Monday, November 14, 2011

12c Wishlist - Part 1

Last week Nuno posted his 'wish list' for 12c. Here's the "Number 1" on my list:

Oracle Personal Edition for Linux.

A long, long time ago...I can still remember
when Windows was the OS that ran on the PC on your desk. It made sense that someone running their 'personal' database would just install it natively on that desktop machine, and that meant a Windows install.

Too often that would just be an install on top of a Standard Operating Environment pre-configured with Office, a virus checker and the other bloat that hangs around. Yuck.

What I'd like to recommend is that you start with an OS that is stable and decidedly unglamorous, such as RedHat or Oracle Linux. That could run on a commodity x86 under your desk. It could run in a VirtualBox virtual machine on your SOE machine, or in a VMWare or Oracle VM environment managed by real server admins. It could migrate happily between any of them.

But when I go to the documentation I see "Personal Edition is available on Windows platforms only"
Oracle are saying go and buy software off Microsoft before you talk to us about running our database ?

I want Oracle Personal Edition on Linux. Why not a bundle price for the database and Oracle Linux ? You could even sell it as a pre-configured VirtualBox appliance - just add disk. You could 'give away' a one-year Personal Edition licence (cost around $100) with every OCP certification. But push Linux as the preferred platform.

I'm not sure of the production use cases for Personal Edition. I heard, many years ago, that it had market share in Life Sciences, but it may have since been eclipsed by more specialised solutions, open source RDBMS or NoSQL data stores. Maybe it won't even be offered in 12c, squashed out between Express Edition and MySQL.

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I've got a few more items on my wish list which I'll post over the coming days. I figured I'd do them as individual posts. In theory that means Plus +1 and retweets might give a guage as to the support for each idea.


3 comments:

Noons said...

Hear hear!
Although at the moment, I'd settle for XE 11g to install straight off the downloaded files...
Blessed thing is so crippled it takes hours just to fix the hard-coded paths in the install scripts!

Hemant K Chitale said...

A pre-bundled Virtual Box appliance with Personal Edition in Linux.
Great idea !

Anonymous said...

>>"You could even sell it as a pre-configured VirtualBox appliance - just add disk."

Teradata is giving away its 'express' database as a VMware VM running SuSE Linux 64. There are two different sizes: 40 GB (for playing purposes) and 1TB (for more serious exercises).

I think this is the way to go.

Cheers.

Carlos.