The return of The Scott And Larry Show

Waiting for the keynote to start, the screens loop an animation of stacked cubes labeled "Database","Applications", "Infrastructure" etc unfurling themselves into strands of little cubes which click-clack across the screen and then reform into the big cube. The effect is like a 3D version of the old skool game, Snake, in which you have to direct an ever-elongating python so it swallows mice, spiders and other small creatures.

So anyway, on comes Scott McNealy in a sweater he describes as being "Oracle maroon". I think Open World has missed Scott.. He was one of the few keynote speakers who you could rely on to entertain as well as inform. He kicked off with a Top Ten of Signs Engineers Have Gone Wild. Alongside things like OS2 and USB drives shaped like sushi he had the iPhone user interface. That was an odd choice, because the iPhone is game-changing device and its interface is a marvel of engineering in the service of design.

His next top ten were Sun Innovations. This included SPARC, Java, CoolThreads, NFS and Project Blackbox. It also included "Open Source software" which is debatable. But even if it is true, it highlights Sun's problem: Java was innovative, it was a game-changer and it is ubiquitous. Unfortunately Sun failed to make much - if any - money from Java. Nobody can accuse Steve Jobs of failing to capitalise on the iPhone's innovatory qualities.

The rest of Scott's session was devoted to reassuring us (and him?) that Sun's legacies would thrive under Oracle. James Gosling came on to tell us that most of Oracle's biggest selling products, the Apps and Middleware, are just "big bags of Java". Then John Fowler laid the groundwork for the last section of the keynote. Sun systems are now number one in seven key commercial benchmarks - OLTP, Oracle BI, SAP etc - because Sun has an integrated computing infrastructure, and because they address efficiency as well as performance. The latest Sun drive is the 1.8TB F5100, a Flash drive which has a capacity equivalent to thousands of disks and runs at a mere 300 watts.

This was all by way of introduction to Larry Ellison. Larry's brief was to address head-on IBM's campaign of FUD directed at Sun customers. They are going to invest more in SPARC, in Solaris, even in MySQL. "We think we can make MySQL a better product and we think we can make some money along the way." Addressing the question of servers and storage, he cited an interesting comparison: Apple. Apple have solved the problem of combining hardware and software and this enables them to deliver products which are clearly differentiated from those of their competitors, who are often consortia.

Together Sun and Oracle have the strength to "beat the giant". That is, IBM. Larry then unveiled the headlines of their attempt on IBM's TPC-C benchmark record. The Sun/Oracle cluster had almost 25% more throughput, with a response times which was two hundred times faster. The Sun/Oracle challenger consisted of nine racks in a fault-tolerant configuration, whereas IBM used a behemoth of seventy-six racks which had single points of failure. To top it off, the IBM configuration used six times as much electricity ("Now we know why IBM's microprocessor is called 'Power'", quipped Larry, although I'm not sure the per machine usage quite justifies that zinger).

Larry rounded off by announcing a $10million challenge: your application will run two times faster on Sun and Oracle than it does on IBM, or you win ten million dollars. This is an interesting development: IBM are big Oracle customers, not to mention partners in many areas. Also there are other manufacturers of hardware who will be monitoring the "Apple-fication" of Oracle with some nervousness.

But in the meantime we can look forward to the Grand Smackdown: Team Read versus Big Blue. It's so on.

Sun belatedly launches Java App Store

Over on O'Reilly Timothy M. O'Brien reports on the launch of Sun's Java App Store at their JavaOne conference. It seems the store will work¹ on the same principle as the iPhone App Store: Java developers upload their apps so that other people can download and pay for them. It's Sourceforge with a cash register. Only it's still in Beta and they haven't decided yet how best to actually collect the money. I can't help feeling that this is emblematic of Sun's general failure to monetize Java for themselves.

As O'Brien describes it the launch seems a maudlin affair, with the triumvirate of Scott McNealy, Jonathan Schwartz and James Gosling talking about how great Java is and what a great future it has. Then the future turns up on stage, in the form of the imperator novus himself, Larry Ellison. Larry says some things about how great Java is and what a great future it has. I note that he picked out JavaFX, Sun's RIA offering which is widely regarded as floundering in the wake of Adobe Flex and MS Silverlight. O'Brien quotes Larry as saying "we're looking forward to is seeing libraries coming out of [the group] that are JavaFX based", and "Thank you James [Gosling], suffering programmers will [thank you] for the rest of their lives because they don't have to program in AJAX any more."

Also, Larry says that "Other than the database which was based on the SQL language which was our origin, everything that sits atop the database, all of our products are based on Java." Is ApEx still a skunk works project?

