Posts by Conor O'Mahony

Ellison: 'There'll be nothing left of IBM once I'm done'

Misleading!

Oracle omitted some hugely expensive parts of their benchmark configuration from the cost comparison. You can see the details at...

http://smarterquestions.org/2011/10/challenging-oracles-sparc-supercluster-claims/

Red Hat's Oracle shot: The Unbreakable Database?

@Alien

Apologies for obviously upsetting you @Alien, but I stick with my earlier statements.

There are a few definitions of Big Data floating around. Many people are converging on a definition that says something like... "a class of Data Management challenges that cannot easily be handled by traditional relational approaches".

Hence the evolution of a Hadoop ecosystem, the emergence of solutions that analyze streaming data in motion, an so on. Oracle has not invested in research and development around these kinds of Big Data challenges. And I am not sure that playing catch-up with organic development is a realistic option or them if they want to enter these markets.

I consider Cloudera to be one of the primary potential acquisition targets for Hadoop-based solutions. So if Oracle decide that they want to get into this market, an acquisition like this is probably the easiest path for them to do so. Sorry to tell you, But Exadata is not going to cut it for such situations :-)

Big Data

Database is a tough/mature market. Some good software vendors have tried to grab market share and failed.

In my opinion, a Big Data play revolving around open source might make most sense for someone like Red Hat. It's higher a growth market, and that market is still in the formative stages.

Cloudera might be a good acquisition. It would avoid conflict with Oracle, and it would really hurt Oracle (because Cloudera is probably Oracle's only viable option for playing catch up in the Big Data space... once Oracle admit that Exadata is not the answer to Big Data).