has only used fbt (Function Boundary Tracing), and is not familiar with the fact that the trace points can pretty much be put at any instruction location where the instrumentation would not involve reentering the trap handler. This means any instruction, and it's done *without* using break points.
I really don't have time to fix this for them (and I doubt I'd get edit rights if it started making DTrace look relatively better anyway), but someone involved in the project should actually take a real look at the software they are trying to compete with before they so casually (and incorrectly) dismiss it.
-- Terry
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I'll ask authors to correct this. BTW, SystemTap also works this way.
But there _are_ valid points in this table. For example, SystemTap probe language is much richer and LTTng is faster than DTrace (and SystemTap, though it's likely to change).
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Oracle has no interest in Sun. Oracle just launched the Database Machine/Exadata with HP. Does anyone think that they are going to stab HP in the back and buy Sun? Definitely not.
Oracle is not a hardware company. It doesn't want to be a hardware company. Sun has way too much hardware for Oracle to even consider them.
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
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They should have instead invested in making PostgreSQL better, at least developing better replication and clustering.
And settling on a sensible case sensitivity methodology [postgresql.org] that empowers developers rather than hamstrings them.
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"MySQL is the best alternative to Oracle" - that's a pretty bold statement. You don't want to add some context? What about large, high transaction databases - DB/2 would probably be the best alternative to Oracle. What about Postgress? What about SQL Server?
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My Thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the two companies have some excellent synergies*. My biggest concern with Oracle purchasing Sun (as opposed to the other way around) is that there would be a culture clash. Sun is a very dynamic environment that fosters great new ideas. But unless those core competencies bubble up through Oracle, the Sun portion of the company would be strangled to death.
Personally, I've always wanted to see Sun purchase Oracle. But I don't think that's happening at this point.
* Warning: Corporate buzzword!
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What?
On what basis do you believe that?
Considering that Sun is a drop in the bucket (around 5 billion market cap) compared to Oracle (~100 billion), I think you're right. Oracle's been much bigger than Sun for a very long time. Never mind the fact that Oracle's business model is ve
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Put Sun in those related groups and you'll see something on order of IBM Alphaworks and some cool results.
Oracle+Sun will make a good F/OSS ally. Oracle's main goal is DB licenses as they truly bel
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WTF? In the last 4 years, Oracle has bought PeopleSoft, Siebel and a plethora of other companies to take over the CRM world. That's not core competence, that's expansion (and in true Oracle form, extremely poorly executed). Ellison probably still thinks he's in a dick-matching context with Gates, yet Gates has moved on.
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* Warning: Corporate buzzword!
GAAH!! Put the warning (or at least the asterisk) before the word! It's well documented that overexposure to corporate buzzwords causes headaches, confusion, and eventually IQ loss.
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If you think exposure is bad, try having to _use_ them for your job. That drops IQ points at a huge rate!
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I think it would be very interesting for Oracle to buy Sun. Here's why:
I'd love to see Oracle create a "black box" database system - you get an install DVD (sold for either SPARC or Intel) and boot your system hardware with it. At install, you indicate what products you want to install, maybe give some license codes, and the DVD automatically installs a database system for you. Want to set up a database that participates in a RAC cluster? There'd be an install option for that. Want to connect to some JBOD o
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I think the two companies have some excellent synergies*.
* Warning: Corporate buzzword!
Indeed. I'm afraid suicide may be the only way to save your honor.
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That said, there is a culture clash. Sun is about everything being done for the sake of doing it, not because it is something the market wants, and certainly Sun is not out to make money with most of their product line free. So, I'd say from an executive level, yes, Oracle (and IBM) don't mix
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Sun can't market their way out of a paper bag. And that's just the God's honest truth. There's nothing inherently wrong with the company besides that.
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I don't think that's entirely true, Sun is quite good at building hype around certain of their products (witness the ZFS! Dtrace! crowd).
They have always been a bit unfocused tho, undermining other marketing efforts (x86! (but use Sparc!) No x86! x86 again!). Interspersed with some plain odd campaigns (was there an actual point to naming everything Java or was it just to outdo Microsoft in relabeling unrelated things by including the ticker?).
