Day 2: Morning Keynotes: Oracle

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Jon "Maddog" Hall started with a few words. He made an interesting point: it's cool that there are about 12 million linux users but it's also true that there are more windows users, but the fact is that on this earth, there are still 5 billion people who don't use computers, and therefore haven't made their OS choice yet.
If you take an example like China, people don't have that much money to spend on machines, and they often end up with a 386 or a 486. Do you think they run windows on those machines? Nope, they run linux (or FreeBSD, or some other free and lighter alternative).

He then went on to introduce Mark Jarvis, Senior VP of Marketing from Oracle

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Here are the key points from the presentation:

As far as microsoft is concerned, www stands for "windows won't win"
Barnes and noble is an example of a company with a big web site that runs with a database on NT. They can't backup their database because NT and MSQL (or whatever they use) requires the database to be taken offline first. So they end up never backing up, and they'll be hosed big time the day their database ever gets corrupted, which surprisingly enough has been known to happen with ms databases running on NT.
As a counter example, amazon.com runs with Oracle and suffers from no such problems.
He also made the point that when you use big synchronized databases, you're much better off with a couple of huge servers like amazon does, than with a lot of small machines (like NT requires since it doesn't scale)
Microsoft is focusing in the wrong place: the important side is the server side. The client is a commodity, so ms' work in MSIE is all for naught.
Oracle 8i will be shipping in 30 days for free to developers. It has a very scalable JVM which can handle 10,000 users and 10TB on a linux system according to them.
The interesting thing is that the whole internet fits in less than 10TB, and that Oracle can scale up to 512 petabytes. Should you ask how much that is, his answer was: it's 0.5 brontobyte
He also taked about iFS, a database FS that is secured/indexable/searchable. Documents stored there are converted on the fly at retreive time depending on viewer (for instance a word doc can be converted to HTML)
Last, but not least, he mentionned that they have 1400 linux servers and 120 developpers working on linux.

You can also read Huub Schuurmans' report and listen to a realaudio feed.

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99/03/09 (23:35): Version 1.0