Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 01:02:00PM -0700, Ron Mayer wrote:
>>
>>>I'd suspect that any single postgresql-support company that had a
>>>similar customer list would get offers from Oracle as well
>>
>> PostgreSQL support companies don't have the leverage that Oracle and
>> MySQL do to get their clients to "come out of the closet". There
>> _are_ such customer lists, but the license for PostgreSQL doesn't
>> entail that those customers be used as marketing fodder.

Agreed, but I think my point still stands -- any PostgreSQL company
with such customer lists who wants to get bought by Oracle could
probably do so easily just by firing off an email to the right person.

Oracle likes sales channels into such customers; and likes
growing through acquisitions.

Heck, they bought 10 (11 counting Innobase?) companies already
during just 6 months of this year:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1861215,00.asp
" Oracle announced its 10th acquisition in six months
Tuesday at its annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco."

And they don't even seem to care if the underlying engine
is theirs or a competitor. They probably even support
DB2 now, thanks to their Siebel, Retek, I-Flex and
PeopleSoft acquisitions.

Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>>>MySQL has a nice set of reference customers (MySQL AB's claims
>>>include Google, US Census Bureau, Yahoo, Sabre, CERN, NASA, Associated
>>>Press, Macys, Cox, Cable&Wireless, Nokia, Cisco, Sony, etc) - along
>>>with a proven business structure (combination of product + marketing)
>>
>> You do know that many of those listed above also use PostgreSQL :)

Sure. I know that some of them (Cisco, at least) sell products
based on postgresql; and from first hand experience know another
uses it for some really big databases. I'm sure most of them
also use BDB and Access and their-own flat-files as well.

The difference is when the US Census Bureau (a heavy Oracle
user) has a many million dollar budget for databases, and requests
bids from dtabase vendors. It would be very nice for Oracle to
be able to say things like "yes, we can supply all your needs as
opposed to having to go to multiple vendors".

Whether the census department sues PostgreSQL or GPL-MySQL or BDB
internally doesn't affect Oracle much, since the dollars are
really in the high-end systems. But conceding that the Census
department needs to look elsewhere for commercial database
vendors (which opens the door for those guys with Access/SQLServer)
to meet their database needs must really hurt.