When I saw this, I just could not believe it. A 40% Price increase in this business climate. Give it a break. It is no wonder Microsoft SQL Server is the fastest growing database in the Market.

Since SQL Server 2005 Microsoft has given us a database that can keep up with Oracle at all levels. When it comes to price performance there is no competition, Microsoft SQL server wins hands down.

Well leave it to Oracle to give is a 40% increase in the worst economy in over 40 years.
Well here is the article that caught my attention…..

Oracle cranks up some prices 40%

Founder & CEO, Ntirety

www.ntirety.com

My Personal Twitter Account: Michael_Corey

Ntirety Corporate Twitter Account: Ntirety

I found a great article on The Register website from the UK. It had some great quotes from Steve Ballmer concerning the Oracle Sun deal.   Here is a small portion of the article.

Microsoft's DNA won't permit Oracle-Sun deal

Ballmer knows his knitting

By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco

Posted in Software, 22nd April 2009 21:53 GMT

Comment When Steve Ballmer tackled the inevitable question on a Microsoft hardware acquisition, in the wake or Oracle's planned purchase of Sun Microsystems, he was "sticking to the knitting."

"I have no idea why a software company would buy a hardware company," Microsoft's chief executive is reported to have said.

That's not to say Microsoft is impervious to one big trend working its way through the market for storing, serving, and understanding information that Oracle occupies: the trend for getting fast access to huge quantities of data on massive networks and making sense of it. Far from it.

Increasingly, a hardware and software stack tuned to the needs of a combined database, storage system, and processing unit - an appliance - is seen as the way to tackle this.

Oracle last year announced the HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server and HP Oracle Database Machine, a box from Hewlett-Packard featuring a stack of pre-configured Exadata Storage Servers all running Oracle's database and its Enterprise Linux.

It's possible that Oracle's purchase of Sun could help it turn out more such boxes. The only question is why Oracle would want to bother taking on the burden of running a global, hardware design and manufacturing operation when its core competence is software.

To read the entire article...

Microsoft's DNA won't permit Oracle-Sun deal 

I think this has a lot to do with Larry Ellison. He has tried on a number of occasions to get into the Hardware Business. I wonder what will happen with the HP relationship now that Oracle does not need them ?

I think Oracle getting access to MySql was a very smart move. They will very quicky develope a migration path from MySql to Oracle if they are smart. There is good reason Microsoft SQL Server is the fastest growing database in the Market. When you look at the total suite of develppment tools all built by one vendor, the Buisness Intelligence Capabilities, the tight integration, the price points. There is good reason people are choosing SQL Server now. 

Also getting there hands on JAVA was very good for Oracle. I think Microsoft is smart to stick to there knitting. 

Founder & CEO, Ntirety

www.ntirety.com

My Personal Twitter Account: Michael_Corey

Ntirety Corporate Twitter Account: Ntirety

Oracle Set Its Sights On Salesforce.com is that what is really going on?

I have been working with Oracle since version 3.  Over the years at times it seemed when I observed Oracle I was watching a good soap opera.  I suppose that could be said of any big company. On the Latest Oracle Fiscal Second Quarter conference call it appears that Oracle now has set Salesforce.com in its sights.

Oracle Target = Salesforce.com

To use an Oracle term I use to hear over the years. When Oracle sets a company in its sight it means “shut off its oxygen”. Though in this case I would not think that is the intention.  So in this latest Fiscal Second Quarter conference call Salesforce.com got quite a bit of attention. In years past I use to listen to these calls, I dont take the time anymore. So I will rely in ZD to provide you some background.

December 19th, 2008
Oracle puts Salesforce.com in its sights
Posted by Larry Dignan @ 4:49 am

Oracle’s fiscal second quarter conference call was interesting on a couple of fronts. Here are a few observations:

No. 1: Oracle has a new whipping boy: Salesforce.com.

Check out CEO Larry Ellison’s comments about Salesforce.com, which totaled eight mentions (not quite SAP territory, but getting there), on the company’s second quarter conference call. The call came after solid earnings results.