Update

The Register has its own jaundiced take on Larry's spiel. They also have a more measured take on the technical implications of in switching the Fusion strategy from AJAX to JavaFX.

Update 2

Lucas Jellema has already blogged about this keynote in some depth. He has the advantage of being at JavaOne, rather than gathering stuff second hand.

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1. You can find the Java App Store here but - at the time of writing - it is still a private beta so there is not much to see.

More on Oracle-Sun

The Oracle-Sun bandwagon rolls on and there are still more questions than answers. The Guardian asks some of them: Will Oracle kill MySQL? Will it continue Sun's drive towards open source? Can Oracle cope with being a hardware company? Why is Larry still so driven?

Elsewhere Business Week asks a similar set of questions plus some sharper ones for the individuals involved: How many Sun workers will lose their jobs? Is a culture clash coming? Or, as the Guardian's Jack Schofield observes, Sun's customers may feel they have "gone from My Little Pony to Ming the Merciless".

Schofield describes the Oracle-Sun deal as "IBM's goof". Maybe Big Blue secretly agrees, because it has chosen this week to announce an intensification of its support for PostgreSQL, through its relationship with Enterprise DB. According to Matt Assay, IBM's plan to embed Postgres Plus Advanced Server technology into DB2 9.7 "basically allows applications written for the Oracle database to run on ... IBM's DB2".

In another part of the open source forest, MySQL customers try to figure out whether the deal is good or bad news. Although former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos reckons most of them hadn't noticed that Sun bought MySQL and probably won't care that Oracle now owns Sun. Anyway, IT World has rounded up the debate (including a quote from Pythian's Paul Vallee).

According to Reuters, Steve Ballmer cannot understand the thinking behind the deal: "I have no idea why a software company would buy a hardware company." Well, ignoring the obvious software assets which come with the deal, there are some major benefits to acquiring Sun's expertise in information management systems, as Andrew Orlowski points out. Unsually for commentators in general and The Register in particular, he has some nice things to say about McNealy and Schwartz's stewardship of Sunover the last few years.

"Yet by betting on some clever systems thinking during the down years, and backing their R&D departments to come up with the goods, McSchwartz ensured such disasters were survivable. The result is a lot of in house expertise in virtualisation and threading, that can make a difference with real workloads.

If Oracle isn't completely dumb, it will appreciate quite what an incredible asset it has acquired - because this know-how can help every part of its business. Peoplesoft cost Larry $10.3bn. Sun looks like a bargain."

So Oracle buys Sun

There had been rumours but it is still a surprising development. What does Oracle get for $7.9bn (a billion more than IBM was prepared to pay)?¹ Surely stomping on MySQL can't be worth that much? Certainly Oracle already has enough web servers in its portfolio without taking on JBossGlassfish too. Perhaps what Larry really has bought is just the ultimate payback for all those cracks about Armani suits from Scott McNealy at OpenWorlds over the years.

More seriously, Oracle has staked a lot of its future on Applications. So having control of Java, the language of Fusion, has an obvious appeal. I imagine this news will disconcert some of the Java heads. I have known some who preferred to use Eclipse over JDeveloper, despite acknowledging that JDev is the better tool, because they wanted to remain free of proprietary frameworks. Well its all vendor specific now. Will Oracle continue with the OpenJDK initiative? There doesn't seem a lot of point spending all that money on getting Java only to proceed down the path to giving it away. On the other hand the past few years have seen much fanfare about Oracle's commitment to open standards and they will want to keep on board as much of the Java community as they can.

The notion of Oracle as a hardware vendor is an intriguing one. Oracle will be able to offer appliances such as Exadata without the trouble (and loss of potential revenue) incurred by partnering with a hardware vendor. The flip side is that hardware vendors may be less happy to accommodate Oracle on their boxes.

Which is where Linux comes in. Initially I thought that this acquisition might change Oracle's attitude to Linux. After all, as it no longer has to pay for Solaris licences, cost is no longer an issue. But Linux does have a couple of things going for it. One is that it provides a platform which will run Oracle on any vendor's hardware. The other is that the costs of maintaining it as an OS are defrayed amongst the thriving Linux kernel community. Oracle aren't going to kill off Solaris just to save costs: it has too big an install base (apparently there are more Oracle databases running on Solaris than any other OS). But I think Linux will remain Oracle's favoured platform. We might see a few Solaris utilities plundered and ported to Linux.

The staggering thing is that this is not Oracle's biggest acquisition. It paid more for PeopleSoft and BEA Systems, which is an indication of just how far Sun's stock has fallen in the last few years.

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1. Or is it $7.4bn? Or even $5.6bn, a billion less than IBM was prepared to pay? Sources vary. Isn't the Internet a marvellous thing!