Oracle Buys Sun 906
bruunb writes "Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. 'We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle's earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle's non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,' said Oracle President Safra Catz."
Sad end (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow. Just Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe this isn't out the of realm of conceivability to others, but it was to me...Oracle is a software company (one that runs a lot on Sun hardware), and suddenly becoming a hardware company has got to be a daunting challenge, regardless of who you are or how smart you are.
The implications are staggering across the board. Maybe Oracle decides they don't want to the hardware, just Java and MySQL (...they got it, finally), but then all that Sun hardware and Solaris...? Or maybe they want to make Solaris/Sun hardware the best platform for Oracle products (already the case as far as I know), then what of support for all their other platforms.
Oracle likes to buy a lot of companies, but they've all been, more or less, niche players in specific markets to fill in the gaps of their own offerings. I can't imagine what "gap" buying Sun will fill, other than something will be certainly be filled.
Java is safe, mysql is safe... (Score:4, Insightful)
But SPARC is fucked. Not that it's any great loss, but anyone somehow still heavily invested in SPARC (not too good at reading the writing on the wall, huh?) should be making their transition yesterday. Probably a transition to IBM, which also has a competing database product which is quite credible.
On the flip side, perhaps Oracle will start leasing database-as-a-service boxes based around SPARC, which is about the only thing that could conceivably keep it alive. Why would you buy Sun if you didn't want their hardware? It would be a questionable move at best.
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun = Poorly run company with great products
Oracle = Masterfully run company with shitty products
I wonder how that DNA is going to come together...
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
There was a time when Oracle was considering Netbeans [zdnet.com], but Oracle joined the Eclipse Foundation.
I don't think JDeveloper is based on Eclipse though.
Might be interesting to see what happens. I think Netbeans will live on. Too many of sun's products rely on it.
What I'm more concerned with is the amount of contributions to PostgreSQL.
I still feel had they put more money/time into postgresql instead of buying MySQL, they wouldn't need to be bought.
Re:Wow. Just Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle likes to buy a lot of companies, but they've all been, more or less, niche players in specific markets to fill in the gaps of their own offerings. I can't imagine what "gap" buying Sun will fill, other than something will be certainly be filled.
Application server? Java development environment? Control of the Java language? UI Technology? Hardware?
Everyone seems to be missing the big picture: Oracle's goal is to offer you a fully supported "stack" from database to application server to hardware and everything in between. All the development tools, technologies, languages, etc. So they can lock you in and offer you the full range of support, no handing you off to so and so because it's not a database problem anymore. Would you pay a premium for that? That's how you make money. And now, they have filled a lot of those gaps and have absorbed some great teams to make that dream a reality. Or so they believe. We'll see how this turns out.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Poorly run company with shitty products?
You can bet your money on it
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Eclipse is open-source.
So is Netbeans.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
My guess is that they'll put Solaris in maintenance mode until Linux becomes accepted as a high-availability, enterprise platform. At that point, there would be no reason to maintain Solaris; companies would move to Linux anyway.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd head out to Sun's website and grab Solaris 10 (10/2008) while its still free. I should get a recommended patch set while I'm at it as well...
New hardware standard. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how long it will take Oracle to pretty much give the middle finger to HP and Dell hardware partnerships in favor of the soon-to-be-released OracleFire "product-in-the-box" line...
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd expect to see closer integration with their DB. ZFS has some very nice transactional facilities. Oracle on other platforms tends to use its own filesystem drivers, but on Solaris they could use a ZVOL for the underlying transactional model easily and benefit from the lower-level parts of ZFS while using their own code for the data layout. They already ship a Linux distribution for running the DB, but I wouldn't be surprised if they start shipping Solaris instead (they can then tie their code closely to the kernel without having to open source it).
The most interesting question is what will happen to the UltraSPARC line. On paper, Rock and the T2 look like they'd be a very good match for Oracle's workloads, but since Oracle's license prevents publishing benchmarks and I don't have the hardware and software to hand to test them, I can't tell how they do in the real world. While Sun hardware is relatively expensive, even a top spec T2 box is cheap compared to the software cost of a typical Oracle install and so I wouldn't be surprised if the T3 is tweaked even more heavily for Oracle workloads. Being able to sell a complete vertical solution, with their own CPU, OS, and DB system is probably quite appealing to Oracle.
Re:New Solaris bit-by-bit licensing terms (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually. I think it might well go the other way. That Oracle decided to fork/clone Red Hat shows one thing - Oracle WANTS to have an OS.
Now they have one.
Re:Java is safe, mysql is safe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? From what I've seen, the recent UltraSPARCs (T2, and possibly the Rock too) have the best performance-per-watt when running parallel workloads with few floating point ops and lots of I/O. Oracle workloads are parallel, with few floating point ops and lots of I/O. Shipping Oracle appliances on T2 chips means that they aren't having to pay another company a share of their profits for their CPU, and continuing to sell them to other people helps them offset more of the R&D costs.
