The below information has been taken from SSWUG.org.
Oracle Drops the Bomb
Since the purchase of Sun and it’s holdings by Oracle corporation there has been much speculation regarding the leverage Oracle now owns in the Server and RDBMS worlds. An March 23rd Oracle has begun flexing that muscle, announcing it will no longer continue to develop products for the Intel Itanium product line.
This is an interesting move in a world where there is a lot of upset surrounding data persistence technologies. Already with the industry movement toward polyglot types of persistence this strategy by Oracle could hurt the RDBMS vendors. Many organizations have a deep investment in servers with the Itanium chips primarily for the purpose of hosting Oracle.
This move from Oracle strikes hardest at HP, a key manufacturer of Itanium based systems. Of course the Sun hardware will still be supported in the same category of servers. And the licensing for Oracle on the Itanium is almost twice as much as on a Sun.
Where does this leave companies who have an investment in Itanium based servers who are using Oracle?
Microsoft has a migration path to move Oracle databases into SQL Server. Tools to translate PS/SQL code into TSQL will surely be of interest. It may be likely that companies downsizing from the Itanium processor to X64 will also consider a less expensive engine than Oracle.
Those with an investment in Itanium systems have the option of abandoning them, or remaining at the current supported release of Oracle.
Are you impacted by this move from Oracle? Would you like to predict what is the next attack by Oracle (perhaps killing MySQL)? Do you have experience you would like to share from converting Oracle databases to another platform? Any tools for conversion you could recommend?
