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http://briefingsdirectblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/oracle-users-enjoy-open-source-benefits.html
An early
By
the way, did we neglect to mention that this open source survey of Oracle
database customers was sponsored by MySQL? It conjures up an image of a mouse
sneaking into a kitchen during Thanksgiving dinner and feasting on the scraps.
In fact, that’s exactly the picture that was painted by the survey.
Open
source use is wide but not terribly deep. Roughly 90% of respondents said they
used open source software or were planning to, but it’s mostly for the
commodity stuff sitting below the application layer where most organizations
imbed their real value-add. Only 4% said they used open-source-based enterprise
apps, like SugarCRM. Not surprisingly, the most popular open source offerings
were the Apache web server, which happens to underlie most J2EE middle tier
products like IBM WebSphere; and of course, Linux. In essence, customers look
to open source for cheap plumbing that simply works.
And
that certainly applies to databases. This being a survey of Oracle database
users, it’s obvious that nobody’s replacing Oracle with MySQL or
any of its open source cousins. But if you’ve got a satellite web app,
there’s little risk – or cost – in using MySQL.
Significantly, 20% of Oracle users surveyed reported having open source
databases larger than 50 GBytes. That 20% is kind of a funny figure. If
you’re an optimist, you’ll point to it as proof positive that open
source databases are getting ready for prime time; if you’re a cynic,
you’ll claim that the figure proves that they will never rise higher than
supporting roles.
... Obviously, nobody
dismisses the viability of open source for basic commodity tasks, but when it
comes to mission critical systems, Oracle users still know whose throat they
really want to choke.
Incidentally, the same settler who made the remark about
the
We'll see
more of these mega service providers using more open source databases, I
suspect, though they won't talk about it. There will be more instances of
database caches and subsets hither and yon, and these too will be increasingly
open source. They will be tuned for their purposes, and not general purpose not
enterprise-oriented. Scale, speed and cost rule.
Therefore the actual numbers of open source database licenses might be small
and hard to measure, but the impact will be felt as more applications and
services move to service provider models and more infrastructure customization
as differentiation is layered on top of the database itself. Some folks swear
by Ingres as a fine data
environment, albeit open source.
And because databases are so mission critical, once
comfort using open source varieties of these bedrocks of infrastructure
components are reached, then a tipping point may be at hand. This may also be
accelerated by moves toward Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) and so-called
Guerrilla SOA, where instances of services are virtualized on discrete runtime
stacks.
Virtualization using open source hypervisors and open source
databases to produce combined dynamic data serving stacks (create data capacity
as you need it) also makes a lot of sense. It does mean more than what Oracle
does with RAC and striping.
I made the pitch a while back on why IBM
ought to buy into open source databases to spur on sales of other IBM
infrastructure. It may have been premature, but the logic still has a nice ring
to it. When a big provider like IBM makes open source databases strategic, as a
bludgeon to its competitors (Oracle and Microsoft) and a loss-leader to other
revenues, then all bets are off.
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