Stephen O’Grady explains why he is in favor of EU approval of the Oracle-Sun merger. He argues that Oracle and MySQL are not really competitors, but there’s too much to it to summarize. It’s an interesting argument, but I think he underestimates the degree to which MySQL competes with Oracle at the low end of the market.
October 23, 2009 at 1:01 pm
thanks for the feedback, sir.
i’d be interested in hearing more with respect to your pushback. in my experience, Oracle cares as little about the low end of the market as other giants like HP and IBM. for good reason, it must be said: their respective focus on higher margin opportunities is clearing not hurting their share price.
are there smaller or medium sized accounts that rely on Oracle but are potential MySQL customers or vice versa? undoubtedly. but a) there aren’t many of them, in my view, and b.) i remain convinced that for those kinds of accounts, PostgreSQL is probably the more logical alternative.
all of that said, i am certainly open to counterarguments, because your opinion is one that i trust.
October 23, 2009 at 1:09 pm
In fairness, I don’t look at it from Oracle’s perspective but rather from the perspective of someone who has seen Oracle used in situations where MySQL would have worked as well or even better. But you’re right in that those deals are probably not of importance to Oracle from a strategic perspective, and so Oracle wouldn’t mind people using MySQL rather than Oracle in those cases.
October 23, 2009 at 6:26 pm
I can say that I’m hearing a lot of rumblings in the academic market where largish universities that have always relied on Oracle are now seeing MySQL as a realistic option for their needs. Switching over for their enterprise apps would be a big pain, which has held them back, but money is talking pretty loudly lately…