In sales on demand, our primary competitor there is salesforce.com and this quarter was conspicuous and a series of competitive wins against salesforce.com. One which was our largest ever on demand or cloud computing, whatever you want to call it, a competitive win over salesforce.com was actually a replacement of salesforce.com.

The customer will be de-installing salesforce and replacing it with Oracle sales on demand so we’re very excited about that. That business is now growing.

When we compete head-to-head with salesforce we win more deals then we lose and that’s new in the last couple of quarters.

And then there was co-president Charles Phillips:

We have strong customer adoption at Siemens, we had a 12,000-seat win, that’s [inaudible] implementation and we’ll become the standard there. US Food Service where we beat salesforce.com about 7,000 users there. [Matreol] Healthcare displaced salesforce.com there and in West Pack where we also beat saleforce.com.

So we have had quite a bit of momentum there and I forgot to mention [Swisscom] as well, another 3,000 seats.

Add it up and you have eight mentions of Salesforce.com from Oracle. You can read that mean:

Oracle is going to buy Salesforce.com. The smack talk can preclude a merger. After all, executives said the company is still shopping for deals.

Or Oracle is acknowledging that Salesforce.com is moving upstream and becoming a threat and Ellison is sending a brushback pitch. Speaking of Salesforce.com obsession Oracle just announced a bunch of CRM on demand wins (statement).

To read the remaninder of this Article in ZDNET....

Oracle puts Salesforce.com In Its Sights

The Marc Benioff Larry Ellison Relationship

First To Better Understand what is happening a little background information...

If my memory serves me right, Larry Ellison was an early investor in Salesforce.com. At one point very early in Salesforce.com history Larry Ellison was asked to be on the Board of Directors by the Salesforce founder Marc Benioff a former Oracle Employee.  Then Larry Ellison was asked to resign from the Salesforce.com board due to a conflict of interest. That conflict of interest was Oracle launching a direct competitor called OraclesalesOnline.com. It is also my understanding that Marc and Larry Ellison knew each other before Marc went to work for Oracle. 

When Marc Benioff was at Oracle I had the pleasure of have a lot of dealing with Marc. Marc very early on was a true visionary. Marc always stood out from others. At Oracle he introduced a number of initiatives that had major impact on directions Oracle was taking. When Marc left  Oracle I felt it was a real loss. I always knew Marc was headed for great things,

What I liked most about this article was the conclusions. 

Oracle is acknowledging that Salesforce.com is moving upstream and becoming a threat and Ellison is sending a brushback pitch. 

Anyone who is familiar with Salesforce.com knows they are definitely moving upstream in a big way.  Saleforce.com is a true development platform already. It is already letting people realize the power of cloud computing.  I could go on for pages on where Salesforce.com is headed but would take this blog way off topic. Suffice to say Salesforce.com is headed upstream in a big way. 

Oracle is going to buy Salesforce.com. The smack talk can preclude a merger. After all, executives said the company is still shopping for deals.

There are so many great reasons why Oracle should buy Salesforce.com

The companies are very synergistic.

Salesforce could really benefit from Oracle dominant position in the enterprise as it moved forward with its development platform. With Oracle behind salesforce.com it would be so much easier to get major corporations to adopt a development platform for rolling out applications housed in the clouds using salesforce.com at its heart.
Oracle would have an incredible brand to build its cloud computing strategy built around an Oracle Software as a service offering.

What really got my attention what something I read in Silicon Valley Watcher. There article provided some really interesting insight....

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce would make a good successor to replace 63 year old Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, when he retires says Matthew Greeley, CEO of BrightIdea.com. Mr Benioff is used to work at Oracle. When he left Oracle in 1999, Mr Ellison provided seed funding for Salesforce and also served on its board of directors.

-Mr Benioff needs a new challenge, he appears to be losing interest in Salesforce, or at least reducing his financial interest in his company at a rapid daily rate. He has been selling 10,000 Salesforce shares every single day since 21 August 2007. Before then, he sold 20,000 shares every day since 14 November 2006. Prior to that date, Mr Benioff sold thousands of shares every day in variable amounts since 31 July 2006.

