Enterprise Unix Roundup: Oracle's Open World

We aren't sure when Oracle decided to change the name of OracleWorld to OpenWorld, but the marketing-savvy name seems to indicate that "open" technology is the way of the future. Personally, our suspicion is that it's a sneaky way of saying Oracle is open to all comers. For now.

If there's one thing as constant as the sun rising in the east, it's the release of TPC benchmarks from Oracle during its annual corporate lovefest. This year was no exception, and the company blared from the highest mountaintops that, in no uncertain terms, it has The Fastest Database. Ever.

Until the next company comes along with its numbers, anyway.

According to the company's press release, Oracle Database 10 Release 2 running on an IBM eServer p5 595 system with 64 1.9-GHz Power processors with AIX 5L v5.3 hit a TPC-H benchmark of 100,512.3 QphH@/3TB with a price-performance ratio of $53.00/QphH@3000GB.

For those reading along at home not familiar with the technical metrics in the world of warp-speed computing, what that means is according to the Transaction Processing Performance Council benchmark TPC-H, this multicode AIX machine was able to whip out 100,512 composite queries per hour on a 3 TB database.

And for those who don't even want to be bothered with this technical minutia, here it is in more straightforward terms: big machine, big processors, big database — mind-freakishly fast.

The irony of such a high-speed performance on a pure IBM configuration amuses us, as Oracle's main competition in this arena is IBM's own DB2. Think Oracle is sticking it to Big Blue? We thought so, especially after seeing the next press release detailing Oracle's performance on a Linux machine: an eight-node HP BladeSystem cluster of ProLiant BL25p server blades, each with one AMD Opteron 2.6-GHz processor and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, running Oracle Database 10g 2 and Oracle Real Application Clusters hit 13,284.2 QphH@300GB with a price-performance ratio of $34.20/QphH@300GB.

And just to make sure the knife stays in: "This new industry-leading result surpasses IBM DB2's best TPC-H 300 GB benchmark running on IBM hardware using half the number of processors."

Competition between IBM and Oracle is certainly nothing new, and the customer does ultimately benefit, but we thought it rather curious that no other TPC-H numbers were handed out as a comparison. Yes, these numbers are big, but come on, Oracle: Where's the competition's stats? Is it always about the zero?

Oracle's endless parade of partners were the other highlights of OpenWorld. HP, IBM, and Sun led the hardware vendor mutual admiration society, and various announcements indicated Oracle is still very interested in the middleware space. Oracle's applications will now run on WebSphere middleware, and rumors abound that, thanks to the recent acquisition of J.D. Edwards, Oracle will soon be able to run JDE apps on its Fusion Middleware platform, too.

With Oracle keeping its eye constantly on high performance, it is clear that demand for multimode machines or multimachine clusters will remain high for quite some time. Which is why we see vendors like HP, IBM, and Sun scrambling to position their operating systems as Oracle friendly.

Whomever gets the Oracle brass ring, after all, will have the ability to tap into huge enterprise markets.

We'll be watching for Sun, especially, as it attempts to shoehorn its way into Oracle's high-end and middleware markets with the Solaris/Galaxy combination. Sun's stance on such a maneuver is easy to predict. Sun President and COO Jonathan Schwartz doesn't even think HP or IBM have operating systems, a statement he's made repeatedly and one we're sure he thinks makes him look confident and cool. Instead of, oh, ignorant and arrogant, maybe?

Cockiness aside, if Sun can offer a higher value to Oracle than HP with HP-UX machines — heck, even if it can generate better buzz, for that matter — we will not be surprised to see HP left out in the cold.

That goes double for IBM and AIX, which we have seen Oracle having no compunctions about jerking around.

Politics may play a role in which Unix flavors Oracle decides to support. But customer demand will likely be the real choice-maker. Commoditization is making Linux and x86/x64 platforms more and more attractive, and all three vendors know it. Although Sun seems committed to its own Unix brand now, look for HP or IBM to shift to all Linux, all the time if it appears Oracle will not play ball with HP-UX and AIX.

For now, Oracle is playing all sides, keeping its software and support on as many platforms as it can. If that ever changes, we anticipate some serious reconfiguring in the Unix landscape.

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