OOW 09, it was

Oracle Open World is winding down. The Register has a recap of the main event – Larry Ellison’s keynote speech. I wasn’t able to attend this years OOW. So I followed  it online via Twitter and the livestream. Worked out OK, but somehow missed some of buzz.  On the plus-side, I avoided the loud music before the keynotes (many on Twitter complained about it), could do other more interesting stuff during the boring parts of a keynote (there were quite a view according to Twitter).

I think there was no “big bang” such as the Exadata announcement last year. To spiff it up a bit they announced the 10 million dollar challenge. Exadata V.2 was already announced mostly to stop SUN’s bleeding, although a part of the keynote was still about it. They probably planned more stuff around SUN, but the EU’s insistence of checking the deal further did halt all major efforts. We will see, what happens later down the road.

Fusion Apps were shown for the first time I know there quite a few who were really looking forward to that one. Applications built on Fusion Middleware.

OOW 09, it was fairly quiet.

Yet another Update on MySQL

The Ex-MySQL boss has sent a letter to the EU, iterating his believe that Oracle should be allowed to buy sun. I find this comment especially interesting:”MySQL is used to power large-scale Web sites with many servers, a role for which Oracle’s back-end database software isn’t suited, he argued. It’s therefore in Oracle’s interest to boost the MySQL business, Mickos said.” I think most of the Oracle Sales people would beg to differ. He might even get a call from Larry Ellison. IBM and others will jump on this assessment. T

he funny part here is that they – Larry Ellison and he – argue in opposite directions.

CEO of Oracle: “We need MySQL to compete with Microsoft in the SMB market”

Ex-CEO MySQL: Oracle needs MySQL to run large scale Internet sites.

Funny how things fall into place once in a while or not ….

Wanna buy a switch?

Brocade supposedly looking for a buyer.

List of interested parties includes Cisco, HP, Dell, IBM and Oracle …..

Update: We won’t spin off MySQL – Oracle

In a blog on CNET the author explains why Oracle wants to keep MySQL – because of Microsoft. As the author states SQLServer is pretty big in emerging markets with MySQL a close second and Oracle nowhere insight. SQLServer is also big in SMB. Sometimes I am just surprised how big Microsoft is …

Another update some footage of Larry Ellison’s interview at the Churchill Club. It is about cloud computing- funny:

The full version is here.

Here is another video comparing this interview with an interview he gave during his NC days with Charlie Rose:

Enjoy

VCE – VMware, Cisco, EMC

Aah, one of these 3 letter initiatives. Why three in this case – 3 musketeers?

I remember others like VOS from back then. It was a Veritas, Oracle, SUN. Not sure if it still exists. If so it would now have to be called SO – from  VOS to SOS (Symantec replaced Veritas) and now the final S needs to be erased so it should be either called SO or SOO …

Anyways I was invited to a sales event by NEXUS. They are partners of Cisco. At this event we got bombarded by slides about this initiative. I have to admit that I didn’t really look at the Cisco’s UCS and if I did I was mostly interested in the FCoE technology. But the power lies in the switch. Cisco added power features/code to their Nexus switches and made them dedicated UCS switches. Not sure what’s exactly added, but they claim it greatly improves Virtualization, though.

Couple of other things I realized. Very little mentioning of Oracle. Weird when you consider how much software Oracle now sells. But then Oracle is a “competitor” to VMware. Not a big one though (Marketshare: WMware: 74,2%, Microsoft:14.8% and then there is the rest). Not much interest in Oracle’s OVM, despite the continuous threat of non-support by Oracle. We will see if Oracle will be able to become a real player in this market. Maybe customer just don’t care or they buy somewhere else. For now – I guess – nobody will virtualize their big production DB anyways, since they are on dedicated systems anyways. There is gazillions of things you can virtualize before you take on the “big one”.

Last question: When will IBM and HP come out with their dedicated blade switches?

Here is an EMC Blog about Oracle non-support of VMware.

Ellison: We won’t spin off MySQL

Here are some interesting tidbits from Mr. Ellison’s appearance at the Churchill Club (he got interviewed by Ed Zander – former CEO of SUN!!!!):

http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-management/ellison-we-won’t-spin-mysql-653

The event took place here (It might be online at a later time):

http://www.churchillclub.org/eventDetail.jsp?EVT_ID=831

Oracle updates it’s “iPod”

Big announcement at Oracle:

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/datacenter/?p=1530

Why do the call it the “Sun Oracle Database Machine” (SODM?). A mouthful of a name. Why is the SUN name still in it? So they do finally cut their ties to HP less than a year after they made the announcement at the 2008 OOW.

Interesting to see how HP will react to this. Getting closer with Microsoft?Rejuvenating their old DBs like Tandem? Will they go out and (re)start selling their Data Warehouse Solution?

What will others do like Dell?

IBM might profit from it though . Some customers don’t like the idea of a vendor lock-in. Meaning everything out of one hand. As Oracle tries to emulate IBM strategy, these customers can now choose from two equals – or evils.

HP is marque sponsor for this years OOW

Silicon Valley Code Camp

Lot’s a good stuff on:

http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/Sessions.aspx

Maybe we will see each other at the registration desk.

NoCOUG Summer Conference

Today I am at the NoCOUG event in San Ramon. First presention was about running Oracle on Amazons Cloud. Interesting…. But I think it actually tough to calculate Cost of Ownership. There is around 5 or more pricing parameter to consider such as I/O per month, bandwidth, CPUs, storage, etc.

One aspect, that I think could be interesting is that you could put your standby database on the cloud. Your primary db is at home.

Also backup in the cloud was looking cool too.

Next is a presentation about Oracle’s SQLdeveloper Data Modeller. Interesting tool. Creates your DDL out of the graphic models.

Oracle’s Fusion Middleware Roll-out

Spent a day at Oracle.

Watched a couple of presentations on Fusion Middleware. Still not clear to me what it really is …

It seems like a bundle of technologies, that they can’t really put a name on. And so it was presented –  a gazillion of apps that. All there to make your life easier. Especially the portal part can be confusing. What can it do, what can’t it do? It is not working with Flash out of the box – I think.

The web is now about 2o years old, but the on the development side it is confusing as ever.

Also realized, that Oracle strength still still seems to be the database. This event drew about half of the people as compared to a database event about 2 months ago. And that event was about new features in 11gR1 – not even R2.

11g R2 is close I guess, I heard rumours of a roadshow in September. I hope it doesn’t collide with Apples event, otherwise it will disappear in iTunes noise with the buildup  of speculations like will Steve Jobs attend or not.