It would indeed be sad to see them go or get assimilated by one o
What direction will Oracle take Java? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe its just that the code I've seen has been outsourced stuff that came back in as unclean globs of code but it makes me a little leery to see where Oracle would take Java.
Re:What direction will Oracle take Java? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think it's a matter of degree. No developer would complain as long as the code is internally consistent, well-planned, and reasonably bug free.
The thing is, in the real world this almost never happens due to time constraints and too-many-cooks-syndrome.
Worse yet, there are developers with fancy degrees and good jobs who have absolutely no idea what they're doing. Most of us have met one or two such people, and a few of us have had to work with them.
So I don't think it's fair to say that developers alway
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And the people like that don't all have fancy degrees.
I knew a C coder that was in love with macros with obscure names (like lTsh). I could never figure out WHAT his code was doing. It didn't have an exceptional number of errors...but it was well obfuscated. When he left another person was designated for several years to translate his stuff. (And he was only there a couple of years.) But if you asked him about any particular macro, he could justify why he had created it. (They did shorten the code con
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I usually get the best of both worlds - tons of bugs, and no fricking clue as to how the code was *intended* to work, as opposed to how it *does* work.
Re:What direction will Oracle take Java? (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree. Developers today (at least the vocal ones) seem to be a lot more interested in putting down the work of others than improving their own. That's why there are sites like The Daily WTF.
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Me! Actually most developers I think.
The reason we think that (almost) everybody else's code is crap is because much of it is. The mistake that we make is to assume it is crap because the original coder was an idiot, when in most cases it is crap because of unrealistic time pressures placed on the developer, or some basic mistake in the foundation that acts like a ball of crap that radiates outwards.
I have seen quite a few pieces of open source code that I would regard as awesome in terms of code quality (n
Re:What direction will Oracle take Java? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you worked with contractors? It's not about what country they're from -- it's about their contractor status. Of the ones I had, the foreigners were better coders, though poorer communicators. But in all cases, the lack of ownership in the product, of knowledge of the history, business purpose, and architecture of the product, the lack of sense of long-term commitment, of common goal, of responsibility for the outcome (in terms of ongoing maintenance, not just "going live") ... all made my life a lot harder. It's difficult work to get good, solid work out of contractors, and not because they don't mean well. They do. They're great people, sometimes even great coders, but their "wanderer" status has its drawbacks and you have to learn special skills to manage them.
So the GP is correct to worry about the quality of outsourced code.
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Am I the only one? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sun certainly have some good products. I often think that they need to focus a bit more. They have their fingers in many pies but can't be good at all of them.
At the moment I have no confidence in Sun. They were considering selling to IBM which potentially could have resulted in many of Sun's key products being discontinued. If Sun is willing to 'sell the farm' why should I buy their products? If Sun doesn't believe in their own future how can I believe in it?
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Sun's a hardware company, and the pie they are in is singular, there: dealing with the memory bottleneck by coming up with new processor designs that don't spend all their time sitting in queue waiting for an I- or D-cache load. Most of the research is there, because it's a problem all the chip vendors are faced with. if they don't do it, they will die.
On the product side, you're mostly seeing the necessary support a hardware company needs (Solaris), the languages (Java, TCL, etc) and the combinations of
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Sun certainly have some good products. I often think that they need to focus a bit more. They have their fingers in many pies but can't be good at all of them.
Split the hardware from the software. Open Solaris runs on x86, java is almost a killer app, etc...
They would have a much easier time selling the software side, in my estimation.
Re:Am I the only one? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Am I the only one? (Score:5, Interesting)
NO, absolutely not the only one - that's my hope as well. But the truth is, Sun is a company that gave a lot to the world in which it exists, and monetized very little of it. It's the greatest open source contributor (Solaris, Java, OpenOffice, the SPARC architecture itself, NetBeans, ZFS... and I'm sure missing some, as Sun gave away HUGE amounts of stuff).
Such companies don't usually succeed in a commercial sense. I'm tempted to say that Sun should cease to be a for-profit publicly traded company, and become either a state-sponsored institution, or private foundation, for the development of high-tech.
Re:Am I the only one? (Score:5, Funny)
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It's the greatest open source contributor (Solaris, Java, OpenOffice, the SPARC architecture itself, NetBeans, ZFS... and I'm sure missing some, as Sun gave away HUGE amounts of stuff).
