Oracle Linux Explored

M-Saunders writes "Two days ago Slashdot reported on Oracle's move into the enterprise Linux market, and how it may challenge Red Hat. Red Hat's stock has already dropped, and there's a great deal of talk about the implications of this act. Linux Format got hold of the 'Unbreakable' distro to find out what's going on under the hood. Is it a breakthrough for Linux in the corporate market, or just another RHEL respin? See the article for all the info and screenshots — including an 'interesting' choice of GRUB colours."

Its the support costs that are interesting

To quote the web article:

Unusually, Oracle are claiming that they will support your operating system indefinitely as part of the Premier Support package which works out at $1199 and $1999.

These lifetime models get pretty interesting - you don't know if they are financially viable until a few years have gone by.

But I've seen a few health clubs, airlines and government pension plans so on, suffer on the weight of their liabilities such as lifetime memberships, lifetime frequent flyer points, a unfunded retirement pensions.

That is actually a big risk over a 10 year period..

Michael

Re:Its the support costs that are interesting

Nope, parent is incorrect:

http://www.oracle.com/technologies/linux/ubl-ds.pd f [oracle.com]

That's $1199/$1999 *annually*, and "Lifetime" is defined as 5-8 years.

Re:Its the support costs that are interesting

The Price of 1999$ is for Premier unlimited support for 1 year. The Lifetime warranty is for 5 years and beyond. Basically if you buy support for 5 years, then they will support you indefinitely except a doing certification with a third party. I believe that it is fail safe, as in Oracle will probably not be the leader in DB after 5 years anyway. And I wouldn't see anybody committing for 5 years to any software even if it is Oracle.

Not first post

but, first release...

Installing Oracle on linux

I would be more than satisfied if they come with an easy solution for installing Oracle flawlessly on most linux flavors!

--
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Re:Installing Oracle on linux

I would be more than satisfied if they come with an easy solution for installing Oracle flawlessly on most linux flavors!

This may be a more practical alternative. Anybody who's installed Oracle on Linux knows that, compared to the open source databases popular on Linux, it's a true PITA. Furthermore, in most cases where you'd want to use Oracle instead of the open source choices, it's running on a dedicated machine. So why not give customers complete support all the way down to the iron?

I see this distro as making sense on database appliances, or servers that are for practial purposes database appliances, although those servers may be massive.

Personally, I don't see customers going with Oracle Linux for general purpose servers that run a mainly open source applicaiton stack.

Re:Installing Oracle on linux

I would be more than satisfied if they come with an easy solution for installing Oracle flawlessly on most linux flavors!

That would be nice, but how about if instead of a full-fledged distro, they put out a barebones Linux+Oracle, all set up and configured, that is then run in a virtual machine. Sort of an "Oracle Appliance". Saves the hassles of supporting various distros, and even saves the hassle of supporting an entire single distro (since people will install other things than Oracle on their "Unbreakable Linux"es).

I haven't used Oracle products in several years. Anyone know why they aren't doing this (or are they, and I am just ignorant)?

Re:Installing Oracle on linux

Actually, the whole reason they're doing this is because they're pissed off with Redhat for buying JBoss when Oracle wanted it.

I kid you not. Search Google for comments from Larry just after Redhat made the purchase and you'll see why.

This is just continuing that. Oracle at the time said they were considering their own Linux distro in an attempt to compete with Redhat. To paraphrase Ellison...

If Redhat are going to step on our toes, we'll stomp on theirs

This isn't going to make any real difference to Redhat in the long term. Oracle would be smart to position their distro as the best possible platform for their own primary products (such as the databases, ERP software and so on.) However, the chances of that are pretty slim.

Given Oracle just recently release a mammoth patch for their 9i and 11i products that, while containing more than 100 bug fixes, didn't manage to fix all known bugs, I seriously doubt they're in any way prepared to take on the responsibility of a full fledged Enterprise ready Operating System. This is going to kick them hard.

Re:Installing Oracle on linux

This is exactly what they are trying to avoid: complexity.

