Oracle gets ready for Yukon
Yesterday
Oracle announced general availability of its Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET 2003. These tools have been developed through Oracle’s participation in Microsoft’s VSIP (Visual Studio Industry Partner) program and enable the development and deployment of Oracle Database 10g applications using the dominant development environment for the Windows platform. This is hot on the heels of the company’s announcement of the
second release of its Database 10g, which also offers Microsoft-centric capabilities in the form of support for the development of database stored procedures based on the .NET Framework’s CLR (Common Language Runtime). There are a couple of aspects to these announcements.
First, these announcements provide tangible evidence, as if it were needed, that Oracle has its mind focussed on Redmond (as well as
Walldorf) and more specifically the week of November 7th, when Microsoft
plans to launch the long-awaited Visual Studio 2005 (aka Whidbey) and SQL Server 2005 (aka Yukon). There is a 3-way battle going on for database market share, with Oracle facing IBM in the UNIX/Linux corner and Microsoft on Windows. Oracle clearly recognises that it needs to get developers, particularly from the ISV community, on side if it is going to take on Microsoft. These announcements will help in that regard, particularly in reducing objections where Oracle has won the database battle. The challenge of course is that Microsoft is able to offer levels of integration which Oracle simply can not hope to emulate – VSIP membership or not. Added to which there will always be a time lag before Oracle is able to support the current version of Microsoft’s tooling.
Second, I think they provide further proof (if proof were needed) that Oracle is still a database company first and an application platform provider second. Oracle’s Fusion middleware stack is exclusively Java-based. Now, if Oracle were an application platform vendor first and foremost then stored procedure support would be based on PL/SQL and Java only, to maximise integration and skills reuse across the platform. But, because the database comes first, Oracle needs to ensure that it continues to have a market-leading standalone proposition – and that means supporting the CLR on Windows, even if it will raise questions in the minds of those considering Oracle’s application platform proposition. Oracle could (and probably does) claim that CLR support means it can play better in .NET environments to provide a foundation for customers to migrate to its broader platform proposition – but then, of course, its application platform is Java-centric.