That is one of the things I really love about them. However, I have heard it postulated by many people that they waited too long to go that route. Waiting so long to open source Solaris prevented them from competing with Linux effectively in the server OS market. And, while you certainly can, not many buy a SUN box to run Red Hat (or whatever).
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The basic issue is that the analysts are right. Sun customers have been secretly worried about Sun's ability to go it alone for quite some time... their stock price, you know, dropped a lot. We noticed. Now Sun has put itself on the market, declaring that its own management team /knows/ that it can't go it alone. This undermines our confidence as Sun customers. The putting up of Sun for sale is almost a no-return event. IBM backing out of the deal is a disaster for them.
C//
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I hope they do too. I think they need to come up with an extra $500 million by this summer otherwise they might be in some trouble. That's going to be hard to do in this current economic climate.
I wonder if they asked for a bailout. I think even IBM did.
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Their major strength seemed to be that they could provide a complete single vendor solution for corporations. A company could buy the servers, workstations, graphics cards, device drivers and OS all from the same company. If there was ever a problem such as a memory leak or device driver crash, all the staff would be in-house to get the problem fixed. This is the same service that their other competitors used to offer until they switched to Microsoft.
Everytime I see this phrase... (Score:5, Funny)
It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Java to Oracle
Java will help Oracle colonize the entire solar system.
Re:Everytime I see this phrase... (Score:4, Funny)
Picture of spaceship crater, with caption: FAIL
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--dave
Slashdot shoud buy Sun . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
. . . if we can get all those Anonymous Cowards and folks with ridiculous names like mine to chip in $10 each.
The company's direction and strategy could be guided by a Slashdot thread. A potent brew of "Informative, Interesting, Troll . . ."
Hell, maybe we could even patent that business model . . . crowd governance . . . or mod governance?
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Unless we're shooting for the Guinness Book record for fastest bankruptcy in history, I would caution against letting Slashdotters decide anything more significant than which goatse mirror site to try and get people to click to.
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To get $6 billion at $10 each, we will need 600 million Slashdot members...
Maybe it's time to open Slashdot.cn
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No. Linux is written by committee, but the design is by Linus. Similarly with Python, except the design is by BFDL Guido. Other projects have other heads...but the heads tend to be singular.
Note that the nominal authority of the FOSS project heads tends to be considerably more absolute than we would tolerate in most other areas. They can toss code on a whim. But this is restrained in the successful project because they mustn't alienate their developers...and they can't offer anything except acceptance
What if Oracle owned MySQL? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like to see that, actually -- Berkeley DB is an amazingly robust data store. It worked well with MySQL.
Mom! Dad! Don't touch it! It's EEEeeeevil! (Score:4, Interesting)
I am so not comfortable with Oracle [wired.com] being in charge of one of the remaining UNIX vendors... Better to see another UNIX license holder get them than that.
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Code can fork. Licenses can generate lawsuits and intimidation forever.
Synergy! (Score:2)
Where "synergy" is another word for "2+2=1". This could produce even more economic value than Microsoft plus Yahoo! would have.
Forks of everything forkable approaching in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
A Strategic Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
If they could both bury the hatchet for about 5 minutes, a joint bid by Oracle and IBM would actually make much more sense. IBM would take the Solaris platform and hardware, Oracle would take the ZFS, MySQL, and DTrace. They could then both jointly purchase and spin-off Java into an Open Source project or its own firm with each company taking a stake. Since both rely so heavily on Java and neither would enjoy the other firm owning the platform it makes perfect sense for it to continue as an independent entity.
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Your post is the best idea in this entire thread. I agree. Although I have been using Ruby and Lisp more the last few years, much of my business is based on Java -- basically the whole world wants a stable and well maintained Java platform and a spin off company for Java might make sense, especially if many large stakeholders owned equity.
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a spin off company for Java might make sense, especially if many large stakeholders owned equity.
This would be the slowest way to murder Java. But a slow murder is still murder... Java would be pulled in every direction and asplode.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Actually, I would assume part of the deal would be that MySQL is left out. Its of no use to them. There are better OSS databases out there to be had at this point, even Sun thinks so.
