Expanding Section: Oracle’s Conflict with Virtualization

Activating Functionality in the Database Layer or the Virtualization Layer?

Oracle is very clearly stuffing their database with functionality that in the vast majority of cases do not belong in the database. Furthermore, they interfere with customers deploying virtualization technology, for the only reason that it cuts down on Oracle’s license revenues. Oracle only supports virtualization if it is performed with Oracle VM, which is not considered a minimally viable product when compared to a product like VMware or actually any of the competitive virtualization products.

The alternatives given to customers are to either follow Oracle’s advice or run an efficient server environment. Open source databases give none of these headaches with virtualization. They have nothing to say on the matter.

Oracle’s Virtualization Product

Oracle does not have effective virtualization technology. Oracle VM is very poorly thought of and very infrequently used, and Oracle has a conflict of interest in providing virtualization in any case as it allows companies to reduce the commercial database licenses required. Virtualization is a primary strategy deployed to reduce the number of CPUs necessary to run the same number of database licenses, and therefore as Oracle prices their databases per CPU, they have a built-in financial incentive to push CPU utilization down, not up.

In part because of this, most of what Oracle has done to their customers is provide inaccurate information about virtualization, even questioning the legal right of companies to perform software partitioning full stop (using a non-Oracle VM virtualization technology), when there is nothing in any of Oracle’s contracts that denies this right.