Covering all (data)bases

Sam Varghese
Friday, 02 February 2007 03:52

Opinion and Analysis

 That's a joke from the book The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: Inside Oracle Corporation, a book about Oracle Corporation, written by Mike Wilson.

But why mention Ellison here? Well, it's strangely relevant because it looks like the divine one's company now apparently believes that there are better databases out there than his own company's proprietary product. Last October, Oracle Corporation decided to start distributing Red Hat Linux on its own. Now it appears, Oracle is distributing the most widely used open source database MySQL along with this GNU/Linux distribution.

Oracle sells support for Red Hat at half the price that Red Hat itself does. It has no operating system business of its own so one cannot query this move.

But MySQL? This is a product that competes with Oracle, even though MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos would like to play down the competition by saying, in response from a query by me: "I see Oracle and MySQL serving two distinct markets, so in most cases we are not competitors."

Sure, one can point to the case of Microsoft now distributing SUSE Linux under an agreement with Novell - but then the Redmond-based company gets something out of the deal.

Is this an indication that Oracle thinks MySQL is better suited to the market than its own product? The same product which it advertised as unbreakable? (Of course, the unbreakable tag lasted only as long as British researcher David Litchfield took to come up with any number of vulnerabilities in it).