Stoking the Sun database fire
Back in February, News.com
reported how Scott McNealy suggested in a presentation to financial analysts that Sun might offer its customers its own database in direct competition to the likes of Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. At the time, he would say no more than "watch this space". In an interview with Sun president Jonathan Schwartz soon afterwards he indicated that databases are one area where the company may look to extend its open source offerings. Earlier this week Sun's software chief, John Loiacono, added
further fuel to the fire and is quoted as saying "...we are looking at PostgreSQL right now".
My gut reaction back in February was that McNealy and Schwartz's hints had all the hallmarks of a typical stunt by Sun. It seems highly unlikely that any customers have been saying "please Mr McNealy, we need a supported open source alternative to that nasty database from Mr Ellison."
Sun’s strategy with the Java Enterprise System (JES) is to offer customers an integrated technology stack to enable application development and deployment. JES, in its current guise, has one obvious omission – a database. In the past the company has relied on its partnership with Oracle to plug that gap and would not have wanted to risk alienating a key partner in generating server sales. Now, with Oracle clearly shifting its strategy away from large UNIX-based multi-processor servers from the likes of Sun and towards clusters of small, x86-based Linux servers from Dell in particular, Sun has less to lose in attempting to plug the gap itself.
However, it makes no sense for Sun to go back to the drawing board and build a database from scratch. Sun already uses Sleepycat’s BerkleyDB but it is not a general-purpose database. There are plenty of open source databases to choose from but McNealy’s presentation appeared to position the most likely candidates, MySQL and PostgreSQL, alongside Oracle and DB2 leaving CA's Ingres as the most obvious alternative back then. Loiacono's comments indicate that Sun has changed its tune (perhaps the legal machinations required to rationalise Sun's Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL) with CA's Trusted Open Source License were too much).
The database market, as the presence of viable open source alternatives indicates, is a mature market and is dominated by the big three: IBM, Oracle and Microsoft. I hope that Sun isn’t looking at this as a significant revenue opportunity. Rather, with Oracle and Sun moving further apart and the former offering an infrastructure stack which competes directly with JES, any move into the market by Sun would be a predominantly defensive strategy.
