This should help people understand Oracle's current acquisition frenzy. With the increasing acceptance of Open source products it's hard to see any long term future growth in the proprietary database and Operating System arena. Ellison understands that hence the spreading of Oracle's customer base into other areas such as ERP systems where he can try to hang onto Oracle as the DB of choice to power these things.

The next generation of Enterprises, whilst today only start-ups, are now running L.A.M.P based Open source solutions. What happened to Sun Micro$ystems after DOT.COM is where the Oracle, Sybase and the rest are going - slowly but surely.

Long live the king

That's a small account, in Oracle terms at least. If the Architect expected to spend 30.000$ (at least from what I understand from the article) he probably did not either understand Oracle's licensing scheme or just the level of transaction he was going to undertake.

No wonder a bunch of sharky Oracle account managers did not take him seriously; probably (they are trained beasts) they smelled a rat in advance and thought they should have not give him much of attention.

The article is not wrapped in the appropriate context: for what I can read FTD wasn't already an Oracle customer or, at least, this project wasn't based on an existing one. Mr. Weiss lacked eventually the necessary knowledge to evaluate an Oracle-based solution if not a solution at all. Helpful EnterpriseDB's people pushed the decision process in their favor (which, from their side, is perfectly compliant with competitive behavior).

But I see a problem here.

This guy seems to have based his decisions on pre-sales vendor ability to deal with him and his apparent ineptitude: he did not think about scalability, life-span of the solution, economy in terms of necessary personnel, security, compliance, technological impact (backups for example), interoperability, application support (acquisitions did well to Oracle, customers of a certain size enjoy enormous benefits by referencing one supplier instead of three) and so forth.

At least this is the impression I get.

Nothing against EnterpriseDB: I love the suite and I am sure they are carving their place in the DB arena. It's just that I completely do not agree with Mr. Weiss motivations.

Answering to the previous post: Oracle is expanding its user base: it does not seem to suffer any major setback from their acquisition strategy.

Globalizing economy has provoked a raft of consolidations: companies desperately need inter operable systems and standardization; Open Source is not (yet) there at an enterprise level and the perception is that the Open Source thing does its job for certain infrastructure projects but when you talk core business or sensitive data....Well you know the names.

GaB

Well, EnterpriseDB is doing a good job here.

Oracle has a big advantage against MySQL -- they own the InnoDB and

BerkeleyDB. PostgreSQL is a much trickier opponent here. The code

is BSD licensed, so they cannot possibly "buy out" companies or even

programmers to stop the code from flowing. And secondly, PostgreSQL

has lesser media-traction. It is not as visible as MySQL, yet they are

doing very good job -- which means Oracle may be overlooking a really

hard opponent out there.

Most Enterprise Sales Reps would not get out of bed for that amount of money!! Would not pay for a single instance of Oracle Enterprise Edition running on an 8 Core server! Methinks the guy is in the wrong market.

Nice to see them going for EnterpriseDB instead of MySQL, as far as the open source alternatives go. Postgres has shown its maturity, and PL/SQL is loosely based on Oracle anyway ;)

I just have not been able to see MySQL as a serious DBMS since the days where they boasted "Transactions? We don't need no stinking transactions!"

But wow, for an open-source DB to displace Oracle is big. It seems Oracle still doesn't care about smaller customers...

If you read other coverage of this story (Google "FTD EnterpriseDB), you will find that FTD is an existing customer of Oracle, and the EDB project is for a reporting system off a production database.

It appears that FTD felt that the response they received as an _existing_ customer was insufficient, and thus looked at alternatives. While US$40K might not be worth much as an individual commission to a rep, the overall impact in terms of this customer, and the press coverage, might be more significant.

Weiss should look into the design of its application to see why it had performance melt-down. Why buy more software, when you should correct the bad design. _Does Weiss really need the enterprise edtion version of Oracle? The standard edition is only $5000, and it appears he is not using nor needs the enterprise edition features. Weiss needs some guidance on the software options with Oracle database, and you don't need a sales guy for that. The Oracle web-site and his internal Oracle IT staff should be able to help him with that.

Sounds like a press coverage opportunity.....

Don't you think the real issue here is that Oracle, IBM and MSFT have formed an unholy alliance in the database realm and have artificially high prices for what should be a commodity? Most people aren't using the advanced features of a database, and the high-end stuff like Oracle RAC will kill you with server upgrades, application changes to make the app "RAC-aware" and more care and feeding than all the animals in a zoo.

The issue is that to protect Oracle's margins, and other vendor's margins, they keep the database prices high because NOBODY wants to swap out a database.

We've scaled back the work force so much, especially in IT, and so much is written about economies of scale and doing more with less, that IT people are frazzled to the nth degree, and Oracle and all the other vendors know they don't have to treat customers well in order to keep them around, because people have MBO's and other "must-do" tasks on their plates just to keep their heads above water.

The key here is that if EnterpriseDB truly has "Oracle compatibility" and has made it easy to replicate or even replace Oracle, then more and more people will dip their toe in the water and test it out. And if it works as advertised (which it appears it does) then they will do what FTD intends to do; use it on more and more applications down the road. And to do that, EnterpriseDB is going to have to earn the business and it sounds like their support and product is positioned to accomplish that task.

Oracle will pay attention when more big customers start to migrate away... Too bad it takes that before they begin to listen.