Michael: I watched that keynote. Thanks for the link (http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/filters/comdex/radio/fall98/). It seems to answer the "computers without operating systems" question.
I agree with you and highly recommend the first few minutes of Ellison's keynote for an articulate treatment of where the Sun/Oracle vision is going, including great hype for Java. He's a good spokesman.
Ellison claims Oracle noted that on 50% of its installations, the server computer was running nothing but Oracle's DBMS. Oracle does its own disk management (apart from the driver), and doesn't need a GUI or other things an OS provides. Therefore, although Oracle was in a general-purpose OS environment, it wasn't using general-purpose OS services. This detracted from performance without a proportional gain in functionality. So Oracle simply created their own minimal "non-OS"...a real-time kernel with some disk and network drivers (no GUI...this is all on the HTML/XML/Java network computing model.)
This isn't a computer without an operating system. Ellison indeed says that Oracle 8i runs "directly against the hardware", but this is marketing. It's a computer with a proprietary, dedicated operating system.
(Ellison says the development of this dedicated "Oracle non-OS" was motivated by the lag in Windows 2000 technology. When Windows 2000 comes out at approximately the same time that Merced/McKinley, it will still be a 32-bit system, thereby masking off Merced's most important benefit to Oracle. While that's all true, this part was mostly gratuitous Microsoft-bashing because other 64-bit systems including Solaris will be out.)
Note that when asked at the end, "Will Oracle8i run better on your non-OS then on Solaris?", Ellison replies, "Solaris is already a very fast 64-bit system. Probably not."
If this is all they're announcing on Monday, i.e., a dedicated Oracle Internet Data Server consisting of a bundle of Oracle8i with Sun hardware but without Solaris, I'll be pretty disappointed. I don't know why McNealy would do something like that. I hope there's a lot more to it.
Regards,
--QwikSand |
