[BUGS] [chat] OraSUN MicroDatabases

[Andrew Sinclair]

Jan Mikkelsen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Andrew Sinclair wrote:
>> 2009/4/21 Dean Hamstead <dean at fragfest.com.au>:
>>> Andrew Sinclair wrote:
>>>> Oracle (-1.3%) will buy Sun Microsystems (+36.8%) for US7.4B, $9.50 per
>>>> share. SUn rejected IBM (-0.8%) offer of 7B earlier.
>>>>
>>> I think you may have forgotten that IBM makes servers and also has a
>>> database (for better or worse) in the form of DB2.
> 
> This is an important point.  When selling into the "enterprise" world, 
> the choice is often IBM servers running AIX and DB2, or Sun servers 
> running Solaris and Oracle.  Sometimes the databases get mixed up 
> (Solaris/DB2 or AIX/Oracle) but given the way Oracle and IBM sales works 
> it is often either one way or the other.
> 
> Sun going away (or going to IBM) would be bad for Oracle because 
> suddenly the only Big Iron hardware vendor left standing for running 
> their high end software would also be their primary database software 
> competitor.
> 
>> I have not forgotten; though, I have never used their stash. Can't say
>> that I can know an Oracle database when I see one either.
>>
>>> My feelings are that MySQL [respectfully capitalised] would be on the chopping block either way.
> 
> Remember that Oracle already own InnoDB and Sleepycat Software (Berkeley 
> DB).  A long time ago they bought DEC/RDB and turned it into Oracle RDB, 
> which is still supported as a separate product.  I suspect Oracle see 
> this as a way of expanding low-end database revenue without damaging the 
> brand of the flagship database products.  I would be surprised to see a 
> significant change.
> 
>>> However there are still suitable alternatives in PostgreSQL [ditto] and firebird.
>>>
>> I'll be honest with you; that makes me very happy.
>>
>> Can't say the same will be true for those who were able to invest in
>> MySQL, my employer included.
>>
>> No matter; the original developers of our system have professionally
>> passed on. I was due to pitch Ingress anyway.
> 
> Ingres!  Wow, I first used that in the late '80s or early '90s.  That 
> was open sourced a few years ago (I got a source kit while it was 
> around), but I thought it disappeared into a private equity thing. 
> What's happening with that?
> 
==============================================
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_(database)
----------------------------------------------
Ingres was first created as a research project at the University of
California, Berkeley, starting in the early 1970s and ending in the
early 1980s. The original code, like that from other projects at
Berkeley, was available at minimal cost under a version of the BSD
license. Since the mid-1980s, Ingres has spawned a number of commercial
database applications, including Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, NonStop
SQL and a number of others. Postgres (Post Ingres), a project which
started in the mid-1980s, later evolved into PostgreSQL.
==============================================

This confirms the story I have from one of their staff; Ingres came
before, "Post Ingres." They were always liberal with the licence, and
they still play nice with competing architectures today.

Rest assured, these people are alive and they mean business.