Oracle Isn't a Linux Company (Motley Fool) [LWN.net]

Oracle Isn't a Linux Company (Motley Fool)

Posted Oct 19, 2006 3:13 UTC (Thu) by dang (guest, #310)
Parent article: Oracle Isn't a Linux Company (Motley Fool)

It doesn't make much sense for Oracle to push for this ( certainly not in any exclusive way ). By certifying with "Enterprise" distros, Oracle black boxes a whole lot of development and support. And if some of those distros go through the pain of getting security certified ( e.g., the coming RHEL5 ), then that is even more pain ducked by oracle.

The kernel is one thing, but maintaining a distro ( which for oracle must include xorg and gnome libs, thanks ) is a pain in the ass. And unless Oracle thinks that they can roll a publicly used distro to sand away the rough edges and try out new features before they are rolled in to the Enterprise edition ( e.g. Fedora ), then they are firing in the dark. I mean, they could hand maintain patches on top of a some Ubuntu release, but , honest, this is hard work ( and tricky coordination ).

That said, could they take a publicly used distro and offer a DVD that let's you install the OS and Oracle in one easy step? Sure. But they'd be buying a ton of headaches if that were the only way that they made Oracle available and I can't see them wanting that.

I can also say that the market would resist. If I've got my internal distro maintenance, build, monitoring, and security infrastructure all based on a certain Enterprise Linux, I really don't want to have to one-off things to handle Oracle support. Nor do I want to have to sort what what this might do wrt licensing. I'm sure that Oracle consumers would communicate that pain back to Oracle if they tried to freeze out other linux distros. ( Though, again, if they just offer the option of using the Oracle bundle, then that is really nothing more than a friendly option and there is no real cause for concern ).

And, please, everyone, stop with the MySQL and Postgres sidelines. They are both fine tools for many jobs. I've used them. I've also been around for many migrations to Oracle because, honest, there are lots of jobs where these are clearly the wrong tools and Oracle is clearly much, much better suited. And it is a worthwhile question in and of itself to look at how best one can deploy Oracle on linux.

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Oracle Isn't a Linux Company (Motley Fool)

Posted Oct 19, 2006 12:33 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

ROTFL

You haven't looked at the requirements of Oracle tools did you ? They *will* force you to install X and a full web stack to handle the database (including niceties like motif)

Oracle Isn't a Linux Company (Motley Fool)

Posted Oct 20, 2006 23:19 UTC (Fri) by dang (guest, #310) [Link]

High on the list of DBA requests to Oracle for a long time now has been for a non-graphical installer, but no go. If you want to roll oracle you need X and Gnome.

Things get more complex when you want to build for 64 bit. Oracle wants a nice mix of 64 and 32 bit libs along with a stunning list of compat libs. Redhat ( and I imagine Suse ) handle all of that; I'm not so sure that Oracle would want to handle that mess on top of the rest.

In a lot of ways the least interesting part of this concerns the kernel. The give and take between Oracle and kernel developers ( and via projects rolled by distro vendors ) seems effective and old news. If oracle goes there own way it won't be with linux-the-kernel but with a distro, and they will really, really buy a chunk of work if they cut the major distros out of the loop. And for what upside? What is the business case for this? Where do they realize more revenue at the end of the day? It just doesn't make any sense to me.