Sun and Oracle promise to work together for 10 more years

McNealy celebrates with free databases for all

By Ashlee Vance in Redwood City • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 11th January 2006 00:31 GMT

Free whitepaper – Reliability analysis of the APC Symmetra MW Power System

McNealy and Ellison took questions from employees present at the event. One employee asked why Oracle had not released the latest version of its 10g database for Sun's Solaris x86 operating system, built for Opteron-based servers. Ellison had been talking up this kit from Sun all afternoon.

"We signed an agreement relatively recently that we will get those ports (SPARC and x86) out in parallel in the future," Ellison said.

Back to the comedy, McNealy and Ellison joked about why "networked computers" were missing from a slide showing the companies' long history together. McNealy and Ellison spent years hyping this idea, while Microsoft and Intel hammered away at the PC market.

"You can't get everything (on the slide)," Ellison said. "The slides are only so big. Let Google make a network computer now. They are young and foolish."

The executives also addressed the obvious issue that both companies, particularly Oracle, do business with respective rivals. Oracle, for example, has very close ties to Dell, and Ellison has even relinquished his likeness to Dell for an anti-Sun ad campaign.

"So, you aren't totally faithful, and we aren't totally faithful either," McNealy said. "Maybe you less so than us."

Nervous laughter fills the room.

"We are talking about IT, yes?" Ellison responds.

"My wife is in the front row. I don't know where yours is." McNealy said.

All in all, this Snoracle event stood as a repeat of a performance we've all seen. The companies love each other, and McNealy and Ellison go way back. They make lots of money together in the data centre and fight against IBM and Microsoft. You know the drill.

The new database bundles, however, are pretty intriguing. Let us know if you guys actually run into such an offer and how attractive it seems to you. ®