Oracle Technology Musings

When looking via Google/Google Desktop (I remembered reading about it shortly after Oracle's announcement) for a defintion (if such a thing exists) of the term "Cloud Computing", I stumbled (quite rapidly) over this article from the multi-talented Stephen Fry.
And guess what? He mentions Larry Ellison very early in his article:

I first heard about the principles of what is now called the “cloud” but was then called “network computing” at a talk given many years ago by Larry Ellison.

There isn't a definition as such, but Mr. Fry does have a go at trying to explain the not necessarily techie readers of The Guardian what that "cloud" might mean.

People often save data online in the ether or “cloud” simply by keeping it on their gmail or hotmail folders..... But many of us are beginning to dabble in true online applications and storage, in cloud computing. The advantage is that files can be created, stored and accessed from any online computer in the world. The network holds not only your files, but the applications that create them!

Yes, we're getting there. This is followed by the most well-known "cloud"-like services there are, such as Google, .Mac/MobileMe, zoho.com.
The one that's not mentioned, but which I knew through articles on backup methodologies for photography, is Amazon! Amazon provides online storage (their S3 product). I remember testing it as a decent technology, there were even user-space file systems for accessing your storage! But the only issue was my upload bandwidth. When it comes to broadband (although being the country with most dense cabling system country wide), Belgium is a bit retarded. The lack of decent competition means all sorts of limitations on uploads (bandwidth ànd upload-limits).
Amazon was obviously aiming at the bigger business as well as the home users and started providing quite a bit of storage (for a price, but hey you get rid of taking care of your own storage!).
Now there's one thing that Mr. Fry wasn't completely up-to-date about yet (and I forgive the man, you can't expect him to be aware of the latest in enterprise computing).

Enterprise systems will tend to hold applications and files on servers. A server is a dedicated storage and processing computer designed transparently to handle tasks for a network of individual “client” computers, the ones humans actually use.

Now Oracle has set the first steps towards enabling enterprise software on the cloud. As of today, you can create Oracle databases, Oracle middleware in the cloud, and even backup your databases on the cloud. All this through Amazon EC2 and S3 . Read all about it on: Oracle Cloud Computing Centre (do not miss the viewlet of how to install a database on the cloud)

We, IT people, have this horrible habit to use acronyms wherever and whenever we can. Up to a point where some acronyms have over 4 meanings. With a bit of luck, these have no overlap and are clear within context.
On other occasions, acronyms are only confusing to dyslectic or people like me who read diagonally and way to quick (don't know what's worse... but dyslectic people seem to be able to prove relativity theory!).
For a non-techie, both acronyms are "related to database type things". But they are fundamentally different and in following articles I'll go a bit more in-depth on the wonder world of OPAL (Oracle, Perl/PHP, Apache, Linux) and the world of OLAP (OnLine Analytical Processing) with some resources and thoughts on the underlying technologies.