OTN TechBlog

You will almost certainly read many "old media" accounts of Charles Phillips' Oracle OpenWorld keynote last evening. (Download a podcast containing a keynote cutdown here.) Most of these accounts will characterize it as an explanation of Oracle "acquisition" strategy; more accurately, it was a explanation of Oracle's "integration" strategy.

To summarize, Oracle sort of considers the rest of the industry as a "farm team" for the Oracle stack. In other words, when Oracle identifies technology or innovation that can plug holes in or enhance that stack, in some cases it will bring that technology into Oracle via acquisition and "scale" it across the stack via Oracle's massive development resources - resources that the technology's original "owner" likely didn't have. This is possible in relatively short periods of time because the core stack - database, middleware, security framework, et al - is standards-based and already in place.

In this "umbrella" strategy, as Phillips calls it, the "pole" of the umbrella is the core Oracle stack and the integrated technology is one of the "spines".

Also, please note these announcements that hit the wire this AM, which Thomas Kurian is discussing in his Develop keynote as I write this:

Oracle Developer Depot - this new (and free) Oracle Application Server tool allows you to download, run, and deploy sample code and applications with just a few clicks. It should take the sample code experience to a new level for Java developers - no more scouring OTN! (This is built on Spring BTW - see this Interface21 blog post.)

Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer Challenge - think you can hack it? Submit your Java-, SOA-, or Web 2.0-based application to Oracle for review by a contest board, and you could win a big-screen high-def TV, a trip to Oracle HQ, or even a meeting with Larry Ellison (maybe!).

More later!

Chuck Rozwat's keynote this AM comprised mostly a "rearview" of significant releases from the Server Technologies division in the last year - Oracle Content Database, Oracle SES, Oracle Database Vault - as well as an overview of pre-existing technologies that bring other "exotic" datatypes into the database, such as interMedia, Spatial, and Mapper. Interestingly, this appeared to be largely pretext for discussing the "growing" (forgive the pun) importance of scalability, availability and database operations management, which turn out to be major focuses for Oracle Database 11g (in Beta), among other things (sorry for the blurry text):

Things to note from above slide in particular: Online Application Upgrades, Flashback Transaction, Hot Patching, Storage and Query of Semantic Content, DICOM support, and Audit Vault. Seems Oracle is building on its already significant capability as a "universal", multi-purpose (mixed workload) data store that is always, always available.

Chuck also highlighted recent acquisition Sunopsis (now Oracle Data Integrator), which serves as a great addition to the data integration portfolio, bringing a service-oriented, real-time approach to data integration to Oracle Fusion Middleware.  Furthermore, Sunopsis extends the high-performance "ELT" (extract, load, and then transform) approach that Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) supports for Oracle targets to non-Oracle ones as well, which makes it a good complement to OWB for creating heterogeneous data warehousing environments specifically.

For more details about these features, see Mark Rittman's post about Andy Mendelsohn's 11g preview, and Laurent Schneider's post about Bryn Llewellyn's session re: PL/SQL enhancements in 11g.

Following the keynote below saw an interesting panel this AM on the topic of Oracle + FOSS (free and open source) software - Ken Jacobs (who directly manages the InnoDB team), Chris Jones from the scripting/PHP team, Mike Olson (former Sleepycat CEO), and Omar Tazi (Oracle Fusion Middleware OSS evangelist), moderated by Monica Kumar (Linux/OSS product marketing).

This panel offered a fairly thorough rundown of Oracle's FOSS efforts (which are deep as well as broad at this point), with these highlights:

• Ken Jacobs explained that Oracle's open source strategy is not to have a strategy; in his view, open source technology is not inherently secure, innovative, or affordable (inherently "better", that is). Rather, it should be used only when it makes sense, not as a matter of "religion".
  
  
• Omar Tazi explained how this approach is supported by Oracle Fusion Middleware's Hot Pluggable architecture and the development org's strong support for Eclipse and Apache projects, but not at the expense of JDeveloper (the dev teams are mutually insulated and separate). Again, use OSS where it makes sense to in the middle layer - Fusion Middleware is certified against some of the major offerings (Spring, Hibernate, Apache, etc)
  
  
• Mike Olson pointed out that one of the underappreciated assets of Sleepycat is its "sustainable" dual licensing model, and suggested that his model (along with Sleepycat's 200 million customer deployments) was a major reason for his company's acquisition  by Oracle.
  
  
• Chris Jones alluded to increased database integration with PHP in 11g (no further details).

If I had to summarize Oracle efforts, I would do so thus: Oracle intends to create a "trusted" environment in which customers can deploy FOSS and proprietary technologies in tandem and interchangeably, at no additional risk to them.

I also want to refer you to the new-and-improved oss.oracle.com. Historically this site as served as the hosting point for the open source projects managed by the Oracle Linux team. But in the last few weeks, I've worked with Wim Coekaerts et al (thanks, Joel Becker!) to make that site more of a "one stop shop" for information about all of Oracle's FOSS offerings. It's a great resource!