Oh, and Sun aren't the only company making SPARC chips. Some of the ones Sun has been selling for the past few years have been rebranded Fujitsu SPARC64s and there are a few companies selling SPARC32 (v8) systems for the embedded market, although they are less common than ARM and PowerPC.
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is one of the biggest potential down sides of this deal. Oracle seek to control their products through using "their own thing"
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever (Score:5, Insightful)
8.4 has citext. Or you can make an index with lower() on the appropriate columns.
IMO it's preferable for software to not assume that "Helped my uncle Jack off a horse." and "Helped my uncle jack off a horse." are the same thing.
Oracle and SUN sitting in a Tree: C, L, O, U, D! (Score:0, Insightful)
Oracle and SUN sitting in a Tree: C, L, O, U, D!
Re:I doubt it (Score:5, Insightful)
MySQL is in a very different niche than Oracle.
I'd think MySQL is one of the reasons Oracle bought Sun. Whatever its failings, MySQL is the "default" choice for most new (small) deployments (I mean, to the extent there's the LAMP acronym for it), the ones that are too small for Oracle to care about.
Now that Oracle has it, they're in a position to "upsell" them once they get far enough. They now control both the high end AND the low end ("... the horizontal and the vertical..."). I'd expect an upper limit to the effort put into scaling MySQL up ("we already have a high-end DB, why waste the effort?"), but I don't see them abandoning it.
Re:Bad news for MySQL (Score:4, Insightful)
So what's to stop those users from using PostgreSQL instead?
Re:Good-bye MySQL (Score:1, Insightful)
Really? Rotting since 1999? This is based on what now? Seems to me postgres is smaller, but is growing.
It is a better implemented SQL server.
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Netbeans is much faster and elegant than JDev. Netbeans is much like another Eclipse, maybe better...
In the long run, FOSS converges to one winner, challenged by many (much smaller) creatures. Try to build a new browser or new *nix kernel and see how many people you project gets. Try to compete with Apache. Try to build a new OpenOffice (though one that had a major corp backing). I expect these IDE's to converge in one way or other to a single winner, and some small hang-on-tight communities fervor's for their champ remaining intact.
As for MySQL, the Oracle benefactors will say: do not worry, my dear people, we will keep it with true love, and gradually let it become deprecatingly obsolete.
Yes, very stupid move on IBM's part (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle suddenly has a great operating system, great server hardware, a popular database, and the de facto language of server-side business logic (other than COBOL.)
And IBM has built so much of its business on Java.
IBM should have just opened the piggy bank and it would have saved itself the world of hurt it now has in store.
Re:Niagara should have a future (Score:4, Insightful)
CPUs are a "scale" business. Bigger is better, cause it's extremly expensive too design and produce a CPU. That is why most of the non i86-architectures have vanished.
I might second you statement that Niagara *should* survive, but nevertheless I doubt it.
bye egghat.
Re:Sun's OSS Projects (Score:2, Insightful)
That 7.4 billion bought a sh*tload of useful I.P. (Score:5, Insightful)
This was an intellectual property firesale. IBM = idiots. Congratulations to anyone who realized Sun stock was ridiculously undervalued; you deserve the profit you made by buying low.
Re:SPARC going out...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonesense.
Their SPARC servers are their highest margin servers and account for most of their revenue. UltraSPARC server sales declined but the CoolThreads servers and x86 servers increased, but nowhere near the level of their traditional SPARC based revenues.
Buying Sun, and killing SPARC would be a stupid idea. They could have bought other companies cheaper.
I agree (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:4, Insightful)
just because someone doesn't know the feature of one language of dubious quality means they don't know anything about software development?
that's a rather arrogant and stupid assertion. I work with several programmers who wouldn't know the first thing about netbeans (i have heard of them but don't know how to use them as I don't care for Java - i work in C++). These programmers all got their degrees before i was born (im 25) and used to write mainframe code, and have since been transitioned to C++. Sure they might not know some of the more modern concepts (software patterns and antipatterns) by name [they've used factory, singleton, etc without knowing the formal names]: but they wouldn't know about netbeans. Does this make them bad programmers? no they're rather good programmers most of the time, if annoying when you know more about modern computer science than them and have to ask their permission to make a necessary change since you're the "junior developer"
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your sense of humor, OverflowException()
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:3, Insightful)
what does this mean for MySQL?
Probably the same thing it means for OpenOffice. Or Java.
