As (what now turns out to be) Part 1 began:
Well, the other shoe dropped. Oracle has bid for Sun. In my tracking of speculation, Oracle had more weight than IBM. And so it has turned out. This might end up being a problem for IBM.
The buyout/merger/lunch is official (so far as shareholders go; DoJ might vomit, but we'll have to wait on that) today, and since yesterday's post about file systems is still fresh in my brain, I thought I'd take a minute or two to expand on why I believe Oracle wants Sun.
It's not java.
It never was java, to my way of thinking. So, here's my way of thinking.
Larry has been buying up applications for a few years. What to do next? Or should he just keep doing that? What is the next Everest?
IBM has been diligent in transforming itself (as has GE, by the way) from a maker of things to a finance and body shop. The reason for doing so is apparent: services require little (real) capital investment. All you do is rent some office space, some computer time (or cloud it? may be that, too), find some minimally competent bodies; and sell the hell out of the "organization". IBM was, is, and always will be, a sales organization. It needed mainframes in the beginning because the US economy had not yet made the transition to de-industrialization (2007: 40% of corporate profit is finance). And to that point, the company had a history of making bespoke machines; in no small motivation to lock-in its customers. Sales staff's major duty was "client management"; squeeze the last dollar out of each of them, and make damn sure clients didn't go someplace else.
The last place that Larry has not been able to take Oracle (the database) is the IBM mainframe. There are technical reasons (mostly due to how IBM designed those things decades ago) why Oracle has never run all that well on the IBM mainframe. Consider that rather than try to climb Everest, may be you could nuke the sucker, stroll over the debris and say that you've climbed Everest. Kind of true.
How, then, does Larry nuke IBM on the mainframe? That's where Sun comes in. Rather than trying to get Oracle (the database) to run as well on the mainframe doing COBOL support as DB2 does, why not build an alternative which is cheaper, faster, easier, and runs Oracle? Cool. Oracle and Sun have been together for years. Now Larry can get the hardware folks to do exactly what he wants. He has HP doing sort of what he wants; but he doesn't own them. And the Sun processors, some tech folk assert, are better than what IBM now uses.
Which brings us to btrfs. It was developed by Oracle, then open sourced. It is still under development, but if you read the site, you find that SSD support is what it's about. He'll have a machine with SSD and a file system tuned for them, running his database. He can make a compelling TCO argument that converting antique COBOL/VSAM applications to his super hot-rod database machine is a slam dunk. You heard it here first.
As I have been saying, SSD multi-core multi-processor high normal form database machines are the most cost effective way to handle data. The more I learn about what Larry is up to, the more convinced I am that this is where he's taking Oracle. I couldn't be happier.
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