Oracle 8i *is* the Oracle RDBMS -- it's the newest version of that
product, and it has an embedded Java engine. The only risk, which
is nonexistent in my opinion, is that Java adoption will be too small
to justify the effort that it took to put the engine in the Oracle
database. The reason that this is significant is that it makes it
easy for people to write new applications, including a web server,
that allow customers to directly talk to a database from the internet.
Also, all of the major database vendors are doing similar things. IBM
is making a very large investment in this technology, for example. The
difference is that Oracle is the only database vendor to write their
own Java VM that was designed to run in the database engine (or at
least they were the first vendor to get one out the door). MSFT and
IBM have the resources to do this too, but IFMX and SYBS probably
don't. The purported advantage of this is that JDBC access is much
faster if you are "inside", and there is the opportunity to use all
of the RDBMS infrastructure to make the Java engine scale to thousands
of simultaneous users. From what I can tell from remarks of people
I know that have used the product, Oracle has done a pretty good job
with this part. (Certainly a lot better than you can do with the JDK.)
Java is not just a language to write annoying applets that crash your
browser -- it is gaining real momentum as a language to write large
enterprise applications. The performance requirements for such apps
are often less critical than for client applications because the
people running them can afford really big iron to run these apps.
What they can't afford is to have the application crash and corrupt
their data, which is why they like "safe" languages like Java. This
way all that has to happen is that the Java VM is reliable, not every
single version of every single application that they are running... |
