REDWOOD SHORES, California -- The Oracle folks billed Thursday morning's event at their headquarters here as the "unveiling" of 9i, the latest version of their database program -- but really, what's to unveil?
Database software doesn't have the grinning front end that always buoys a new release of Windows, and it certainly lacks all that cultish sycophancy that comes with a new Apple product.
A database program is a back-end enigma, run through mysterious commands (not "point-and-click") that don't really make for a very flashy media event. So for Oracle, the flashy front end is Larry Ellison, the company's CEO, who is a tiger when it comes to presentations.
He attacks and attacks and attacks, and he makes for a good show -- but even though Ellison did a number on Microsoft and IBM -- Oracle's biggest competitors in the database market -- a few open-source advocates are saying that those companies aren't Oracle's real worry.
The real worry, they say, are free databases like MySQL, which may not yet be as rich in features as Oracle, but they're quickly catching up.
Ellison went after both IBM's and Microsoft's database programs on Thursday, saying that his competitors' products are slower, less reliable and more expensive than 9i.
Oracle's big innovation in 9i is the "clustered database." Ellison said that instead of running on one huge, really expensive machine, 9i can work on many small machines at the same time. This makes it cheaper to run an Oracle database, since you don't have to buy very pricey computers -- and the price of his system is a big deal for Ellison, as all his competitors have recently been saying that Oracle's stuff is just too expensive.
Database companies have long claimed that their software handles clusters, but Ellison said that those databases could only run custom programs, not standard, off-the-shelf programs. Oracle's 9i, he said, is the first clustered database for Windows and Unix machines that can run "real applications," so "you don't have to change one line of code" to make programs cluster-compatible.
"This is breakthrough technology, folks," Ellison said of 9i's clustering capabilities. "This is the holy grail of databases. And we're the only ones to offer this. The only company in the world who can do this is us."
Now, Oracle's technology may well be revolutionary, better than the stuff that IBM and Microsoft are producing, and the clustered approach may well make Oracle as cheap as or cheaper than the other commercial databases.
But just because Oracle is now not as expensive as it once was doesn't mean it's not expensive.
"Our solution is still less than their licensing costs," said Britt Johnston, the founder of a NuSphere, a company that sells a version of MySQL, an open-source database program.
NuSphere is the self-proclaimed "RedHat of databases." Johnston says that companies like RedHat brought Linux to the big leagues by making it a one-CD installation, and that's just what he wants to do for MySQL.
He thinks that soon, people will see the virtues of open-source databases. The first issue, he said, is cost: Under the new pricing scheme Ellison unveiled on Thursday, a copy of 9i will cost about $40,000 per processor (IBM's runs about half that). NuSphere's MySQL product, by comparison, is a few hundred bucks.
Johnston is careful to note that MySQL is nowhere near as rich in bells and whistles as Oracle's software, but he said that most people buying database programs don't need all the stuff that makes Oracle, IBM and Microsoft so expensive.
"The people who are focused on 'I have to (have) a corporate standard' are going to go out and buy the database with the 100 percent of features, even ones they might not need," Johnston said. "But we're seeing a tremendous number of customers who are interested in cost. And really, you only need a few tools to put data in and out of a database.
"(Other vendors) have thousands of tools, and no individual could ever learn that stuff. The entire documentation for ours fits in 650 pages."
Johnston said that NuSphere has also added e-commerce transaction capabilities to MySQL to make it more attractive to businesses, and he said that some large corporations are also looking to his products as an alternative to the other expensive databases available out there.
George Fitch, an engineer at the semiconductor company Allegro Micro, said that his company had installed NuSphere's MySQL after trying out some commercial databases and finding them too complicated.
"It was very slow going," he said. "So after a while we decided to get rid of our commercial database license entirely and move to the open-source model."