By assembling their own distro, they gain the ability to offer a complete virtualized environment - which is where the data centers are trending. This allows them to move from supporting *whatever*, into supporting a single environment.

Go look at the VMware Appliances [vmware.com] to get an idea of what I am talking about. The devices are complex, but the consistency is identical from VM to VM, regardless of hardware or underlying operating system.

Their support costs will plummet once they start moving their customers over to an "Oracle Appliance". Of course, this savings will be passed along to their shareholders.

Re:Installing Oracle on linux

Why not just use Postgres instead? That works flawlessly on most Linux flavours. You even get the source code (so you can hire a programmer to make it do exactly what you want), and you don't have to pay for it -- not even by giving back improvements made by your hired programmer for the benefit of the Community. In fact, it's probably right there on your distro CDs already.

Redhat: "UnFakeable Linux"

Redhat: Unfakeable Linux - Oracle a Fork! [osdir.com]

Screenshot Walkthrough

http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/?q =node/20 [thecodingstudio.com]

Too expensive? I know why

From the article: "A recent CIO Insight Research Study ranked Red Hat No. 1 for "vendor value". Oracle ranked 39 out of 41 overall, 40th in the category "meets expectations for lowering costs.""

Too expensive? I know why. Larry buys too big boats, too often. And, above all, he never invited me... (Now is your chance, Larry!)

They're building an applicance

Oracle wants to sell their application stack and figure that integrating an OS into that stack gives them vendor lock-in. I think the OS is a commodity part like the hardware and Oracle's strategy logically leads to them rolling in a big black box you just plug into the datacenter. Personally I just think this is petty revenge for Red Hat daring to reach up into their high margin software stack with JBoss. By effect squeezing RH's tight OS margin by scraping off the 10-15% of their businees that supports the Oracle stack. Hoping to put pressure on RH's cash flow and force them to circle the wagons to protect their core business.

Plan for Linux Domination

1. Copy someone else's flagship software exactly
2. Remove all vendor identity
3. Explain how your's is somehow "better"
4. Profit and repeat

Re:Plan for Linux Domination

Oracle is not claiming their distro is better, they are claiming their support model is better. And, by all indications, they're right. Their support model offers more than RedHat (better support for older versions, plus indemnification, which in practice means very little but executives drool over it), and does so at a much cheaper price. RedHat's "Unfakeable" campaign is clearly a panic strategy and it won't work. They are going to have to come up with something better than that if they want to stay in the game.

By the way, calling Unbreakable Linux a separate distro is not really accurate at this point. Trying to disparage it by calling it "just another Red Hat respin" is really missing the point. Ellison already said it's a Red Hat respin, that's the idea. The idea is to basically piggyback on the one name in Linux that has any real street cred among executives in large companies, that being Red Hat. Oracle is basically trying to take Red Hat's primary revenue stream away from them by offering better service for the same code at a better price. If they are successful, I would imagine the end game here would be for Oracle to either buy Red Hat on the cheap or, more likely, hire Red Hat's best talent away and let the company itself fade into oblivion.

First Oracle Bug Fix

Oracle just announced a security patch to fix the "DB2 optimization malware" on Unbreakable.

Who pays for this stuff?

I understand Oracle is an industry juggernaut, but $160,000 for a 4-CPU license (from the Guardian article)? Is Oracle really that superior to Ingres, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, and especially PostgreSQL or MySQL?

I'm not trying to troll here. I'm just thinking that for the cost of several Oracle installations and experienced Oracle DBAs you could get a much cheaper (or outright free) database and some really top notch talent.

Re:Who pays for this stuff?

That price sounds high unless you are talking the full Oracle Suite. Oracle has very good performance, is very stable, is well supported, has a clustering and failover (RAC) capabilities, built in messsaging for DB-to-DB communications, fully supports ODBC and JDBC connections, runs on almost any OS from mainframe to desktop, conforms almost 100% to the Relational DB model, supports high volume transaction rates, has row and column locking, supports encryption, can store binary large objects (BLOBs), and has a long history of success in the Enterprise. Downsides are it's hard to install correctly right out of the box, it is so flexible it is hard to "tune" for best performance, it is not something you can just "play around with" it takes some learning to handle it so good DBAs are not cheap, and it is expensive although discounts can be negotiated. YMMV...