No, because they have nothing to upsell above java ... Expect mysql to be stabilized, and have all syntax and maybe even docs oracle-ized or oracle-ified. Sort of like "free starter version of Oracle (minus as many useful features as we can get away with)". Expect new features to pretty much be sandbagged. The key is to slow down progress as much as possible without instigating a fork. So, the transition plan to go from the nuevo-mysql to oracle, would be dump the DB on nuevo-mysql and import it on oracle. No syntax changes, no modification of source, no column type issues, etc. Could be pretty cool.
On the other hand, if they really wanted a "starter demo" version of Oracle, they did not need to buy Sun to do it.
Re:Unbreakable (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm hoping that's a joke and not serious...
Why would that be a joke? For years Oracle/Solaris/SPARC was one of the preferred stacks for deploying a mission critical OLTP system in the enterprise as well as many start-ups.
When Oracle embraced linux and created their linux distro, they called it "unbreakable linux", because they made enhancements to linux to make it more stable. Implying that it was breakable before.
You don't have "Unbreakable Solaris" because that would be like having a banana-flavored banana.
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever (Score:1, Insightful)
Their string comparisons are case sensitive.
OMFG, massive fail for MySQL. I thought you were joking, but you aren't!
Imagine an OS where strcmp() was case insensitive, and where it was used to compare hashed passwords when authenticating users. Realize that base64 is now really base36, and that you're been throwing away approximately half the bits per character in the encoded password, and that your passwords are now about .5^$LENGTH as secure.
Have fun auditing your MySQL-based webapps to make sure that none of them use base64 password encoding coupled with case-insensitive searches!
Re:The internal announcement (Score:1, Insightful)
our board of directors and I approved the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by the Oracle Corporation
Notice how he makes it look like Sun is the controlling party.
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect if you're manually copying around the db's internal files you're doing it wrong. That's not the proper way to do replication, backups, or just about anything. Care to elaborate on what you were trying to do with the db's internal files?
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle vs DB2, I think most people will choose Oracle unless they're a long time IBM mainframe shop and think their IBM salespeople walk on water.
Same goes for AIX vs Solaris.
This is probably why IBM was even considering buying Sun, to keep Oracle from buying it.
Now you have a great database, OS, server hardware, application servers, middleware, development tools, consulting services, all from a single vendor. It's another IBM, but with products that people prefer.
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:2, Insightful)
btrfs is an attempt to recreate the features of ZFS. If Oracle releases ZFS under the GPL, then I would hope that it would be available as a first class filesystem under Linux as long as the Linux kernel maintainers don't get that "not invented here" syndrome. ZFS is a marvellous filesystem, but a lot of people don't understand it or how revolutionary it is because they haven't tried using it.
Oracle as backoffice coupled to OS/X front office? (Score:3, Insightful)
Since the back office is not mobile and caters to groupware, the cloud service could be called ImmobileUs, but I think marketing may object.
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever (Score:4, Insightful)
What good is a copy of a table file with no context, no foreign key integrity, no transactional integrity
Dude, you're talking to a MySQL user. They don't know what those things are.
Re:Niagara should have a future (Score:3, Insightful)
Untrue. Niagara T2 embeds inside of it's CPU most of the parts you would find on the motherboard, such as the RAM controller, northbridge, southbridge, even the Gig-E controller. There is less than 10% of a normal PC in the picture with the single, solitary, only PCI Express port.
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:3, Insightful)
In the long run, FOSS converges to one winner, challenged by many (much smaller) creatures. Try to build a new browser or new *nix kernel and see how many people you project gets. Try to compete with Apache.
KHTML/Webkit, BSD or Solaris, Lighttpd or Nginx. Doesn't matter if it's got the most users, it just matters if it's a viable deployment platform that's got (relatively) modern features. The only thing that matters to the end user is whether he can use BSD or Lighttpd or Webkit and have it do what he needs and will be maintained in the future.
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:3, Insightful)
According to economic theory, in most markets you get two market leaders--e.g. Coke and Pepsi, Bud and Miller, Ford and GM--and I don't see FOSS as any different.
Think about it: for almost every mature most-popular open source project, there's a second-place project that's superior.
Sendmail has postfix. MySQL has PostgreSQL. Apache has LigHTTPd. Emacs has vim. Python has Ruby. Git has bazaar. GNOME has KDE. Dia has Kivio. And so on.
(Have I poured enough gasoline yet?)
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was going to ask about KDE or Gnome.
MySQL or Postgres is still going strong.
Perl or Python ended up being both + Ruby
Windowmaker of FVWM ended up with neither
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:3, Insightful)
OURsql = Oracle Upgrade Route sql
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever (Score:3, Insightful)
string comparison using MATCH(row) AGAINST ('string') is case insensitive.
I know you can match insensitively, but it boggles my mind that it's not the default. I expect "=" to mean "equals", not "closely approximates if you throw away enough information".
