Oracle buys Sun

[Freddie Cash]

Thinking about things a bit, this seems to be a good buy for Oracle.

Most likely, IMO, would be an effort to bring MySQL up to the point
where it can become Oracle Lite (with paid support, of course), to be
used as a the gateway drug to Oracle Express (with more paid support),
which is just a stepping-stone to the full Oracle. All with nice,
for-pay migration tools. Get'em hooked on the free stuff, then reel
them in for the big bucks!!

My bet is that we are going to see a lot of development going toward
creating a nice spectrum with
MySQL+scripting-language-du-jour+whatever-OS on the one end and Oracle
DB+Java+Solaris+SPARC on the other, with MySQL on Solaris in the
middle.

At the same time, we'll see a nice push to get Oracle (more?)
optimised for all the storage goodness in Solaris, and a stronger
focus on storage hardware solutions/products (storage demand will
never go away).

And, hopefully, some consolidating and strengthening of the Enterprise
Java stack, again, all nicely (more?) optmised for the heavily
threaded T1/T2/the-next-SPARC architecture(s).

In theory, Oracle can become the next IBM, providing everything you
could want in a DB server, storage server, Java server, etc. With all
the nice expensive support options available in-house.

As a vertical, all-in-one-shop setup, they're looking really good.
Especially if you look at things in the long-term, and skip over the
knee-jerk reactions.  ;)

The wildcard bits that will be interesting to watch are
OpenOffice.org, VirtualBox, and all the other non-DB-related bits that
SUN has. Those don't really fit into the new Oracle landscape, IMO.

But, I'm just lowly network admin, who hasn't touched Oracle since
university (and Oracle Personal could be used as a form of torture),
so what do I know? :D

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com