Oracle promises to respond to the data warehouse appliance makers
On Oracle’s quarterly conference call September 20, Larry Ellison said:
There are some interesting niche players. Sybase gets smaller every year. Teradata, a database machine and now there’s some new database machine players, Neteeza, and let me say that Oracle is a very innovative company and I think you’ll see us with a response to some of these niche players some time at the end of this year or next year.
How important this is depends hugely, of course, on just what form Oracle’s response takes.
Oracle already does a great job of accelerating complex queries within the severe limitations of its SMP/shared-everything architecture. If it just does more of the same, perhaps adding in some hardware optimizations and vendor relationships, it will be a big ho-hum. At best, such moves will improve Oracle’s price/performance somewhat and garner some favorable publicity, and postpone the serious bleeding for a while as Oracle tries to find a better way of dealing with the specialist threat.
Much more significant would be a new engine, whether developed inhouse or acquired. Inhouse seems more plausible given Larry’s exact phrasing, and Oracle does have a richer history of skunkworks DBMS engine projects than most people seem to realize. What’s more, there would be little barrier running the new engine and Oracle classic side-by-side, with a common, federating front-end that was completely transparent to programs and users. (Administrative transparency would be a different matter, of course.)
Specialized data warehouse technology is sold mainly to large enterprises. And Oracle’s well-publicized focus is to sell ever more software to large shops. So this certainly is a market that they could be entering in a serious and intelligent way. Whether they actually are, however, is of course a matter that very much remains to be seen.
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