Some Thoughts on Oracle + Sun

So today Larry Ellison "set the new course" for Oracle. And the whole blogosphere started chatting about the future of Oracle and Sun products, especially Java and MySQL. So I figured I'll jump on the band vagon and write my own 2 cents.

I personally think Larry Ellison was right on the money:

He's going to keep Sun's hardware and improve upon it. I always had a lot of respect for Sun's hardware products and they've always been very well designed. Specially the multi-core SPARC systems with the Cool Threads technology. I also like the Sun storage products, specially the F5100.

He's going to keep Solaris, which is light years ahead than any other server operating system. The simple proof, ZFS.

He's going to keep Java. He stated that Oracle already makes money from Java which is obvious since most of Oracle apps are written in Java and in addition they added a whole lot more Java apps to their portfolio by the BEA merger back in 2008.

So basically he's going to get Sun, remove the extra fat and optimize it to produce a hardware/software foundation fully optimized for running Oracle apps. Sounds like good business to me. Most of the mission-critical Oracle installations are already running on Sun hardware/Solaris/Java. So he's just cutting the middle man. Or in case of Sun, an army of middle men, since Sun was used to selling through partners.

The only thing left is the future of MySQL which I am not too worried about since I am already seeing community forks/patches such as the awesome Percona builds. And I don't think Oracle is going to kill MySQL immediately, because if they really wanted to do that, they could've killed InnoDB which is the most popular transactional storage engine for MySQL and interestingly enough is owned by Oracle, years ago.

In addition I'm not too worried about Oracle trying to change Java too much, since they won't be willing to re-write all their own Java apps anyways. And even if they do end up messing with the Java ecosystem, there's always OpenJDK.

All in all, I think Larry Ellison set a pretty good course for Oracle so now let's see how things are going to pan out in real world ...