Slashdot reviews “Softwar: An Intimate Portrait Of Larry Ellison”

One of the new Larry Ellison / Oracle books recently published, "Softwar: An Intimate Portrait Of Larry Ellison" has just been featured in Slashdot's book review section.

Oracle's always an interesting subject for the Slashdot crowd because;

• Oracle are a big supporter of Linux and the standards process
• You can download all of the software for development purposes for free (mostly)
• They're not Microsoft, but
• Their software is closed source
• And compared to free databases like mySQL and PostgreSQL it can be quite expensive

Whilst much of the argument (as you would expect) centres around Oracle vs. open source offering such as mySQL and PostgreSQL, this posting by mzito probably sums up the feeling of the actual Oracle users in the discussion;

"Whoa, whoa, whoa - Oracle not innovative? Oracle is, in fact, doing a huge amount of work to drive their database and application server forward. Here's a list of some of the things they're doing that I have seen working in test environments:

-Volume management - that's right, the database with an integrated volume manager. Self-tuning, self-healing, online migration and mirroring - what other database has that?

-distributed clustering over high-performance interconnects - okay, db2 has this, but does it differently. With oracle 10g, nodes can actually share their memory purely in hardware over InfiniBand to improve performance and reduce latency for clustering.

-Wrote their own clustered filesystem - its not the greatest thing since sliced bread yet, but Oracle took a look at the clustered filesystems available for Linux and decided to write their own specifically geared towards Oracle.

This is just the start - I'm not even touching on some of the data representation things they've done with the database and application server. While Oracle made a very smart move porting to Linux, they continue to be leaders in pushing Linux forward as an enterprise platform, even working around Linux's limitations where they feel they have to.

Now, I'm a touch biased - my company has a database appliance product based around some of these features I just listed. But there's no question that, after having worked with a number of different nameless database vendors, Oracle has the most comprehensive, forward-looking, and innovative insight into the future of the enterprise database in the industry."

Take a look if you get a chance, and while you're there, check out today's discussion on the new PostgreSQL release. According to the article summary, ""PostgreSQL 7.4 has just been released. The list of new features is impressive and includes greatly improved OLAP performance among many other speed improvements."