Re:Who pays for this stuff?

IMO, Oracle genuinely is faster, more reliable and more scalable than the others. Mind you, I've been an Oracle dev for some years, so YMMV. It also works cross-platform, which is a biggie for lots of customers these days.

Take a look at this [techtarget.com] for an allegedly unbiased opinion (but who knows what is shilling and what is real these days?!).

J.

Oracle Prices Are Negotiable

Back in 02-03 I worked for a small startup. We were running Oracle on Linux doing dev work. We called them up to inquire about licenses. I think we were quoted $32k for our setup. We naturally told them, nevermind, we'll port it to MySQL and they eventually came back and offered us a deal at $4k. Of course, our app was meant to be installed at several high profile insurance companies so that meant more Oracle Licenses for them in the future.

BTW, all those numbers are from my rather fragile memory. YMMV.

Re:Who pays for this stuff?

I understand Oracle is an industry juggernaut, but $160,000 for a 4-CPU license (from the Guardian article)? Is Oracle really that superior to Ingres, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, and especially PostgreSQL or MySQL?

Remember that we are talking list price for one server.

I can speak from experience that Oracle's architecture is better than DB2, substantially better than SQL Server, and completely blows Sybase out of the water. Oracle 7 or 8 years ago was handling concurrency and large transactions better than Sybase does today. The CBO is much better than everyone's except maybe DB2. The hardware support is broader than just about everyone else with the exception of DB2. Locking is better handled. Indexes are efficient even on columns that aren't integers. VARCHAR support is clean. PL/SQL is quirky but less quirky than the alternatives. The trigger support is richer.

What generally happens is that a customer will go with Oracle for a handful of critical apps that justify the high price. Then once Oracle has their foot in the door, they'll come back and offer an expanded deal to host the databases that could run perfectly fine in any db, and do it all at a discount. The end cost is going to be substantially less than one would suppose by scaling up the quoted numbers.

This will help others adopt Linux

Greetings.

There is a wrong perception that large companies don't adopt Linux because they prefer commercial offerings. This is only half right. It's not that they like commercial software per se, or that they don't know or understand the benefits of open-source software. The real issue for the lack of adoption is the perceived legal exposures of running software and becoming liable for it (SCO, anyone?). These large companies would be happy to bring Linux in-house as long as a larger company offers some kind of indemnification clause in their contracts.

Many large companies offer Linux distributions and absorb the indemnification. It's no wonder then that superior distributions like Ubuntu aren't on the enterprise shopping list: there is little or no viable indemnification offered. Red Hat is a big fish among open-source vendors but not large enough to convince many large enterprises to take the plunge. That's why IBM has made a good play in this arena: their Linux offerings are rather crappy, but they offer the magic word: INDEMNIFICATION. This has opened many doors for them that remained shut to other vendors.

An Oracle offering brings the same "large company support" that will let the pussies in legal departments and the dumbass middle managers sleep well at night. Oracle is already known to work well with Linux; couple that that with Red Hat functionality and Oracle support (especially if other Oracle products are involved) and that makes a very attractive proposition for all the parties involved. If Oracle plays this right they can start by offering Red Hat dressed in Oracle garb as they came out of the gate, and then provide a migration path toward Ubuntu or another Linux distribution with better tools.

Oracle didn't get that big by being idiots. They are smart and they are aggressive. I think that this is overall a good thing. It creates more competition for IBM, who perhaps now will actually push for real Linux offerings that work, for Novell with SuSe, for Sun and Solaris, and it opens the door for upstarts like Canonical who are well-positioned to make Ubuntu a household name. Last, it will open doors to Linux that would otherwise remain shut. Oracle Linux marks the maturity phase of the first round of consolidation and is the harbinger of the next distribution wars. The next five years will be very interesting.

