Blog: Dan E. Linstedt

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Oracle - Fully Loaded? Or Dried up like dust?

I suppose it's all in how you look at it, but take a look at these two new E-Week stories: (This is an extremely opinionated entry, would love your feedback).

Oracle Scores Open-Source InnoDB Storage Engine
Oracle Lets Fly Zippy TimesTen Database

I like Oracle Database (for specific projects), but let's take a walk on the wild side... What do you suppose is happening? Did they (Oracle) decide their core-engine is too big, too cumbersome and can't take the heat anymore? Or do you think it's a Microsoft-like move to squash extremely great technology never to be heard of again?

For the sake of discussion, let's talk about both sides of the coin. In the first situation, we have to make some assumptions: (these assumptions are only 1/2 based in reality - the rest are what I've personally experienced at customer sites).

1. Oracle's engine has been "added on and added on and added on" over the years, it's grown up like a big huge ball of band-aids. They've done some serious modification to parts of the core engine and in their latest releases (10g and on), they've finally added some LONG overdue functionality.
2. Oracle's been losing market share (at least in the data warehousing / BI space), until it bought up competition in the analytics sectors to make up for it.
3. IBM has been gunning for Oracle market share in the DW/BI space for years, it's 8.2 release and price-points really make it attractive, along with the features.
4. Microsoft SQLServer 2005 is also gunning for this space, and will make a huge splash - it's a tremendous advance.
5. MySQL has rapidly become a database of choice among the OLTP transactional community (Oracle's biggest market share $$ is OLTP - that's what they're REALLY GOOD at).
6. InnoDB has been a mainstay for MySQL.
7. Oracle has taken a beating at the hands of Teradata, Netezza, and DatAllegro lately.

Well that leads me to say:
a) Oracle MUST back-up, tear-down, and completely re-build the entire core architecture of their engine (well most of it anyhow) if they are to compete going forward
OR
b) purchase technology that will "gut" their own engine, and automatically replace the "bad parts" under the covers, slowly dissolving the old "Oracle core engine" and replacing it with the "new" oracle engines - nimble, FAST, and scalable, all at cheaper price points.

Think about it, Oracle has to charge huge fees in order to pay it's army of core engineers. With new smaller, leaner, and faster core engines - away with some or more of this massive expense!!

Now it's not wise (and I'm not suggesting) that the ENTIRE Oracle core engine be tossed, although Hmmmm.... I am saying that re-engineering, cost reduction, and smaller faster/leaner meaner engineering needs to take it's place if Oracle is to compete in the new market place.

That still leaves the second question: Is this just another attempt by a large corporation (like Oracle) to squash upcoming technology?
This doesn't make very much sense - Oracle has millions of man-hours in applications technology on their stack, MySQL had a lot of development work in this area - but most of it was outside the MySQL/InnoDB range.

I think honestly, Oracle needs to breathe new life into their old technology engines, and simply bought the expertise - now if they're really smart, they'll learn from the existing company at InnoDB, instead of squashing it into the Oracle Culture.

What's your opinion?

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