Link-O-Rama
Time to catch up on a few articles and bits of news.
"Closer ties between the two firms will benefit their users, but only rivals would gain from a merger" argues Martin Banks in "Why Oracle would be mad to buy Sun". "The speculation follows a recent bout of serious "cuddling up" between Oracle chief Larry Ellison and Sun's Scott McNealy ... The Microsoft SQL Server marketing team are almost certainly sacrificing every chicken they can find to persuade the Gods of IT to make Oracle acquire Sun, because the likes of HP and Dell would then find the Microsoft option even more attractive. But it seems clear that Oracle knows that it needs Sun alive and well for the foreseeable future. This is despite having publicly grown friendlier towards Dell and the Linux community - supporting low-cost, standard platforms makes the only high-margin item on the menu the Oracle offerings. However, this strategy may be causing problems for Oracle. Dell's business model is geared to keeping the price as low as possible and the volumes as high as possible. It is a model that does not square well with giving comprehensive levels of support."
More on the recent Sun and Oracle announcements. "Sun and Oracle have established a new strategic partnership in an attempt to challenge Microsoft with what Oracle CEO Larry Ellison calls "standards-based systems." According to Ellison and McNealy, their mutual goal is the production of a complete Java-centric enterprise datacenter architecture that leverages Solaris 10 and Oracle's Fusion middleware. Designed specifically as an alternative to Microsoft's .NET technology stack, the new platform is competitively priced and based on robust frameworks." writes Ryan Paul in "Oracle and Sun team up to provide .NET alternative" for Ars.Techica. The debate continued on Slashdot with the best comment being "So I'm supposed to trade a solution written by a ompany with a maniacal leader for a solution written by TWO companies with maniacal leaders? No thanks."
Finally, Doug Burns is hosting a guest blog by Peter Robson on a couple of data warehousing events he recently attended. "I recently attended a couple of lectures covering aspects of data warehouse, which prompted the very real question – is there any future for the data warehouse approach?" writes Peter. The events he went to were a Temporal Databases seminar by Chris Date and Oracle's Rob Squire (see this previous posting for a background to the subject) and the DAMA Event just before Christmas, where the question was raised as to whether separate and distinct data warehouses had a future given cheap and plentiful storage, increasing hardware performance and analytic extensions to SQL. Certainly Peter suggests that in the light of these developments "the days of the data warehouse may indeed be limited" and there's an interesting follow-up comment by Peter Scott: "Data warehouses do indeed have a short future. Probably the only thing keeping them going now is the unsuitability of the current source systems for historical data reporting ... A few years ago, a DW typically ran weeks (or months) behind the operational systems that fed it; this gap is ever reducing as more an more organisations want to see up-to-the-second reporting of performance mixed with a historical view. This requirement to mix operational and historic reporting is reducing the utility of conventional data warehouses"