Cheers,

Eugene Ciurana

Dunno about anyone else...

But my organization is not allowed to just go to any schmoe who says they support generically Enterprise Linux. There's a reason we get the contracts that we do with customers, and one of the main ones is because we use a WIDELY supported OS (Red Hat EL) that is common criteria certified to a certain level. Likewise, Red Hat has had it's certification program for professionals out for several years now, and we have several people on staff who are certified and know backwards and forwards how to install and support Red Hat as well as Oracle products.

Likewise, the licensing scheme is pretty interesting. That is NOT the price per server. That is the price per CPU...how they determine the actual CPU will probably be something stupid like their database products, where a quad-Core CPU they count as 2.5 or some nonsense.

Also, not sure how many people have called Oracle lately, but when I call for support, I don't want to be transferred to some faker in India who I can't understand, who says their name is Joe. Dell was guilty of that early on, and we saw how well that worked. Now, their Gold and Silver support for the USA is all back to 100% English speaking people usually in the CST time zone. This is the mistake Red Hat never made...when you buy premier support from them, you get access to an RHCE or higher support person in the USA who you can actually understand, who generally isn't guessing on what your problem might be.

If Oracle wants to compete with Red Hat globally (markets OUTSIDE the USA), I can see that. But I think any USA residents would be fools to go with Oracle instead of Red Hat.

Like anything Oracle tries to do after the fact and supposedly *better* than others (Oracle Collaboration Suite?), I think this idea to compete directly against Red Hat is a stupid one. When I have Oracle issues, I don't even call Oracle anymore...I call a 3rd party consultant or an engineer at Red Hat...99% of the time I usually get better/quicker results.

What about old Cygnus?

Since Red Hat bought Cygnus a couple of years back, Linux is no longer everything they do, there's also the gcc business. As far as I know, the gcc business earns money from embedded toolsets, and contracts with microprosessor manufacturers (including big ones like Intel) to improve gcc on their kit, or to port gcc to new CPUs.

So, can anyone in the know comment on how much of Red Hat's business is Linux, as compared to what used to be Cygnus?

Recant.

Yesterday I suggested [slashdot.org] Oracle entering the game would be good for the market by increasing competion among Linux vendors. Looking at this offering, I have to say: what a joke. I was completely wrong.

Oracle are pulling nothing more than a publicity stunt with this. I expect I would be correct in the speculation that some marketing executive asked some developers to slap together an “Oracle branded distribution”. They then took a release of Fedora Core and changed graphics and colors. Boom! Instant industry player.

As usual with Oracle...

... including an 'interesting' choice of GRUB colours

I noticed that with Oracle security and perfomance begins with "nice colors" too...

Our biggest competitors are our customers

'Our biggest competitors are our customers' - paraphrase of a shareholder statement for a high tech company.

Companies don't NEED Red Hat support. All the documentation they need is freely available. They could provide all their own Linux support. The reason companies buy support from Red Hat is because it is cheaper and more reliable than doing it in-house.

Companies do need to buy support from Oracle because it is closed source. On the other hand, the open source databases are getting better. Oracle has two challenges: it has to provide better support than Red Hat (Oracle has a lousy rep.) and it has to fight off the steadily improving open source databases. In the long term, things don't look that good for Oracle. In the short term, we will see if they can use their superior size to crush Red Hat.

Open Oracle Linux ..

Couldn't a group of Oracle users form a support group and distribute upgrades for free. It's not as if Larry has any objection to stealing software.

Red Hat DB

I would really like to see RedHat throw a lot of weight into their "RedHat DB" product. As a postgres user I have been rather disapointed with RedHat's lack of marketing and their pricing of the product. I have never had to use any of the oracle to postgres migration tools, so I don't know how robust they are, but what if RedHat started marketing to existing Oracle users? If Oracle wants to take market share away from RedHat I would really like to see RedHat fight back. Any thing that gets postgres more users is a huge plus.

