Re: Any Oracle 11g for Solaris x86?

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:56:42 +0000, John D Groenveld wrote:

> When enough of Larry's sales critters hear from customers that they're
> moving to MySQL or Postgres, Larry will commit to Solaris x64.

Unfortunately, those databases are toys, compared to Oracle RDBMS. Postgres, the better of the two, has diagnostic and tuning capabilities that match Oracle 6. No optimizer hints, no event interface, no playing with statistics. Those databases still have many miles to go to get to the level of Oracle8. Standby databases, asynchronous replication, cluster databases or gateways to other DB systems are still objects of desire, rather then reality.

What I use Postgres for is to replace MS Access databases. It is easy to create replacement apps and get them running (Symfony, Rekall) and it runs circles around an MS Access databases. There is no annoying 4GB limit, as is the case with Oracle Express.

In other words, there is no danger that corporate users, the main contributors to the Oracle's bottom line, would switch to PgSQL anytime soon. MySQL is a great DW engine - on top of Oracle. You need a cruncher to summarize the data, MySQL to load the summarized data into a table with "ENGINE=MEMORY" option and a nice tool with all graphical bells and whistles to present the "cubes" to the end-user. The role of the big bad data cruncher is usually played by an Oracle instance. As for the SUN Microsystems, I will be rather surprised if it doesn't get bought by someone by the end of the 1st decade of the 21st century. Resistance is futile, SUN will be assimilated. Strong commitment of resources to SUN platforms probably doesn't make much business sense for the Oracle Corp.

-- 
Mladen Gogala
http://mgogala.freehostia.com