DBTechCon – Spring 2011
Hosted by SSWUG.org.
Have you been putting off registering for DBTechCon? The wait is over. Due to the high level of interest in DBTechCon SSWUG has been able to secure many sponsors for the event. This results in great savings to you. In the past our rates were $279 for non-members and $249 for members. Sign up from now until April 19th and you will receive a discounted rate of $129 for non-members and $99 for members. It’s hard to find a better value for what has grown to be the biggest Virtual Conference available. Click here to go register now.
Oracle Drops the Bomb
Since the purchase of Sun and it’s holdings by Oracle corporation there has been much speculation regarding the leverage Oracle now owns in the Server and RDBMS worlds. An March 23rd Oracle has begun flexing that muscle, announcing it will no longer continue to develop products for the Intel Itanium product line.
This is an interesting move in a world where there is a lot of upset surrounding data persistence technologies. Already with the industry movement toward polyglot types of persistence this strategy by Oracle could hurt the RDBMS vendors. Many organizations have a deep investment in servers with the Itanium chips primarily for the purpose of hosting Oracle.
This move from Oracle strikes hardest at HP, a key manufacturer of Itanium based systems. Of course the Sun hardware will still be supported in the same category of servers. And the licensing for Oracle on the Itanium is almost twice as much as on a Sun.
Where does this leave companies who have an investment in Itanium based servers who are using Oracle? One blog posting suggests it is quit easy to transfer to DB2 using much of the existing Oracle scripts already in place.
Oracle customers running on HP Itanium servers can move to DB2 with little to no change in their application. After the move they will run faster and require less DBA time and effort.
And their existing DBA scripts can run without change.
Check out the details here: http://dsnowondb2.blogspot.com/2011/03/oracle-drop-development-on-itanium.html
Microsoft has a migration path to move Oracle databases into SQL Server. Tools to translate PS/SQL code into TSQL will surely be of interest. It may be likely that companies downsizing from the Itanium processor to X64 will also consider a less expensive engine than Oracle.
Those with an investment in Itanium systems have the option of abandoning them, or remaining at the current supported release of Oracle.
Are you impacted by this move from Oracle? Would you like to predict what is the next attack by Oracle (perhaps killing MySQL)? Do you have experience you would like to share from converting Oracle databases to another platform? Any tools for conversion you could recommend? Send your comments to on Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail at btaylor@SSWUG.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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