"Oracle will finish switching its 9,000-person
in-house programming staff to Linux by the end of
2004, the database powerhouse said Wednesday."
writes Stephen Shankland for CNET News.com.
"In October, the company finished the Linux
transition for the 5,000 programmers of its Oracle
Applications software. Now the transformation has
begun for those who work on the database product,
said Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux engineering,
in an interview at the CeBit trade show here. "By
the end of the year, (Linux) is our core platform,"
Coekaerts said. Oracle is switching because Linux
systems are less expensive and faster, he added."
UPDATE: The above news item is actually being
discussed on slashdot at the moment. An
interesting point that's come up is that Oracle's
developer migration is actually from Solaris to
Linux, rather than from Windows to Linux as you'd
probably have thought. Also, there's an
interesting comment about the Oracle 'Virtual
Operating System' that could well mean that Solaris
will still be the primary platform the Oracle RDBMS
is developed for:
"This is perhaps both more and less
significant that it first appears.
For those that don't know, from version 8.0
Oracle is in fact two seperate components, VOS
(virtual operating system) and Oracle itself.
VOS completely abstracts everything from the
actual OS; Oracle programmers have their own
APIs for file I/O, memory management,
networking, threading, scheduling, you name it.
To port Oracle to a new platform, VOS is ported,
then Oracle itself compiled against the new VOS
libraries.
Solaris was the primary platform, which meant
that everyone developed on a Solaris box and
then compiled against VOS on all platforms prior
to release. This meant that inevitably useful
new features went into Solaris first, but
eventually they would have to be incorporated
into VOS otherwise Oracle itself would fail to
compile anywhere else.
So, this means that everyone gets a Linux box on
their desktop, but they are still developing
against VOS, and so while Oracle is pushing
Linux as its platform of choice, all its other
builds such as Solaris and AIX will remain
current."
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