There is a lot of dicussion among my financial friends of whether Oracle can digest all the application software vendors that it has purchased – and the jury is still out on that. The new Fusion middleware and its incorporation into the new Oracle App line-up is … well to be from Missouri – a “show me” proposition.
On the other hand, Oracles buy of Sunopsis is a no-brainer win for a number of reasons. First, and foremost data is virtually spilling all over the place and IT staff and database vendors are working over time to keep it a)under control and b)safe/secured. The database vendors have started to :
1)Give away their low end database software as much to help IT shops control the spillage as to beat MySQL;
2)Automate every aspect of setting up, installing and maintaining a database they can – its essential Rolaids relief;
3)Allow for ever larger petabyte installations with hoards of tricks: 64bit processing, grids, parallel threads, clustering, etc;
4)Look again “seriously” at MDA and other application generation technologies(best of luck here).
But the one aproach that nobody has taken a hard look at is standardizing much more closely on the ANSI SQL standards not just for SQL but all database the support processes. ANSI SQL Standard is infamous for being the one you could drive a Mack Truck (or equivalently, SQL Server) through and not offend anybody anywhere close to ANSI or standards.
Well that darned if I am going to observe standards attitude is coming home to roost. The big problems today in BI, ECM, EAI, and IT Integration in general are ??? – you guessed cross database integration. So software vendors and shops have adopted SOA and ESB because that forces integration standards but at a fairly hefty handshake price that makes CORBA and Sunopsis clients smile. And of course that is the second reason, Sunopsis and Sun make a whole lot of sense together. Sunopsis is in the business of doing ETL-Extract/Transform/Load with a maximum amount of SQL and standard database processes.
Now lets see where that might fit at Oracle. Hmmm – maybe their BI+Datawarehousing where the Oracle Data Import and Export utilities are good, just very badly gerrymandered. Orrrr .. maybe also in the new Fusion Middleware where the problem is “Lets talk and very fast between Oracle and DB2/ SQLServer/other data stores. Heyyy …. maybe now we can have some SOA based WebServices that a)really can put the petal to the metal and b)we can use the word “integrated” without being embarrassed. Sum – Sunopsis is very good for Oracle … but the Cardinals lost to the Bears on Monday Night Football after leading in the 3rd quarter by 20 points.
(c)JBSurveyer 2006