Red Hat's Oracle shot: The Unbreakable Database? Red Hat has always been joined at the hip to the success of the database market. What's surprising is that it has yet to launch its own database product. Perhaps that should change. Much of Red Hat's success today was built on Oracle's early support for the Linux and middleware leader over the past decade. But it wasn't always …
"But does it have the will to buy the last-standing privately held database vendor?"
You have completely omitted that EnterpriseDB sells its own version of Postgres and that its business has been doing very nicely since Sun borged MySQL and Oracle borked the Sun acquisition; the Oracle compatibility certainly helps. Netezza is another Postgres+ (in the sense of added value) vendor. For customers there is a lot of sense in keeping things the way they are which may be why Postgres has been making such great strides recently, 9.1 is really going to get a lot of interest.
I really wonder how could enterprise companies could stand to such an amateurly, almost like a little grocery shop managed company especially when there is IBM option.
Itanium thing still makes me amazed since I still use powerpc here. If some CPU rejected to boot because its sales forecast is bad, it would be my poor Mac Mini G4 and yet, I compile everything with GCC. I guess RMS doesn't follow news like Oracle does :)
I'm an infrastructure architect and I am waiting for a good alternative to Oracle & SQL Server to recommend as an enterprise standard.
I personally adore PostgreSQL and would love to be able to recommend EnterpriseDB. The only reason I cannot, right now, is because over my head are CIOs and they've never heard of EnterpriseDB. They have, however, heard of Red Hat.
Honestly, in a bigco the decision tree often is that boneheaded.
Acquisition would be a very smart move, if RedHat can learn from their post-M&A integration mistakes with JBoss.
In the meantime, Oracle renamed "its" (intentionally put in quotes) variant of a Linux distribution to just Oracle Linux, happened with version 5.6.
From my experience, taking those terms like unbreakable and specifically Enterprise out of the name makes sense, 'cause one thing's for sure: It's not enterprise-ready..
"It aggressively targets major rivals in big market"
Oracle targets anyone who if feels it can cut out of the loop including its own VAR's and partners.
We were responsible for Oracle having a major account with at least one multinational and they dropped us some years ago as we did zero direct VAR sales. Today we support and enhance postgresql as oracle has let us down more than once. I suspect Oracle must be wondering why pg is cutting into thier very lucrative telco market sales about now :-)
Database is a tough/mature market. Some good software vendors have tried to grab market share and failed.
In my opinion, a Big Data play revolving around open source might make most sense for someone like Red Hat. It's higher a growth market, and that market is still in the formative stages.
Cloudera might be a good acquisition. It would avoid conflict with Oracle, and it would really hurt Oracle (because Cloudera is probably Oracle's only viable option for playing catch up in the Big Data space... once Oracle admit that Exadata is not the answer to Big Data).
> once Oracle admit that Exadata is not the answer to Big Data
Admit that is is the storage component of the fastest and most scalable database cluster platform in the world, supporting both OLAP and OLTP?
Admit that it is based on Infiniband that is far superior than using Gig Ether?
And they have already admitted that Exadata and Oracle DB Machines were the fastest and widest product uptakes they ever had in the market. It is. That. Damn. Good.
It will be very tough for anyone to enter this niche market that Oracle has grabbed.
Apologies for obviously upsetting you @Alien, but I stick with my earlier statements.
There are a few definitions of Big Data floating around. Many people are converging on a definition that says something like... "a class of Data Management challenges that cannot easily be handled by traditional relational approaches".
Hence the evolution of a Hadoop ecosystem, the emergence of solutions that analyze streaming data in motion, an so on. Oracle has not invested in research and development around these kinds of Big Data challenges. And I am not sure that playing catch-up with organic development is a realistic option or them if they want to enter these markets.
I consider Cloudera to be one of the primary potential acquisition targets for Hadoop-based solutions. So if Oracle decide that they want to get into this market, an acquisition like this is probably the easiest path for them to do so. Sorry to tell you, But Exadata is not going to cut it for such situations :-)
> That would be news to me and I've been following the technology sector for too long to remember
Well, it did made a difference. The Oracle db market is significant. And when it supported RHEL, corporate doors opened for RedHat.
Have first hand experience at that - getting Linux/RHEL into a major corporate. Today Linux (and not HP-UX or Solaris or Windows) are the preferred o/s for database platforms.
Granted, you can argue about the extend this impacted RedHat's market share and turnover. But it would be foolish to argue that it did not.
Well, you haven't been paying very close attention then. So, explain what application is more prevalent in the Enterprise on Red Hat than Oracle DB? Without Oracles support in the Enterprise, Red Hat would be much smaller and much less than what it is today.
Whatever may be the stage that EnterpriseDB is at - the engagement from the BIG names in the industry has my interest piqued....waiting and watching to see how this story plays out.
Might and resources of the large players + EnterpriseDB mastery in PostgreSQL + EnterpriseDB Oracle Compatibility = Spring board to a meaningful database play?
Postgres can play in the OLAP space with folks like Greenplum/EMC, but it doesn't have the ecosystem (apps, tools, trained DBAs, etc.) to compete in the OLTP space. The only true competitor in that space is MySQL, also owned by Oracle. MySQL dominates in the cloud as well. I expect Redhat, HP and others will come around to extending MySQL with business class capabilities.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
