why no Oracle on FreeBSD ?

[Michael Vince]

On 25/09/2009 10:28 PM, Saifi Khan wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Sep 2009, Julian H. Stacey wrote:
>
>    
>>>>> i noticed that there is no Oracle available for FreeBSD
>>>>> http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/index.html
>>>>>
>>>>> What could be the reason for that ?
>>>>>            
>>>> Best ask direct of commercial application vendor Oracle.
>>>> IE wave money under Oracle's nose&  ask to purchase what you want.
>>>>
>>>> If Oracle think there's enough profit in it, there's many BSD
>>>> consultants eg http://berklix.com/consultants/ willing to work.
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Julian
>>>> -- 
>>>>          
>>> i was wondering if there is any technical reason behind this ?
>>>        
>> Most unlikely. Ask Oracle&  tell advocacy@ what you find out.
>> I'd bet perceived market share&  demand as ever, ie Money.
>>
>>      
> Hi Julian:
>
> Here is the response on the Oracle forum thread to my posting,
>
>
> """
> FreeBSD is a kernel not used in any extant operating system with
> the sole exception being Apple's Mac OSX so you are heading,
>    
The reality is that Oracle is meant to be a very expensive solution for 
companies that don't know what to do. This makes Red Hat etc an ideal 
contender for this situation as it promises full enterprise support.
Whether it is the truth or if its even a good solution is completely 
irreverent to these 2 tech companies because at the end of the day they 
are just trying to make money and please the stock holders.

We have bought the occasional Dell server with Enterprise Red Hat and 
found all sorts of weird little problems. My preferred story was the 
Perl that RHE came with was bleeding edge (for the time of release) 
which at first looked nice. But when I discovered my FreeBSD laptop 
could parse a 500meg log file 4 times faster then the quad core RHE Dell 
server I know something was wrong. It was just the version Perl that RHE 
decided to package up the distribution with. I ended up having to build 
a later version into /usr/local and everything was fine. But is this 
really a good solution? Was this worthy of the word enterprise? 
absolutely not, I mean its not a big deal to build a second Perl into 
/usr/local on RHE but FreeBSD ports seems like a far cleaner and 
professional solution if you ask me, just because its not point and 
click friendly shouldn't be some kind of excuse, to me its and clean and 
pure as I could dream.

We hired a person directly from Oracle full time to build a new database 
project on Oracle. After it was all built and been using it for about 2 
years I just thought it was a bit of a disgrace. Oracle is brittle, 
unreliable and expensive. We had FreeBSD+MySQL along side it the whole 
time and it was just so much more reliable and faster for the same 
amount of hardware.
Oracle by packaged design is meant to encourage a comparatively massive 
amount of hardware investment compared to what could be achieved with 
MySQL and FreeBSD. I think it is just as much about masking its crap 
performance then any other argument.

I think Oracle is a about of system of making money out of false 
beliefs, it takes full advantage of corporate companies conservative 
beliefs and is probably only the reasonable solution for at best 5% of 
the companies it lives at, its all a matter of opinion which would be 
argued more from how much money a set of individuals are making out of 
it over a better technical solution.
Some how Oracle want people to believe that a few 100's thousand dollars 
for their software is vastly superior to any other DB in the world is 
just nonsense.
There is not any other mass scale pieces of software that most company's 
need where there is some how a magically vastly superior solution. There 
is no single/few license $100,000 operating system, no single/few 
license $100,000 excel, no single/few license $100,000 web server.

I guess what I am saying at the end of this is that if you can avoid 
Oracle that is great, I fully recommend you do.

Just because you can buy MySQL Enterprise Server far more cheaply and 
install/deploy it far more easily on more different platforms isn't 
something to be suspicious about, its just a better software solution 
and I recommend you take full advantage of it while you still can.