Blood Sucking..

"if this kills Red Hat, well, Oracle could either buy the company for peanuts or move on and suck the blood out of another vendor such as Novell or Debian."

Oh no! I sure hope Debian's stock price doesn't drop!

3 No's for Oracle

1) I don't see Oracle as having better/more Linux knowledge than those at RedHat so sell this as "Oracle to compete....Linux Support"? Would you pay an OS vendor for Oracle support?

2) If I use a database on Linux it is MySQL. I use Oracle on Solaris exclusively. I know it is a technical fallacy but I have to say it, "they go together".

3) If companies have to tweak the OS for their software to run then I tend to shy away from the software.

OSS Corporate Benchmarks

How much new SW has RedHat actually contributed to the community (not just support)? How much of that has been used in other distros?

We in the OSS community should benchmark Oracle's entry into the biz by measuring their contribution of code against how much money they earn on their distro. Their late entry is welcome, but does start "standing on the shoulders of giants", including RedHat's. The real contribution of a corporation getting all that "free" software to turn into a business is measured in their contribution of new code others can turn into a business, along with their cooperation in the mutual ecosystem.

What are Oracle's expected contributions to OSS Linux software? Anything other than just kernel tweaks that make Oracle RDBMS run better?

Another article: "Oracle Support," an Oxymoron"

Maybe biased, some some good points none-the-less:

http://www.linspire.com/linspire_letter.php [linspire.com]

ah damn !

read the article thinking "Oracle Linux Exploded"

Red Hat responds with real data

http://www.redhat.com/promo/unfakeable/ [redhat.com]

Let's examine other Oracle attempts at open source

First, I couldn't agree more that installing Oracle on linux being a total PITA. There're some truly arcane and painful steps in there. The database truly lost its luster for me years ago after I found out how great MySql and Postgres could be.

But how about the Oracle application server? A truly horrendous piece of shit that makes most SAP installations look like pure genius. One of the big "selling points" of their App server was that it used "the open source Apache web server". Oh joy.

This was great until the chunked encoding bug came out with Apache. I was caught supporting several external instances and they were fully vulnerable. No problem , it's Apache right , just fix it ourselves? Wrong, the custom modules are closed source, so you can't compile them for the upgraded version.

To add pain and suffering, Oracle said they had to do a full regression test on any fix and estimated a delivery time of something like four to six weeks for a fix. Their solution? Just turn it off to the outside. Firewall it off. Lovely. What we finally had to do was install a proxy in front of their web server.

I'd love to see how they treat any potential security issues. What a security fiasco. I really hate the fact that Red Hat has to suffer stock price loss as a result of the 500 pound ape throwing its idiotic weight around. This is just a security and performance fiasco waiting to happen.

Oracle "Unbreakable Linux"

Here is a thought folks - Oracle is more worried about MySQL steeling market share than anything - the model oracle is tuning into sounds pretty damn familiar to what the MySQL boyz having been doing for quite sometime. hmmmmm.......

Oracle may be losing relevance

I'm CTO of a small but growing just-barely-post-startup. (EG: We're profitable, and growing fast)

For me, Oracle is a non-starter. It's big, expensive, and reportedly has a high management overhead. So why would I bother?

So far, I've seen massive growth easily and handily supported by PostgreSQL [postresql.org]. It's been rock-solid, very stable, secure, and installation consisted of typing two commands:


yum install postgresql-server;
service postgresql start;


We're experimenting with Slony PG clustering, with the intention of rolling that out over Christmas break. (when nobody's looking) Currently, we're snapshotting and mirroring databases hourly, but we want real-time failover...

Kill the share price...

Kill the share price and buy yourself a nice Red Hat.

CentOS?

So, is this a CentOS or a real fork? It sounds more like a fork, which doesn't sound like a good idea. Oracle should have licensed the OS from RedHat and then provided a package deal.

Oh Big Larr, so excited about linux but no way to harness it. Thank got they didn't buy Novell.

-m