Michael Dolan Dot Com

Thursday, October 26th, 2006

Oracle’s Move: Some of my thoughts

There are so many angels/effects on this one and I won’t possibly cover them all here. Stephen has posted his Q&A with coverage of the announcement here.

Taking an perspective a few miles back from the action, to say that no one saw this coming is a bit narrow in scope. If you looked at their Miracle Linux, this is just a copycat move of something Oracle already does… albeit on a grander scale.

Here’s a question for those IT industry trivia buffs out there… how does this Oracle announcement impact this, this and this? Hmmm… anyway, back to the present.

I think this opens up new opportunities for Oracle (as if Larry needs more to work on). I don’t consider forking as much an issue as everyone has been flag waving about. At the end of the day, it’s all the same code (unlike UNIX) but at different rev/patch levels. That’s a different issue than say Unices forking with entirely different code bases, POSIX implementations, etc. Larry made it clear they would re-synch with RHEL regularly (although with Oracle patches) and they’re platinum FSG/LSB now.

Back to new opportunities. Oracle patches released alongside their UBL patches through a single update utility. Oracle could build a test facility into the patch mgmt tools; Oracle could build a “stack” that’s pretuned for perf. Oracle could make Linux mgmt easier - say for the “starter” Windows admin level. If I had to speculate *on technical reasons*, one of opportunity for doing this is that you can config the OS to the tune of your workload (Oracle 10g in this case). So while 80% of RH’s customers may not want particular Oracle 10g perf tweaks (say xyz config option tweaked to 100 instead of the normal 3) - Oracle can do this in the future and match it to 10g needs.

Oracle could essentially create a highly tuned conf.d (although in RHEL the contents of conf.d would be spread throughout the directory structure with no apparent concern for organization). It would be foolish to say this doesn’t also give Oracle “a big seat at the table” when it comes to architectural, community, and strategic decisions. They did join the FSG - which evidences their LSB commitment. Does this make the LSB more relevant - I think it does.

Maybe… we’ll have Oracle 3D data cubes with XGL… didn’t Cognos try that once?

Ultimately we’ll see how this plays out with fireworks and penguin suits b/c I’m sure it will be front and center in the press/analyst/financial communities for some time to come. I’m most “fearful” of RH’s reaction to this - if they do something “stupid” in retaliation that disrupts the community. A 25% stock hit can prompt some drastic behavior (like trying to find an IP route to block Oracle in code rather than compete outside the code). I think right now, UBL is a great announcement for Linux and quite a ringing endorsement for RHEL and Linux as a mission critical, enterprise technology.

It’s also clear Larry has Windows in his sights (his smile at the end of the Q&A Windows question deserves a poster blowup). With UBL’s currently limited scope, I wouldn’t be surprised if this doesn’t give RH a boost in the long run. Think about it: Oracle didn’t announce a distro - they announced support (although basically lied b/c they did launch a distro). Circular yes, but there are thousands of RHEL webservers, DNS servers, SAP servers, DB2 servers, BEA/Websphere servers, etc that Oracle won’t be touching anytime soon (at least at a high volume scale with current model). It’ll take large customers months to test, validate, and decide if they want to roll the Oracle dice too. Even if they want to go with Oracle, it’ll take months of red tape before they buy.

So I’ve said more than usual on this one. I’m sure many will disagree with a point here or there, but overall again I think this is good for Linux and hope you do too. Hey, at least someone’s taking the attention away from rms ;)

BTW, ALL the above are my own personal thoughts and not that of my employer … as if any employer ever endorses someone’s personal thoughts :)