[Please see: Insider Trades - Marc Benioff - Yahoo! Finance.]

-An Oracle acquisition of Salesforce would strengthen its strategic position against SAP, the top enterprise application software company. SAP has been slow in figuring out its online strategy, even naming its initiative has been challenging to the company.

UPDATED: Larry Ellison will have to buy Salesforce at some point anyway. Netsuite cannot be scaled to the size of Salesforce in this decade, maybe in the next. The two businesses could be easily integrated, that's the beauty of online software, it's all standards based.

To read the entire Silicon Valley Insider article....

Is Salesforce Worth $75/Share To Oracle?

Some things in this article really stood out...

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce would make a good successor to replace 63 year old Larry Ellison

Mr Benioff needs a new challenge, he appears to be losing interest in Salesforce, or at least reducing his financial interest in his company at a rapid daily rate.

If Larry Ellison were willing to step down, I can not think of a better person to take over the helm at Oracle then Marc Benioff. Given where the industry is headed, cloud computing, Software as a service. Marc would be a visionary that could take Oracle to new heights. 

Posted Michael Corey,

Founder & CEO, Ntirety

www.ntirety.com

We all keep hearing about cloud computing. The opinions are all over the map. From time to time I have commented in cloud computing in my Blog. A few of my favorite quotes…

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman. 

This was covered in detail in my blog entry Richard Stallman - "Cloud Computing is a Trap!

Larry Ellison said that the computer industry is more fashion-driven than women's fashion and cloud computing is simply the latest fashion.

This was covered in detail in my blog Why Cloud Computing Is Like The Fashion Industry

In some ways I think of cloud computing akin to timeshare computing in the 1970’s. What is clear to me is where there is smoke there is fire. When companies like AMAZON and Microsoft are making big bets on it. There is something there that will effect how Technology is delivered.  My latest blog entry is from  O’Reilly Radar

Here is a little bit of Information on Tim O'Reilly..

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, and the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is an activist for open source and open standards, and an opponent of software patents and other incursions of new intellectual property laws into the public domain. Tim's long-term vision for his company is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. 

It’s a very well written piece on cloud computing I want to share.

Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing

by Tim O'Reilly 

A couple of months ago, Hugh Macleod created a bit of buzz with his blog post The Cloud's Best Kept Secret. Hugh's argument: that cloud computing will lead to a huge monopoly. Of course, a couple of weeks ago, Larry Ellison made the opposite point, arguing that salesforce.com is "barely profitable", and that no one will make much money in cloud computing.

In this post, I'm going to explain why Ellison is right, and yet, for the strategic future of Oracle, he is dangerously wrong.

First, let's take a look at Hugh Macleod's argument:

...nobody seems to be talking about Power Laws. Nobody's saying that one day a single company may possibly emerge to dominate The Cloud, the way Google came to dominate Search, the way Microsoft came to dominate Software.

Monopoly issues aside, could you imagine such a company? We wouldn't be talking about a multi-billion dollar business like today's Microsoft or Google. We're talking about something that could feasibly dwarf them. We're potentially talking about a multi-trillion dollar company. Possibly the largest company to have ever existed.

I imagine many of my friends who work for the aforementioned companies know all about this, and know how VAST the stakes are.

Windows vs Apple? Who cares? Kid's stuff. There's a much bigger game going on... And for some reason, its utter enormity seems to be a very well-kept secret, at least to non-combatants like myself.

The problem with this analysis is that it doesn't take into account what causes power laws in online activity. Understanding the dynamics of increasing returns on the web is the essence of what I called Web 2.0. Ultimately, on the network, applications win if they get better the more people use them. As I pointed out back in 2005, Google, Amazon, ebay, craigslist, wikipedia, and all other other Web 2.0 superstar applications have this in common.

Cloud computing, at least in the sense that Hugh seems to be using the term, as a synonym for the infrastructure level of the cloud as best exemplified by Amazon S3 and EC2, doesn't have this kind of dynamic. (More on different types of cloud computing later.)

