[luau] News - Oracle - The Importance of Being Linux

[Warren Togami]

http://otn.oracle.com/oramag/oracle/02-nov/o62dba.html
The Importance of Being Linux
By Ken Jacobs

Oracle's advances for Linux increase its viability and applicability.
Oracle has long been a strong advocate for Linux-although I always hasten to
add that "long" is a somewhat relative term in the world of technology.
Oracle released the first commercially available database for the Linux
platform back in 1999 and has continued in a lead role to enhance Linux to
meet the requirements of enterprises, specifically in the areas of
availability and scalability.

Most recently, Oracle published a series of libraries and toolkits for Linux
that dramatically improve Linux clustering and give developers new features
for working with Linux and the file system. These new tools greatly increase
the practicality and commercial usefulness of Linux. In addition, Oracle now
offers technical support to customers who deploy Oracle9i on Red Hat Linux
Advanced Server 2.1. The benefits of this service are tremendous and mean
that a company can now launch applications on Linux with full confidence.

Before discussing the details of these new features and support, I want to
examine some fundamental questions, such as "Why Linux?" And more pointedly,
"Why Oracle and Linux?" After all, Oracle has decades of experience with
every major (and most minor) commercially available operating system, so why
invest so much effort in supporting an open-source operating system?

In some ways, the answers to these questions are painfully obvious. The
market is, quite simply, begging for Linux. For example, IDC predicts that
spending on Linux environments will grow from US$80 million in 2001 to
US$280 million in 2006, a 28-percent compound annual growth rate. Gartner
Group predicts that by 2007, the Linux market will surpass US$9 billion in
revenue, approaching 18 percent of total shipped revenues on an initial
acquisition basis. Predictions like these speak for themselves, and it makes
common business sense for Oracle to fully support Linux. (Since June 2002,
more than 68,000 copies of Oracle9i Database Release 2 for Linux have been
downloaded.)
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