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When your share of the market is the 23% that doesn't buy anything, then your share of the market doesn't matter. Sorry, no one buys FOSS because of market share, they buy it because people are stupid and like buzz words. People who use FREE software generally are the people who don't PAY for software, so its of little value to anyone.
I really wish you people could it into your thick heads, companies don't want something thats free, they want something they can sell.
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People who use FREE software generally are the people who don't PAY for software, so its of little value to anyone.
it's not free as in beer, you imbecile.
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Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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I don't know if RedHat has the capital,
They don't. They only have about 1.7 billion in assets and less than 700 million in cash. They'd have to get some pretty hefty financing to buy Sun and I doubt anyone is going to loan them money that would amount to 12-15 times their total revenue last year.
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Hahahaha
No, Redhat does not have the capital to buy Sun. They don't even have the capital to take Sun out on a respectable date and they probably never will.
Its kind of sad that you don't realize how much larger Sun is than Redhat. Redhat really isn't that impressive. It may be impressive to the Linux community, but not to the real world. The rest of the world is still waiting for their customers to realize that they have nothing of value to sell. Everything they have of value is built on something som
personally i think Sun is done for (Score:3, Informative)
i think their support is crap. every time i call for netbackup support it takes them a week to get back to me. place i work for was scammed into buying netbackup from Sun instead of Veritas years ago.
i'm trying to get the latest media for netbackup and it's insane trying to register just to download it.
we looked at the SL500 a few months ago and it was overpriced. everything Sun sells seems overpriced compared to HP, including the servers.
Long thought IBM or Oracle would Buy Sun (Score:4, Interesting)
Sun + Oracle = Yay (Score:3, Interesting)
The documentation is horrible, but that's not what it's about. Our development machines run on a JBoss AS with a Mysql Repository. The performance is horrible, and I mean it. It's beyond bad, MySql gobbles up the whole server. It takes 95% CPU time and 2 gb ram for our (rather complex) queries.
On our staging machine (running Oracle as a repository), the same tasks take 10% CPU and we hardly notice it happening.
Needles to say, SUN thought it might be a good idea (for political reason obv) to include Mysql in their documentation as "supported", although no sane person would actually use it.
I kinda forgot what my post has to do with this story. I just read "Oracle + Sun" and it clicked. I'm conditioned to think it's a perfect combination.
Say good by to their OSS initiatives (Score:2)
They will either close or shut down projects like Openoffice, NetBeans, Java, Open Solaris, Open Sparc. ( and other smaller projects )
It would be a sad day.
Better download what source you can and fork the projects before it all becomes extinct.
Oh yea, Oracle would die to have MySQL (Score:2)
...
What crack head thinks this shit up? Anyone who thinks this should not be allowed to touch a database. Ever.
MyOracle? (Score:2)
I don't see what MySQL provides to Oracle. How long would it take Oracle to create a defeatured version of their database product that has about the same features as MySQL. It's not as if MySQL has some great database secrets that Oracle doesn't already know about.
Why waste your time with such small offerings (Score:2)
Why waste your time buying these small offerings, when you can go right to the top. If you buy SCO, you own every single byte of code ever written to run under any unix-like operating system.
If the courts weren't so slow, SCO would be the largest company in the world. But you can get in on the ground floor quite cheaply right now. But wait. If you buy right now, you also get an additional Darrel Mcbride with your order.
Re:Strange Database Merge... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see anything changing. Right now we have a 3-way fight between three heavyweights: Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. Everyone else is unimportant.
However, IBM and Microsoft have other competencies and sources of revenue. Oracle does not. In result, Oracle has been looking for new ways to enter the low-end market. So owning MySQL could be a boon for them, but it wouldn't significantly change the market.
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last few years Oracle has bought a lot of application companies. BEA, Peoplesoft and a long list of others
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Oracle has no other competencies?[1] Are you sure about that -- have you read their annual report anytime in the past couple years? Oracle's service LOB is growing quickly (currently 21% of revenues, and growing), and has good margins. Never mind the
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They'd probably rather have PostgreSQL which already has front ends for it that can make it behave a lot like Oracle and take direct connections from Oracle clients, since it is an actual transactional database, unlike the afterthought MySQL calls transaction support.