Of course, it is true that the bigger players will have economies of scale in the cost of equipment, and especially in the cost of power, that are not available to smaller players. But there are quite a few big players -- Google, Microsoft, Amazon -- to name a few, that are already at that scale, with or without a cloud computing play. What's more, economies of scale are not the same as increasing returns from user network effects. They may be characteristic of a commoditizing marketplace that does not actually give outsize economic leverage to the winners.

I can't vouch for the authenticity of the following remark, since I heard it secondhand, but it was from a thoughtful, informed source: Jeff Bezos is reported to have said that he welcomes cloud competition from Google and Microsoft, because they'll subsidize their cloud services with profits from other part of their business, while Amazon will always have to make it pay. "We're good at commodity businesses," Jeff is reported to have said, and the facts bear him out.

If cloud computing is a commodity business, then the outsize profits that Hugh envisioned are not going to be there. This is a business that will be huge, but it may be more similar to the web hosting and ISP markets, which are also huge, but not hugely profitable. (See Rackspace's numbers for a taste.)

But because one of my goals at Radar is to help people think about the future, I wanted to spend some time on the possible futures and strategies that could turn cloud computing into the kind of massive monopoly that Hugh envisioned.

Types of Cloud Computing

Since "cloud" seems to mean a lot of different things, let me start with some definitions of what I see as three very distinct types of cloud computing:

1. Utility computing. Amazon's success in providing virtual machine instances, storage, and computation at pay-as-you-go utility pricing was the breakthrough in this category, and now everyone wants to play. Developers, not end-users, are the target of this kind of cloud computing.

   This is the layer at which I don't presently see any strong network effect benefits (yet). Other than a rise in Amazon's commitment to the business, neither early adopter Smugmug nor any of its users get any benefit from the fact that thousands of other application developers have their work now hosted on AWS. If anything, they may be competing for the same resources.

   That being said, to the extent that developers become committed to the platform, there is the possibility of the kind of developer ecosystem advantages that once accrued to Microsoft. More developers have the skills to build AWS applications, so more talent is available. But take note: Microsoft took charge of this developer ecosystem by building tools that both created a revenue stream for Microsoft and made developers more reliant on them. In addition, they built a deep -- very deep -- well of complex APIs that bound developers ever-tighter to their platform.

   So far, most of the tools and higher level APIs for AWS are being developed by third-parties. In the offerings of companies like Heroku, Rightscale, and EngineYard (not based on AWS, but on their own hosting platform, while sharing the RoR approach to managing cloud infrastructure), we see the beginnings of one significant toolchain. And you can already see that many of these companies are building into their promise the idea of independence from any cloud infrastructure vendor.

   In short, if Amazon intends to gain lock-in and true competitive advantage (other than the aforementioned advantage of being the low-cost provider), expect to see them roll out their own more advanced APIs and developer tools, or acquire promising startups building such tools. Alternatively, if current trends continue, I expect to see Amazon as a kind of foundation for a Linux-like aggregation of applications, tools and services not controlled by Amazon, rather than for a Microsoft Windows-like API and tools play. There will be many providers of commodity infrastructure, and a constellation of competing, but largely compatible, tools vendors. Given the momentum towards open source and cloud computing, this is a likely future.

    

2. Platform as a Service. One step up from pure utility computing are platforms like Google AppEngine and Salesforce's force.com, which hide machine instances behind higher-level APIs. Porting an application from one of these platforms to another is more like porting from Mac to Windows than from one Linux distribution to another.

   The key question at this level remains: are there advantages to developers in one of these platforms from other developers being on the same platform? force.com seems to me to have some ecosystem benefits, which means that the more developers are there, the better it is for both Salesforce and other application developers. I don't see that with AppEngine. What's more, many of the applications being deployed there seem trivial compared to the substantial applications being deployed on the Amazon and force.com platforms. One question is whether that's because developers are afraid of Google, or because the APIs that Google has provided don't give enough control and ownership for serious applications. I'd love your thoughts on this subject.

