Sun Hints At Open-Source Database Offering

An anonymous reader points out a ZDNet story which begins "Sun Microsystems has raised the possibility that it might offer customers its own database, a move that could trigger displeasure at Oracle but curry favor with open-source advocates," writing "Last week, during a meeting with financial analysts, Chief Executive Scott McNealy showed a slide that placed the words 'Sun DB' next to a list of existing database products. McNealy offered no details besides 'stay tuned.'"

Re:Uhm...

[ultranova]

> Do we really, _really_ need another OS/Free RDBMS? What is it going to do what
> others don't?

Stored procedures & triggers?

Funny, I seem to recall using both on PostgreSQL [postgresql.org], which I had compiled from the BSD-licensed source...

Re:I doubt they can unseat MySQL...

[lokedhs]

Well, considering the fact that mysql is the windows of the database world (crappy product, people use it despite its crappiness) it's going to be hard for any product to unseat it.

Re:Clustra anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

That might be the case - Sun certainly has the appropriate competence available. Clustra, which was located in Norway and recruited most of its engineers from the local university's database systems group, still has about 40 engineers working on database products at the same offices as before, although now under the Sun Microsystems name.

Re:Say Ingres

[freemacmini]

YOu forgot the most important reason.

Ingres is the only "enterprise" open source DB that can scale to lots of processors.

Obviously sun will want to go with something that will run well on their high end hardware.

It will be interesting to see sun try and sell ingres though. CA couldn't really sell it to any new customers and sun isn't known for their marketing savvy.

Re:Clustra anyone?

[noodle dancer]

I'd put my money on it being Clustra any day. Why would Sun want to fool around with MySQL, or Postgres, or Ingres when they have their own HA DBMS and a truck load of developers.

Clustra was developed by Svein-Olaf Hvasshovd, Oystein Torbjornsen, and Svein Erik Bratsberg http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices /a-tree/h/Hvasshovd:Svein=Olaf.html [uni-trier.de]. Looks like Svein-Olaf - Sophus - went back to Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. But Oystein and Svein-Erik still work for Sun at the Trondheim office.

For extra credit read:

http://research.solidtech.com/publ/drake-isas04-ha db.pdf [solidtech.com] - note location of Sun credits to this paper.

Re:bad for Open Source

[grigori]

IBM hasn't dropped DB2 for Solaris - they just haven't done it (?) for Solaris on peecee. They still do lots of it on SPARC. Oracle already screwing Sun and their cost/core really hurts total purchase price. This way Sun can say 'you want a DB app for free on our OS - here ya go'