Oracle Musings

I’ve been trying to ignore the Oracle / blogger spat for a while — it seems to be boiling down to an argument about “respect” and who’s giving it to whom.  Oracle appears to be complaining that the blogging community favors other software vendors and the bloggers appear to feel that Oracle doesn’t give them special opportunities and access like the mainstream press.

Doug Burns and Kevin Closson have logged good posts about the topic here, here and here. 

My only opinion on this is that respect is earned, not given.  Bloggers need to stop reading their own press clippings and comments, and Oracle needs to start acknowledging the mass market a bit better.

I’d like to talk about the latter for a bit.

I had an interesting conversation with my wife, Wendy (currently at Oracle), who mentioned that she’s seeing more and more customers constrained by electrical power lately, rather than CPU or memory or disk.  As customers outsource their data centers or fill up their current ones, they’re starting to look for savings on electricity rather than CPU.

I’ve also seen that problem, and the corresponding drag on new projects and research for lack of hardware.  So I started to talk to her about how traditional IT shops are going to have to come to grips with internal customers who have an expectation of instant hardware capacity, based on their experiences in getting hosting services on the Internet.

Take a look — for ridiculously small amounts of money, I can get a full development environment (shared or dedicated), instantly, just using my credit card.  For example, check out the hosting plans on dreamhost.com.  They’re currently running a special where for $16 per month, you get 300GB of disk space, 3TB of network bandwidth, and a full, open-source software suite.  Apache, PHP4&5, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, FTP server, Chat server, crontab access, full Unix shell, CVS & SVN repositories, and SSL.

$16 per month — set up the instant you press “Process My Order”.

And dreamhost.com isn’t the only place you can do this — there are 1,000′s of hosting companies.

If you needed to prototype anything at work, why would you wait for IT to get you a server and space?  Heck, you could probably expense the hosting fee.

You want to know what’s missing here?  Hosted Oracle.

Don’t get me wrong — there are hosted Oracle plans out there.  Typical cost?  $200-$600 per month.  Ridiculous.  You mean that someone can’t do a hosting solution based on Oracle XE?  Why not?

I found a good presentation on this from the Virginia Oracle User’s Group here.  Looks like revion.com is offering Oracle hosting plans for roughly $50 per month.

What are you waiting for?