RE: Oracle ventures into the O/S market.....?

Quoting Kevin Closson <kevinc_at_polyserve.com>:

> Good thread, Matthew, but as a guy that worked inside
> an Oracle port (Sequent) for 10 years, I still see
> the same old OS interfaces (OSDS).... Oracle still
> does shared memory, shared libraries, IPC (on and off host (skgxp)),
> and I/O...unless Oracle gets some code (a lot actually) into the
> kernel, those VERY important runtime facilities are
> still going to be in the domain of the OS.

and hence their urgent need for control at OS level over those same features. Let's face it: if Windoze or Loonix suddently decide those things are really not important and put them in the backburner, Oracle RDBMS as we know it is dead. So, Oracle the company needs to make sure that no one will ever take that away from the OS. Taking control of a given Loonix port sounds like an eminently sound strategy. Completely late (why the heck did they let Suse go to Novell?!!) and likely the wrong distro choice but nevertheless a sound approach.

> Also, since Oracle never truly implemented a multithreaded
> server (ala Sybase or Informix DSA, Ingres) there is
> quite a reliance upon process infrastructure as well.

Yes, because Oracle relied on the existence of such in the real OS environments it ran on. As opposed to the sad joke Windoze was at the time. This however has changed. If anything, the "multi-threaded" servers of those databases - which never were such, just simple time-sharing round-robbin threads - are nowadays more a liability to them than an advantage. Most OS's do that now natively much better than databases can. But if Oracle's competitors can convince the OS makers otherwise, then Larry will be in for a rough ride.

I said early last year that 2006 would be the first of a few "anus horribilis" for Oracle. It will happen. Maybe that will finally knock some sense back into Larry and his J2EE hordes and they'll concentrate on what they're supposed to be good at instead of flights of fancy...

-- 
Cheers
Nuno Souto
from sunny Sydney
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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l