Posted on 10/31/2005 7:30:48 AM PST by N3WBI3
Oracle intends to release a free version of its database, a reaction to the growing competitive pressure from low-end open-source databases.
The database heavyweight on Tuesday is expected to announce the beta release of Oracle 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE), which will be generally available by the end of the year. It is targeted at students, small organizations and software vendors that could embed the Oracle database with an application.
The latest edition is the same as other databases in Oracle's lineup but is limited in usage. It can only run servers with one processor, with 4GB of disk memory and 1GB of memory. Oracle on Friday offered a beta version of the new database for Windows and Linux on its Oracle Technology Network Web site.
The new low-end edition is aimed squarely at free and open-source alternatives to Oracle's namesake database, said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Oracle's server technologies division.
Open-source databases have caught on steadily in popularity over the past few years with corporate customers and Web developers.
MySQL is the most popular open-source database among developers, according to a recent Evans Data study. IBM earlier this month released a free version of its own DB2 database as part of a PHP development package. And Microsoft intends to ship a free version of SQL Server 2005, called Express, next month.
"There is definitely a market there (for low-end databases) and a demand. And we want them to be using Oracle and not MySQL or SQL Server Express," Mendelsohn said. "It's definitely a reaction to the market interest."
About a year and a half ago, Oracle introduced Oracle 10g Standard Edition One, a version aimed at mid-size companies where Microsoft has many customers. That database is limited to two processors and cost $149 per user.
By introducing a free entry-level product, Oracle intends to get more developers and students familiar with its namesake database, Mendelsohn said. Those customers, Oracle hopes, will eventually upgrade to a higher-end version.
"Even though the database is initially free, standards progress and those university students who are playing with the database today will eventually be working at corporations and making product decisions," he said. "We want to have mind-share with those people."
The Express Edition database can be distributed with other products. It will be available through Oracle's developer network and include a Web-based administration console development tools.
Separately, Mendelsohn offered comments on what Oracle intends to do with InnoDB, a storage engine for the MySQL database that Oracle acquired earlier this month.
He said Oracle intends to extend a contract with MySQL where the InnoDB storage engine is packaged with MySQL.
"There are all kinds of possibilities we're exploring," Mendelsohn said. "You might be seeing it showing up in Oracle products."
Tech Ping!
I predict a collective yawn from the OSS community. Putting out a crippled version of Oracle won't do much to slow the adoption of MySQL, Firebird, PostgreSQL, et al.
Im pretty excited about it, if the functionality is pretty much the same Ill take the hit in capacity!
Interoperability alone probably makes this a good deal for smaller firms.
I picked up a Dell 4300 server for nothing (about what it was worth!) and am turning it into a file server here at the office. I ran a file server with Mepis, but this one has a collection of 6 drives with a total of about 100 gig storage, so I decided to do the "span/stripe" thing and install across all 6 drives. Can't do that with Mepis, so I went with Fedorah core 4. Pretty nice...., but if you don't turn off the security for the firewall (not just make your eth0 a "trusted" device, but turn OFF the samba security), you will spend all weekend cursing trying to figure out why you are getting the "network path not found" in your windoze boxes.
Anyway, I want to set up a chron job to rsync files from all 5 of the office machines, and I realized I don't have a clue as to where to find the files. Do I have to edit the fstab file to get it to mount, for example, //frontdesk/q/blah blah blah? With mepis, when you go out and click on the graphic pic of the network, it is "mounted" so that you can go in and just link up with the remote drive like it is local (the samba shares are listed in the home directory).
I try mount //frontdesk/.......and it tells me it can't find anything.
Anyone out there know a good idiot proof resource for Fedora, or better yet, someone here want to tell me what I need to do to mount remote drives in a terminal environment?
Thanks in advance
Ive never had that problem, if you think there are ports you don't know about bring down the firewall connect from a known client (and do nothing else from that client) and do a netstat to see what you need.. Install webmin (webmin.org) it makes iptables 10 times easier to configure.
Do I have to edit the fstab file to get it to mount, for example, //frontdesk/q/blah blah blah?
(1) Dont use fstab for connecting to windows it will cause nothing but trouble, use autofs because when you reboot a windows box you dont have to worry about a mount point getting stale, plus decreased traffice between the computers when its not needed.
(2) Keep in mind that windows by default shares the drives, dont worry about mounting specific shares just mount the whole drive and use the rsync script to pick and choose what you want to back up, no point in mounting more than you have to just that much more to go wrong..
I try mount //frontdesk/.......and it tells me it can't find anything.
Keep in mind with the command line mount you have to know what type of thing your mounting, in the case of windows its smbfs...
You could use mount -t smbfs (where -t is the type flag) but there is an easier way...
smbmount //server/share /mountpoint –o username=username, uid=uidofmountpoint, gid=gidofmountpoint, fmask=775
uid and gid will be the local permissions of the mount..
Trust me take the extra twenty minuets and do it through autofs the first time you should not have to worry about it all that often ever again.
BTW you should beable to use either gnome or kde to browse for smbshares but once they are autofs they are treated as local disk so far as your scripts go..
It's not great news for those that want to sell software, as the value of powerful products like Oracle DB's are pushed towards zero. Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are probably the last of their breed, pretty sad so early in the software sector's life.
My point is that the free version will probably be a very lightweight version of the DB which will encourage others to try it out until their needs facilitate buying the full version.
Oracle moving fom a premium software vendor into a shareware style company is far from a positive move for them, or the industry.
Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are probably the last of their breed, pretty sad so early in the software sector's life.
Bill Gates gives away a browser, a media player, backup software, anti virus software, and other products to sell an OS and office suite. I think its pretty much what oracle is doing now... Put something extra out there it may hurt other companies who sell that product (in oracles case MySql and in MS's Netscape, Real Audio)..
Not yet but it is being severely deteriorated. Ellison is frantically buying all these application vendors because he knows free software clones from overseas like MySQL will soon overtake his flagship database product.
Bill Gates gives away a browser, a media player, backup software, anti virus software...
That only run on his for-sale product. If Oracle was only giving away utilities that required the purchase of their database your analogy might apply, but obviously and not surprisingly it doesn't. Microsoft doesn't give any mini opearating systems away, but if and when they do it will be a sad day for those that develop and sell software, as the value of software will have further declined.
The thought of a lightweight database on my developers desktop freeing them to write software without stepping on each others toes is also of value to me but not enough to but a copy of oracle for every one of them & more likely to use oracle based application (the ones we pay big money for) because of it. This will hurt MySql and MSSql (we use MSSql in some places because its cheaper for the developers to use it as I have described)
Giving each developer their own database isn't a wise long term decision. Not only do they have to do perform their own DBA duties locally, they don't learn to co-exist with others well within the database space, don't utilize connection strings during development, have to duplicate custom/dynamic stored procedures identically among all the systems, apply software patches to all the individual systems, etc etc etc. Maybe if you've only got a half dozen or so developers but if you've got about 80 spread out across several buildings it's a nightmare situation.
Why? Seems like a smart way to introduce your product to a larger audience. The "Oracle" lite will not be powerful enough for a company to run their applications with and when they outgrow it they'll move into the more powerful version.
This is kind of like giving the users a "test-Drive". I don't know if they still do, but Microsoft used to give a one-licensed version of SQLServer away a few years ago. I never used it so I don't know what it's limitations were, but I remember seeing a free version available.
Very good point. I would not want to have my own copy of a production DB. Much smarter to have a "staging" or non-production version (replicated often with the 'live' DB) and share with other developers.
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