I’ve been at the first day of Oracle Open World in San Francisco.  This conference is huge, I have heard estimates of 47,000 visitors.  A major street in the middle of San Francisco has been closed to accommodate this volume of people.

Conferences like this and Autodesk University (Nov 28 – Dec 1) are valuable because they bring together a lot of people, many of whom are technical (at Autodesk University most of the participants are technical), and you can pick up some very interesting information and meet people you might not have run into otherwise.

There were two very interesting sessions I found some time to attend, the first was  a panel of Oracle folks (Ken Jacobs, Chris Jones, Mike Olson, and Omar Tazi) discussing Oracle and open source, the second a presentation by Noel Yuhanna of Forrester on the future of databases.

Oracle and Open Source

This was a very interesting discussion.  First of all I was surprised to see Ken Jacobs on this panel.  I have been acquainted with Ken for many years, starting back in the days when Oracle began looking at long transactions and versioning (now encapsulated in Workspace Manager).  He has been at Oracle for a long time and has always been on the forefront of technology.  When you see Ken involved with something you know immediately it is new and it will become a big thing at Oracle.  Ken’s new role involves open source and in particular he is responsible for the Innodb team in Helsinki, which Oracle acquired in the past year.  For those of you not familiar with Innodb, it is open source and was the default data store for MySQL for several years.  Also on the panel was Mike Olson, who used to be the CEO of Sleepycat which was responsible for Berkeley DB, prior to being acquired by Oracle.   Mike is now responsible for embedded databases at Oracle.  Berkeley DB was and is open source and is estimated to be running at 200 million sites around the world (considerably increasing Oracle’s installed base I would add.)  The other panel members were Chris Jones, who is responsible for Oracle’s PHP support, and Omar Tazi, who is Oracle’s chief open source evangelist.

To me, and I think to the audience, the message conveyed by this panel is that Oracle has supported open source for many years starting with Apache and Linux, that Oracle is not “religious” about open source, that its primary business remains closed source, but that Oracle sees a market need and opportunity in the open source arena.  It sees advantages in having open source offerings for both market expansion and for revenue generation.  Based on this panel I would say that Oracle is serious about open source technology, the open source market, and the open source business model and doesn’t intend, for example, to take BerekelyDB proprietary.  Oracle seems to be continuing with the same dual license open source business model that Sleepycat used for 10 years.  Also Oracle has released two new versions of Berkeley DB since acquiring Sleepycat.   One can only speculate about Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL, but I suspect that Oracle sees MySQL has the major competitor in the open source market and I expect something interesting will evolve with InnoDB.

An interesting factoid that indicates the business opportunity that Oracle sees in the open source market is that the total revenue from Linux-based RDBMs in 2005 was $1.5 billion, of which Oracle’s market share was 80.6%.  Oracle RDBMS is a proprietary product which it is selling successfully into the  Linux market.  Clearly Oracle sees significant revenue opportuntities in the open source marke. 

Oracle is also investing in open source.  In addition to acquiring InnoDB and Sleepycat, Oracle contributed its cluster file system to the Linux effort, and has contributed to Apache, open source testing, and other initiatives.