    

3. Cloud-based end-user applications. Any web application is a cloud application in the sense that it resides in the cloud. Google, Amazon, Facebook, twitter, flickr, and virtually every other Web 2.0 application is a cloud application in this sense. However, it seems to me that people use the term "cloud" more specifically in describing web applications that were formerly delivered locally on a PC, like spreadsheets, word processing, databases, and even email. Thus even though they may reside on the same server farm, people tend to think of gmail or Google docs and spreadsheets as "cloud applications" in a way that they don't think of Google search or Google maps.

   This common usage points up a meaningful difference: people tend to think differently about cloud applications when they host individual user data. The prospect of "my" data disappearing or being unavailable is far more alarming than, for example, the disappearance of a service that merely hosts an aggregated view of data that is available elsewhere (say Yahoo! search or Microsoft live maps.) And that, of course, points us squarely back into the center of the Web 2.0 proposition: that users add value to the application by their use of it. Take that away, and you're a step back in the direction of commodity computing.

   Ideally, the user's data becomes more valuable because it is in the same space as other users' data. This is why a listing on craigslist or ebay is more powerful than a listing on an individual blog, why a listing on amazon is more powerful than a listing on Joe's bookstore, why a listing on the first results page of Google's search engine, or an ad placed into the Google ad auction, is more valuable than similar placement on Microsoft or Yahoo!. This is also why every social network is competing to build its own social graph rather than relying on a shared social graph utility.

   This top level of cloud computing definitely has network effects. If I had to place a bet, it would be that the application-level developer ecosystems eventually work their way back down the stack towards the infrastructure level, and the two meet in the middle. In fact, you can argue that that's what force.com has already done, and thus represents the shape of things. It's a platform I have a strong feeling I (and anyone else interested in the evolution of the cloud platform) ought to be paying more attention to.

4. The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits

   A lot of my thinking about web 2.0 grew directly out of my thinking about open source. My argument in The Open Source Paradigm Shift was that what we learned from the history of the IBM personal computer -- a commodity platform built from off-the-shelf parts -- was that it drained value out of the hardware ecosystem, turning it into a low-margin business. But profits didn't go away. Instead, through something that Clayton Christensen calls "the law of conservation of attractive profits," value migrated elsewhere, from hardware to software, from IBM to Microsoft. Christensen:

To read the entire article.... Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing

Posted by Michael Corey CEO & Founder Ntirety

www.ntirety.com

In my Blog Entry  Why Cloud Computing Is Like The Fashion Industry on September 26, 2008 It quoted Larry Ellison Speaking at Oracle OpenWorld.  Larry Ellison said that the computer industry is more fashion-driven than women's fashion and cloud computing is simply the latest fashion.

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU follows in Larry's footsteps. According to the article

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman

 

Web-based programs like Google's Gmail will force people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that will cost more and more over time, according to the free software campaigner

 

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman

Web-based programs like Google's Gmail will force people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that will cost more and more over time, according to the free software campaigner

• Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent
• guardian.co.uk,
• Monday September 29 2008 14:11 BST

 

According to the Guardian.co.uk article....

But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

"It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign," he told The Guardian.

"Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true."

To read the entire article...

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman

 

What is clear when you do cloud computing, you are putting your hands and data in the hands of someone else. 

Posted by Michael Corey

www.ntirety.com

For those of you who could not attend Oracle open world and see the launch first hand. ZDnet on their site, has a great video clip.

Larry Ellison does it again. His latest comment is priceless!!!!!!

I saw this on CNET News.....

Oracle's Ellison nails cloud computing

Posted by Dan Farber

Finally, a technology executive willing to tell the truth about cloud computing. Speaking at Oracle OpenWorld, Larry Ellison said that the computer industry is more fashion-driven than women's fashion and cloud computing is simply the latest fashion. The Wall Street Journal quoted the Oracle CEO's remarks:

"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

"We'll make cloud computing announcements. I'm not going to fight this thing. But I don't understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud."

To read the entire article....

