EC Formally Objects To Oracle's Purchase of Sun 334
eldavojohn writes "The EC has presented Oracle and Sun with a statement of objections. Despite the promotion of former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, the statement seems to focus entirely on
what many have feared: MySQL vs. Oracle databases. From Sun's 8-K SEC filing: 'The Statement of Objections sets out the Commission's preliminary assessment regarding, and is limited to, the combination of Sun's open source MySQL database product with Oracle's enterprise database products and its potential negative effects on competition in the
market for database products.' The EU and the EC are getting a rep for disagreeing with US counterparts." On Monday afternoon the DoJ reiterated its support for the deal. Matthew Aslett has a helpful timeline of the action from the EC.
What is the EC?? (Score:2, Informative)
The European Commission (formally the Commission of the European Communities) acts as an executive of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union.
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
The EC is.. who now?
EC is European Commission http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission [wikipedia.org]
Re:Good Business (Score:4, Informative)
"Some hardware engineering but that SPARC stuff really isn't competitive."
Really?
How much do you know about "that SPARC stuff?" It's true that x86 has finally surpassed a lot of the things that Sparc led the way in, but there are still ways that traditional Sparc scales better.
Now moving to the next generation of Sun's gear, we have hardware virtualisation and CoolThreads. Under a hundred grand will buy you a system with four 8-core CPUs, and each core can process eight simultaneous threads. That is OLTP nirvana! Too much power? Chop it up into a handful of smaller servers, each running their own OS. Any one of them can in turn be split into zones--soft OS partitions.
I keep hearing about how Sparc is obsolete, and yet the new generation of Sparc processors and supporting hardware is pushing the state of the art that Intel and AMD aren't even planning in yet.
Re:Okay... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I disagree (Score:1, Informative)
I'm not the GP, but I'm guessing it's not a shot against it in any way since the fact that it's low-end isn't a consequence of poor implementation or design, but is itself a design decision: MySQL is good at dealing with small, simple databases that require only simple features and relatively small-scale loads, and anything else is simply not what it's intended for, so any performance issues or the like are a consequence of using the wrong tool for the job, not of the tool being broken.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:3, Informative)
"...not specifically American nerds."
Are you sure?
http://slashdot.org/faq/editorial.shtml#ed850 [slashdot.org]
"Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans"
Re:Good Business (Score:3, Informative)
"Some hardware engineering but that SPARC stuff really isn't competitive."
Really?
How much do you know about "that SPARC stuff?" It's true that x86 has finally surpassed a lot of the things that Sparc led the way in, but there are still ways that traditional Sparc scales better.
Now moving to the next generation of Sun's gear, we have hardware virtualisation and CoolThreads. Under a hundred grand will buy you a system with four 8-core CPUs, and each core can process eight simultaneous threads. That is OLTP nirvana! Too much power? Chop it up into a handful of smaller servers, each running their own OS. Any one of them can in turn be split into zones--soft OS partitions.
I keep hearing about how Sparc is obsolete, and yet the new generation of Sparc processors and supporting hardware is pushing the state of the art that Intel and AMD aren't even planning in yet.
Umm... what?
First of all, for "a hundred grand", I can buy 10 systems that add up to 80 Intel 3Ghz cores (160 threads) with 720GB of memory, which is going to shit all over that SUN box with its anemic 1Ghz processors. That's retail pricing, in Aussie dollars! Including tax! Delivered to your door in under a week, assembled!
Meanwhile, to get that SUN box, I'd have to "call your nearest SUN dealer". Oh good, I can't wait to have him explain to me how spending $100K is going to "save me money", or something.
I'll grant you that 32 cores in a single box is needed for those rare cases where you need "one big box to rule them all", but SUN has dropped the ball on that too:
Intel is releasing their 2GHz+ 8 core, 16 thread Nehalem-EX [intel.com] processors this year (or very early next year), and it has glue-less scaling to 8 processor sockets (64 cores, 128 threads) and a jaw-dropping 128 DIMM sockets. With the dirt-cheap 4GB DIMMs that most people are buying, you could pack in 512GB into a single box for a mere $24K. Again, that's retail pricing, in Aussie dollars, including tax.
Meanwhile, IBM is about to ship their 4GHz+ 8 Core, 32 thread POWER7 CPU [wikipedia.org], which scales to 32 sockets. In case you missed that, it's 4x the clock rate and 8x the sockets, or 32x the performance of that SUN server.
Not to mention that both IBM and Intel processors have had virtualization (same thing as "zones" or "partitions") for a long time now, and can run more than one kind of OS side-by-side. The POWER processors can run various IBM operating systems as well as Linux, and Intel is compatible with damned near anything, including Solaris.
Face it, SPARC is dead, the big-boys are making chips with several times the power, for a fraction of the cost. (admittedly, POWER7 isn't going to be cheap)
PS: I'm not surprised SUN is generally losing their market share, even their x86 kit is overpriced. I personally love the concept of the SUN Thumper ZFS-based storage array, and was all excited about it, right up until I saw their pricing model: They only go to up to 1TB drives, and it's actually cheaper to buy the model with 250GB drives, then throw the drives out, and go buy 48 replacement 2TB SATA drives from a retail store. That's 2x the storage for 1/2 the cost. Insanity.
I think SUN forgot that some of their potential clients can count.