Re:deja vue, DEC (Score:3, Insightful)
What in the world does this mean? Are you suggesting that EPIC could have gone any other way than non-general purpose computing? Or that Intel should have thrown billions of dollars at compilers to advance the state of the art the decade it needs to handle EPIC in a general purpose environment? Or that Itanium should have taken a route other than EPIC -- if so, then how would that differ from x86-64, Core2 style?
Itanium is an incredible processor for extremely predictable workloads. Numerical computation, rendering and the like where assembly can be used to tune the instruction ordering, or even very smart compilers that are tuned for specific flows really make EPIC shine something special. General purpose computing, with branch mispredicts, massive delays for different levels of memory hierarchy (L1, L2, main memory, spinning storage) and even context switching throws most EPIC for enough of a loop that a far simpler out of order processor with a few threads makes a lot more sense. Core2 is so simple that they're tossing more than half the die to the L2, and they might as well, because the IO count means they have to have the bigger die anyway. As much as I hate Chipzilla, they really hit one out of the park with the Core2 generation. Multicore Pentium-M was a brilliant idea -- IBM should have done the same thing with the PowerPC 750, but alas it was not to be.
I think the only thing HP/Intel could have done differently with Itanic was to not bet the farm on it. Alpha, MIPS and PA/RISC were far more promising than anybody allowed because as everybody at the time knew, Itanium was on the way.
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:3, Insightful)
I usually don't comment on my moderation, but flamebait?
Someone obviously doesn't know much about the enterprise db space.
Oracle has about twice the market share of DB2. On IBM's mainframe and midrange servers, DB2 is the only available choice, which helps their market share, but otherwise Oracle is the more popular choice.
As for AIX vs Solaris... I thought it was common knowledge which was more popular. Doesn't take much googling to find out.
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever (Score:2, Insightful)
This also has the advantage that the hash of the entered password never travels over the wire (if your db server is on a different box)
Umm... and the actual correct password hash traveling over the wire as a result is better how?
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Oracle = Masterfully run company with shitty products
I'm not sure I agree. Love it or hate it, their core product--their database--is what runs any enterprise application where fast, reliable transactions are required. You can't run Visa or SalesForce on MySQL. It'd be great if you could, but they'd break under the load.
To which product(s) are you referring?
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Firebird can't compete with MySQL. PostgreSQL can. The risk for Oracle just might be that PostgreSQL can compete with Oracle. MySQL can be a good backend, but it can't meet some of the advanced needs that people have of Oracle. Therefore it's not really a competitor. It hoovers up all the small players that either don't care for or can't afford Oracle's almighty solutions. Even the table type that does lend MySQL some of the more advanced technology (InnoDB) is licenced from Oracle and their home-grown version (Falcon) has yet to show signs of being usable.
PostgreSQL can't provide all the features and power that Oracle can either. For the absolute most powerful setup you can ask, you want Oracle. But PostgreSQL can get a lot closer than MySQL. And migrating between PostgreSQL and Oracle is also quite easy a lot of the time. I think from Oracle's point of view, they'd rather MySQL be out there as the go-to database than PostgreSQL. This is all a bit conspiracy theory - I make no suggestion that Oracle actually are looking at things from this point of view and I don't think it would be a factor in purchasing SUN even if they did consider this angle. But I'm just considering the actual implications and it seems to me that while MySQL doesn't compete in the same market as Oracle and wouldn't for quite some time, its main rival PostgreSQL can and sometimes does.
Re: Solaris (Score:3, Insightful)
He also said "Solaris is the best unix techonology available in the market."
Solaris isn't going anywhere.
So why is there still no Oracle 11g for Solaris/x86, when its already been released for most of the other major platforms, including Windows, Linux, AIX, HP-UX. It has been released for Solaris/Sparc, but as of yet, no 11g for Solaris/x86.
Oracle + Sun MUCH better than IBM + Sun (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM would have killed all of Sun's hardware (including their backup and storage gear, which is often forgotten and yet it's very large and important). No more SPARC and their cool-running, many-core (and open-source) Niagara platform.
IBM would have killed Solaris (they have their own Unix, AIX). Luckily, Solaris is open-source, so perhaps someone would have picked up the torch.
IBM would have killed Star/OpenOffice (they have their own office suite, no matter how crappy). Again, OpenOffice is opensource, so...
Oracle likes all of the above, to a varying but still high, degree.
Oracle is also a ruthless, almost barbaric company when considering their sales practices, but I prefer them to IBM any day. Oracle is like Attila's Huns - they pillaged for the money and the women, but they never tried to bullshit you with "we come in the name of the Lord" - that is IBM's style, with their fake and cynical pretense of contributing to open source and standards.
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think that's a very fair characterization. According to PJD, who ported it to FreeBSD::
http://www.bsdcan.org/2007/schedule/events/43.en.html [bsdcan.org]
See page 15 of the presentation. He calls it "highly portable". Perhaps it's the linux internals which are not modular enough!