Behold Oracle's Sexy, 'Cheap' DB

The Oracle folks billed Thursday morning's event at their headquarters here as the "unveiling" of 9i, the latest version of their database program -- but really, what's to unveil? Database software doesn't have the grinning front end that always buoys a new release of Windows, and it certainly lacks all that cultish sycophancy that comes with a new Apple product. A database program is a back-end enigma, run through mysterious commands (not "point-and-click") that don't really make for a very flashy media event. So for Oracle, the flashy front end is Larry Ellison, the company's CEO, who is a tiger when it comes to presentations. He attacks and attacks and attacks, and he makes for a good show -- but even though Ellison did a number on Microsoft and IBM -- Oracle's biggest competitors in the database market -- a few open-source advocates are saying that those companies aren't Oracle's real worry. The real worry, they say, are free databases like MySQL, which may not yet be as rich in features as Oracle, but they're quickly catching up. Ellison went after both IBM's and Microsoft's database programs on Thursday, saying that his competitors' products are slower, less reliable and more expensive than 9i. Oracle's big innovation in 9i is the "clustered database." Ellison said that instead of running on one huge, really expensive machine, 9i can work on many small machines at the same time. This makes it cheaper to run an Oracle database, since you don't have to buy very pricey computers -- and the price of his system is a big deal for Ellison, as all his competitors have recently been saying that Oracle's stuff is just too expensive. Database companies have long claimed that their software handles clusters, but Ellison said that those databases could only run custom programs, not standard, off-the-shelf programs. Oracle's 9i, he said, is the first clustered database for Windows and Unix machines that can run "real applications," so "you don't have to change one line of code" to make programs cluster-compatible.