Het onderstaande artikel heb ik ruim twee maanden geleden hierover gelezen. Het is een redelijk stukje text (qua formaat in ieder geval) en legt de pijnpunten aardig bloot.
Volgens mij komt het erop neer dat je nooit je geld terug zal krijgen en je alleen maar meer geld kwijt bent voordat je die miljoen terug zal krijgen of zo
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"Oracle's 3X Deal: Read The Fine Print" (the451.com, 10/10/00) By William Fellows
London - Well, Oracle really got IBM's and icrosoft's goat last week with its guarantee of tripling performance or paying the customer $1m. But what does it really mean?
Such performance, in Oracle's promotion, is defined as delivering three times the number of page views per second for an equivalent number of concurrent users or the same number of page views with three times the number of users. More specifically, the customer must do the following to
qualify:
It must have an existing commercial production website based on DB2 or Microsoft SQL Server. Oracle doesn't make any reference to a user's Web
server, only to the database.
It must replace those database products with the Oracle 9i Application Server and Oracle 8i Database.
It must purchase the recommended Oracle products and the recommended Oracle services and then work to optimize the new site following Oracle's recommendations.
Regardless of whether the customer achieves the 3X performance improvement, it must buy all of the prescribed products and services.
After conversion, if the site doesn't run at least three times faster, Oracle has 90 days to tune the site, independently of the customer. The customer must pay for the additional tuning services, if required.
The customer must agree to reveal no details of any of the activity without written permission. If Oracle ever has to make a $1m payoff because it couldn't achieve the promised improvement, the customer is prohibited from talking about it.
The customer also agrees to have its name and likeness used in advertising. The offer applies only in the US through year-end 2001 and is subject to
change.
The long and short of it is, the fine print is incredibly complex and not likely to attract many customers. Oracle has made this kind of offers before, and they tend to fade out of sight after the usual flurry of press
activity. The451 spoke to IBM, which suggested that "anyone who reads all of the fine print will realize it could cost $1m or more in the attempt to achieve the improvements."
IBM also told the451 there's a problem with how Oracle describes the offer, because first and foremost, websites are built on Web servers and not on databases: There are no websites that run on a database. Websites access databases to retrieve information, then insert the information into Web pages that are served back to the users through Web servers.
Oracle has repackaged its Application Server (OAS) as 9i Application Server and is targeting it primarily against IBM's WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and Sun's iPlanet. It's effectively offering OAS with a new Web cache added for better performance, something that the other Web application servers already provide. By any measure, it's got a lot of ground to make up on any of them.
It's possible to tune websites to give much better performance, especially those that are poorly designed or don't use a cache -- or don't use it properly. Similarly, large or complex Web pages are served much slower than small or simple ones. Furthermore, companies that use any kind of relational database as part their site can often have performance problems because they have not tuned the database. There's also poorly configured hardware to consider.
Any one of these could be turned around to triple performance -- and that's only on page views, which do not represent the total user experience, which includes transaction performance as well. So what Oracle needs to do is to find IBM and Microsoft customers with poorly designed sites and reel them
in.
What will IBM do to counter Oracle's latest offensive? It says it is taking out ad space to declare DB2 the world's fastest database at the lowest price, including billboards on Route 101, which runs past Oracle
headquarters. Big Blue also told the451 that it will trumpet the fact that it has first place in many major benchmarks, and that it will tweak an existing promotion to offer a free DB2 license to any customer who converts from an Oracle system to DB2 -- "with no strings attached."
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De webserver is gewoon niet meer dan een doorgeefluik geworden. Het is zelfs mogelijk om de java webserver IN de ORDBMS Informix Internet Foundation te draaien, dit is al een keer gedaan. Ook zijn er steeds meer produkten die de webserver, database en contentgenerator versmelten. Let op mijn woorden: Apache, PHP en mysql zullen de handen ineen slaan en 1 produkt met de overkoepelende functionaliteit gaan maken.
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