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Oracle at SJSU

Oracle, via Wim Coekaerts (VP, Linux Engineering Team) [blog, bio], gave an hour talk today in the Engineering Building at San Jose State, on “The History of Linux at Oracle”- I went not because I get extra credit for a C++ class, but because I would have gone anyways (and will for the rest of the semester)… I’m just like that.

Oracle

It was a very interesting topic, less of a presentation and more of a true “talk” by Wim, on things that I didn’t know Oracle did or was involved in. I even got to probe him on MySQL during the Q&A. Here’s some of the highlights, my thoughts in brackets:

  • Oracle provides Customer Support for Linux.
  • Oracle owns alot of smaller database methods, but doesn’t encapsulate them into their own products. Examples are InnoDB and BerkleyDB.
  • Oracle is “big” on the Open Source community. Helped to make the Linux Kernel stable, years ago, because they saw Linux as the coming platform for servers, and obviously the databases (like… theirs) on them.
  • Oracle is also “big” on virtualization, and provides code back to the community.
  • All of Oracle’s systems (development, production, etc.) are Linux. [A distro wasn't mentioned, but either way that's a huge deal.]
  • Amazon.com was the reason Oracle decided to fully port and support Linux… Amazon demanded it years ago when they decided to take on the entire world of retail-ing everything. [I had assumed MySQL...]
  • Oracle does not see MySQL as a competitor, even though it’s now owned by Sun. They see it as a different option for different needs. An example given was that MySQL needs alot of queries to read/write (not simultaneous), where Oracle can write in realtime.
  • Oracle even sees MySQL as partially based on them, as InnoDB is theirs, and is apparently used as an under layer of MySQL. [Weird, huh?]

Like I said, some interesting stuff that I don’t think is common knowledge. Alot more was said in much more detail, but those are the biggest points that I remember.

I wish we had more time to get some technical details on the inner workings of Oracle’s systems…

posted on February 7th, 2008 at 5:25 pm by Kyle

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