Red Hat Dismisses Threat Posed by Oracle and MS 95
Rob writes "Red Hat Inc's executive vice president of worldwide sales, Alex Pinchev, has dismissed
the impact that Oracle Corp's entry into the Linux support business could have on Red Hat,
insisting Oracle does not really know what it is doing. Pinchev also described Microsoft's
recent interoperability and patent peace deal with Novell Inc as a "non-event"
and dismissed the suggestion that Linux users
are at risk of a patent infringement lawsuit from Redmond."
Re:Red Hat must not be an Oracle shop. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a good philosophy to have, but unfortunately, the sad reality is that your average PHB has heard of Oracle and knows that it has the reputation of being a rock-solid reliable product. Postgres and MySQL are unknown by many PHBs, and even worse, MySQL has the reputation of not being so reliable and not so high-performing, despite the best efforts of MySQL AB, which has put a ton of effort into MySQL to improve in areas of performance, availability, and reliability. Postgres is nice, and I think for all but high-end clustered databases, it can give Oracle a run for its money, but for now Oracle has carved itself out a nice niche being a premiere database player, along with IBM's DB2.
Re:Red Hat must not be an Oracle shop. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oracle's typical answer is that Oracle will only be supported by platforms blessed by Oracle.
Unlikely. Ellison is a blustering motormouth, but he isn't stupid. He wanted to put pressure on Red Hat because they were pressuring him -- hence the whole support for Red Hat drama. Oracle won't be going Oracle-platform-only anytime soon.
Smokin' The Herb... (Score:4, Insightful)
I like Postgres and MySQL as much as the next guy, they both have a lot going for them, but come on. Are they really as solid as Oracle for "mission critical" 100% up-time applications? I think they have the potential to reach that point, but maybe not yet there.
Re:Problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are there anti-trust issues with SQL Server only on Windows Server?
Re:Problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Red Hat must not be an Oracle shop. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Smokin' The Herb... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Red Hat must not be an Oracle shop. (Score:5, Insightful)
I can only speak to the situation at the company I've been with for the last eight years. We're pretty big, and have some large data requirements. There is absolutely zero chance that we will move away from Oracle in the next ten years (at least). The cost to licence, administer, and maintain our Oracle databases is trivial next to the cost of moving.
Other "Oracle shops" where professional acquaintances of mine are working are in a similar situation. The cost to move is MUCH larger than the cost to stay, and Oracle works extremely well.
For us, specifically, PostgreSQL and MySQL are not nearly powerful enough anyway. We really do need the beast.
I keep hearing that "move to an open source product" mantra about databases, but as near as I can tell it only makes sense for relatively trivial, simple systems to do so. It's not that more complex systems can't be built on the open source product - it's that once you're already running, there has to be a very serious gain to be had in switching.
Probably not... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do your applications support MySQL or PostgreSQL? If not too bad.
Do you want to re-write your applications for MySQL or PostgreSQL?
It really isn't as simple as just migrating. To be honest MySQL and PostgreSQL are not as good as Oracle for very large databases that require high availability.
The can probably do about 90% of what Oracle can do but some places need that extra 10%.
Re:Microsoft and Patents (Score:3, Insightful)