  Cnet Article

Posted by Michael Corey

www.ntirety.com

I have debated to myself if I should comment on this or not. This is not the first time that Larry Ellison has gone down this path of where Oracle/Larry has invested in a company that builds hardware. What I like about this approach, he is partnering with a company HP that makes hardware.I think this approach will increase the likelyhood of this succeeding. The combination of HP and Oracle is a pretty compelling story.

This approach makes a lot more sense to me, than trying to do it from scratch.  God knows with database growing 3-5 times their size every 3 years. With the application explosion we have seen the success of companies like Netezza. www.netezza.com There is a clear market for this.

Lets not forget my friend’s Foster Hinshaw, President and CEO at Dataupia. www.dataupia.com  When I was building the Ntirety Database Administration Appliance, I met with  Foster for some advice. I was able to look under the covers at Dataupia and was blown away what they had built. I highly reccommend looking at Dataupia products suite. Meeting with Foster, helped Ntirety greatly with the building of our own database appliance.  Ntirety's Database Adminustrators use this specialized appliance to manage our clients Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases with.The Ntirety database appliance wakes up every few seconds and asks each database inour care, are you ok. Looking for situations we know could lead to a Database failure and proactively dealing with them. Doing it all with a very low foot print in the clients database environment.

The Ntirety Database Appliance, the specialized hardware has provided Ntirety a competitive advantage over all out competitors who also provide database administration service remotely. Ntirety has had an 8 year track record of near perfect client retention and satisfaction. Let me say that again, Ntirety has had an 8 year track record of near perfect client satisfaction and retention. The Ntirety database appliance has helped Ntirety gain efficiencies in how our database administrators do their jobs that has enabled Ntirety to keep prices competitive and still be 100% North American staffed.  So I get it. I think specialized hardware makes sense especially for databases.

I saw a blog entry I thought did an excellent job of commenting on Oracle new machine.

What is the Oracle Database Machine and Is It Needed?

Posted on September 25th, 2008 by Robin Bloor in IT Trends

You may have stumbled on the news that Oracle is now in the hardware business or to be more precise, it is in the database engine business - and by database engine I’m talking about hardware specifically built for running big database applications - and in respect of big databases applications, I mean big data warehouses.

On Wednesday Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison, unveiled the company’s Exadata Storage Server and a Database Machine - shown in the adjacent illustration, with the words Extreme Performance written down the side in red. The hardware is made by HP and you can think of this machine as being an implementation of the Oracle 11g database implemented over Oracle RAC with a complete Oracle software stack, plus Oracle Enterprise Linux.

From a software perspective much of this is familiar territory. The smart part is that the hardware has been designed for lightning query performance. Oracle claims that the HP Oracle Database Machine will run queries 10x faster or more. You can think of the whole configuration as having two parts; up to 8 HP Database Servers running Oracle 11g connected to 14 Exadata Storage Servers. The Exadata Storage Servers marry Intel multi-core processors with blocks of memory to specific disk resources, so that query processing for each disk happens “over the disk”. That’s where the performance comes from.

Does The World Need This?

It’s a logical question to ask. Database engines have been tried before (remember Britton Lee), but the only one that saw much success was Teradata. Other ideas like ICL’s CAFS (Content Addressable File Store) delivered the performance. But performance is never the problem with devices like this, it’s whether the overall architecture has longevity.

The fact that this is Oracle makes a big difference of course. The database giant has a right to try to move the industry along a different path - and I’m sure that this machine will see some quick adoption. On the HP side of the equation some commentators may wonder whether there isnt a product clash here, with HP also offering its excellent Neoview - based on the Tandem architecture. But first of all, HP is simply providing the iron, it is not selling the database machine. Secondly, Neoview performs best when dealing with mixed workloads whereas the Database Engine specifically targets multi-terabyte data warehouses. It is not a head-to-head clash although they will doubtless meet in the market place.

To read the entire article by Robin Bloor....

  What is the Oracle Database Machine and is it Needed

Only time will tell. For now, Oracle has once again entered the hardware business. This time with HP. Only time will tell.

Posted by Michael Corey

www.ntirety.com

I just saw this on Newsday.com.......

Oracle's Larry Ellison is top-paid chief executive

The Associated Press, Associated Press