If MySQL was worth its salt, Sun would probably use it rather than PostgreSQL in the xVM suite. Its generally a sign that your not that great when the company that owns you, picks a product that they don't own to use rather than the one they d
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MSSQL? PostgreSQL?
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Putting Access as a competitor to Oracle...that's funny.
In Oracle's class would be guys like MS SQL Server and IBM's DB2. Access is the DB small companies foolishly build apps on and then deal with pain and ridicule until they move off it.
Re:Strange Database Merge... (Score:5, Funny)
So, what's next on your fight card? Space Marines vs. Pee-Wee Herman? Guillermo Jones vs. 6-year-old Timmy from down the block?
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PostgreSQL (Score:5, Insightful)
PostgreSQL is still a *huge* player (in fact, they're pretty-much the only open-source, fully-transactional DB available).
Also, Access isn't MS's DB offering... MS SQLServer is the real player. Access is as much a database as a go-cart is a race car (which is to say, kinda-sorta, but not really).
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Oracle is a true relational database management system. As is DB/2, Postgress, SQL Server, mySQL....
Access is ... words fail me. The last developer here that suggested using Access was summarily shot, hung, drawn and quartered, and his head posted on a spike at the door to the computer room as a warning to others.
Re:So where does this leave Open Souce? (Score:5, Informative)
While Sun may not be the strongest FOSS advocate, they've made many adjustments over the past few years to open up several products.
Stop right there. Sun is one of the biggest corporate contributors to open source. Go ahead, count lines of code. I'm betting Sun will be in the top two if not #1.
Here's a brief list of things Sun has open sourced:
Solaris [opensolaris.com] - Their entire OS, including ZFS and Dtrace
SPARC [opensparc.net] - Their CPU line
Java [java.net] - Maybe you've heard of it.
OpenOffice [openoffice.org] - The office suite that ships with every desktop Linux distribution.
VirtualBox [virtualbox.org] - A GPL desktop virtual machine.
NetBeans IDE [netbeans.org] - A multi-platform IDE.
OpenDS [java.net] - LDAP Directory Server
High Availability Cluster [opensolaris.org]
Honorable mention:
NFS - The Network File System
vi - developed by Sun founder Bill Joy
MySQL - Now owned and maintained by Sun-paid engineers
So, next time you say Sun hadn't done much for open source, look again. It would be a shame if Sun was bought by Oracle and all of their valuable contributions were abandoned.
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I doubt it, why would they bother with MySQL (unless its part of an 'upgrade' path to SQL Server).
MS already has SQL Server express, and developer edition versions so I'm not sure why they'd want to take MySQL on. I'm sure they're just waiting for Access to die naturally, or only keeping it around for legacy reasons.
And as for Java, they made J++ so this is 5 years too late for them, they don;t want Java now - they're more interested in converting Java devs to C# (and Windows lock-in, obviously)
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MySQL and Access are NOTHING a like.
Do you think MySQL would be a good replacement for VBA? Thats basically what you are saying.
People don't use Access because its a database, they use Access because its a VBA front end with some support for database-like data stores. Those data stores can easily be swapped out for a real database server backend if needed. MySQL would need a lot of development to make it suitable as a replacement for the Jet backend. Sure, MySQL is going to be far faster, but faster doe
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I think you've hit the nail on the head. Sun and Microsoft have been getting together for some time now. It makes more sense than probably anything else. Not really sure what they would do with SPARC, though. Threaten intel with it, then give it to them?
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What if Google buys Sun and get a Soogle :) So Ogle.
Sun has nothing Google wants.
OS: Android > Solaris
Code: Python > Java
Office: Google Apps > Staroffice
Database: BigTable+GFS > MYSQL
The virtualization software (VirtualBox) might be nice, but all the Google stuff I've seen ported has used Wine.
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They haven't ever been able to make any money off of Java, even though it is widely used
In one of Jonathan Schwartz blog posts he said they make something like $275 million a year just from licensing Java. The way it's phrased doesn't seem to include any of their other Java software such as the Enterprise Server stack.
Sun's revenue is close to $14 Billion a year. To compare, RedHat is only $164 Million, Novel is $214 mil, Oracle is $5.5 billion, IBM is $127 Billion.
They're selling stuff and bringing in a decent chunk of change. The problem they have is in making a profit. There's a huge potent