Monash Information Services -- The Point of Oracle10g

"Curt Monash's publications provide unmatched insight into
technology and marketplace trends. I have read them avidly for over a decade."

--Larry Ellison, Chairman
and CEO, Oracle

"Curt Monash possesses the rare ability to distill the essence of technological issues into understandable terms. He is particularly adept at melding a firm's product positioning, corporate strategy, and valuation parameters into a concise and coherent framework upon which one can make an informed investment decision. He is a trusted resource."

Matthew P. Kaufler, CFA
Portfolio Manager
Clover Capital Management, Inc.

Note To Folks Looking for Monash University

The Real Point of Oracle10g – Manageability

The initial marketing of Oracle10g revolves around grid computing. But grid computing was not the design focus of this Oracle release, nor will it provide the main user benefits of this upgrade. That’s not to say Oracle’s commitment to cluster and grid technology isn’t real and important. Oracle’s competitors don’t seem to be trying to solve the same hard problems that Oracle is addressing, and some day Oracle’s efforts will likely pay off in a big way. That day just won’t be very soon.

If you think for a moment, that’s self-evident. Grid computing won’t be a major concern for most customers for years, by which point there will have been an Oracle11 and probably an Oracle12, each with their own marketing emphasis. Thus is hardly a new Oracle tactic. With every major database release, Oracle chooses a marketing theme, and usually that theme is only loosely tied to current product and market realities. By the time Oracle actually delivers on the promise of the theme, several other database versions – and marketing themes – will have come and gone.

For example, internet-focused Oracle8i in retrospect had few significant internet-specific features -- the “Internet File System” iFS fizzled, 8i’s content management advances were under-utilized, and Java in the database turned out to be a generic enterprise feature rather than an internet-specific one. “Unbreakable” Oracle9i did not provide great, widely-adopted improvements in sturdiness or security. And so it is with grids; by the time the Oracle database is installed on very many grids, its version number will probably be somewhere in the teens. In fact, the very name “10g” – and presumably the “Grid” marketing focus – wasn’t chosen until a couple of months before the product’s final release. Until then, the upcoming release was referred to internally at Oracle as 10i.

So if it isn’t grids, what IS current and important about Oracle10g? For starters, as in every major release of the Oracle database, Oracle10g is supposed to have major performance enhancements in a number of areas. We find this claim very credible. Similarly – and overlappingly – it sports a number of advances meant specifically to advance data warehousing and business intelligence. But the most significant refinements and innovations in Oracle10g fall in the area of manageability. Indeed, Oracle reports that 10g’s manageability enhancements were a huge initiative, occupying many of Oracle’s most experienced DBMS engineers.

This focus on manageability makes perfect strategic sense. TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is king. And with hardware getting cheaper, software getting cheaper, and custom programming being outsourced to cheap countries, administrative costs are an ever bigger part of TCO. What’s more, manageability is historically a major competitive challenge for Oracle; 10g is designed to neutralize that issue.

Oracle10g actually reflects several distinct major manageability initiatives:

A. A major upgrade to its general installation and management tools, with lots of policy automation, automated configuration, etc.

B. A new set of aids to SQL tuning.

C. A new, simpler file system.

Taken together, these could radically reduce the costs of Oracle database administration – and thus reduce one of Microsoft’s few major competitive advantages in the DBMS market.

For more information, please contact Curt Monash.

To reach Monash Information Services by phone, please call 978-266-1815.