In my first year in IT, I was fortunate enough to be sponsored by my employer to go to Oracle OpenWorld. This was way back in 2002. Hard to remember that far back isn't it?
Anyway, I attended Larry's keynote, and if I remember correctly, he wasn't there. He was in Australia (or somewhere) in the middle of a some sort of boat race. I do remember being dared, during the question and answer period, to ask him for a job. Amazingly I didn't do it.
One thing that stuck with me though...
He was talking about the internal operations of Oracle. He stated that there were something like 500 databases in use throughout the company. With those 500 databases there was the requisite staff to support those databases. His goal was to get all of Oracle into a single database.
So my question to Larry, or anyone else that might remember this particular speech; Did this ever happen?
I was reminded of this last week at the SOUG meeting. Charlie Garry gave a "where we have been" type presentation. The title of the first slide was Oracle Database: 2000-2009, which I thought was a misprint, until he got started. The gist of the talk was that way back in 1999 (before I was IT born), they set out a plan for the database for the next 10 years. I can't remember specifics because that's the time I started to come down with The Plague. In essence, this phase of Oracle database development has been completed with the release of 11gR2. Pretty interesting presentation (stupid Plague).
* I still have The Plague, so pardon the haphazard ramblings
Specifically what reminded me of Mr. Ellison's statement back in 2002 was Mr. Garry telling us that all of his files were in a database somewhere.
Seven years later, I'm asking the followup, Did Oracle ever get down to a single database?
I doubt they have done it. :)
ReplyDeleteI am yet to see an organization which takes any IN-HOUSE PROJECT seriously.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure about those 500 dbs, but what I can say is that there's one db for email, one db for apps for the whole company. Before, there was one db for email for each country, and one for apps per country also. (sometimes different apps)
there are probably other dbs (like bug db, for instance, of the ones that handle the different websites).
rgds
rgds
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ReplyDeleteYes, they did consolidate their E-Business Suite environments a number of years ago:
ReplyDeletehttp://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2006/07/case_study_oracles_own_ebusine.html
Some information and links there or google for "Oracle Global Single Instance"
[Deleted my last comment because I pasted the wrong URL. The one I intended above.]
@ghassan
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. I wonder if Mr. Ellison got a before and after report. Not sure what the head-count was back in 2002, but I believe it's supposed to surpass 100K once the Sun merger goes through.
@dave
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link. Very interesting stuff indeed. I'll be reading up on the case study in the near future.
I'll also have to attend one of Bret Fuller's presentations on the topic.
chet