[geeks] Open Solaris, while I've been asleep.

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Thu, 28 Oct 2010, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:

>> That would be very shortsighted of them.  A -whole lot- of people run
>> Oracle on AIX, Linux, and Windows very happily.  Those people pay silly
>> money to Oracle for that "privilege".
>
> I don't think so at all. If they do nothing to IMPROVE the performance
> of Oracle under those operating systems, but significantly improve the
> performance of Oracle under Solaris by tightly integrating the operating
> system with the application people would want to move.

You'd need a huge performance difference to justify:
         1a) Abandoning an expensive investment in IBM hardware, or
         1b) Training the MSCEs on Solaris

Especially since, IME, Oracle runs better on AIX than Solaris, anyhow.
Windows is a mixed bag, but there are enough Windows-only Oracle shops[0]
that have no interest in throwing a Unix-like operating system into the
mix.  Linux will always need to be a first-class citizen for any number of
reasons.

> I can only speculate the numbers, but I assume something like 2%-3%
> would not make much difference to customers, 5% would show some movement
> and 10% or more would make a big change.

A 5-10% improvement is below the noise floor in a hardware upgrade cycle.
POWER has historically leapfrogged SPARC by 30-40%, and the inexpensive PC
server vendors move a lot faster than Sun/Oracle could ever try to.
Oracle seem hell-bent on making it difficult to run Solaris commercially
on anything other than an Oracle-branded overpriced PC.


[0] Think: classical small-to-medium engineering/finance type companies,
     not IT-sector companies or huge firms.  Also, a fair number of
     small-to-medium sized government agencies with outsourced IT.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke |
Elgin, TX         | "He who is contented is rich." -- Lao Tzu
USA               |