There’s yet another interesting story out this week about Larry Ellison’s unbelievable nack for making money.

The story, which appears on Forbes.com, talks about the Ellison-based NetSuite — an online CRM applications provider — plans to go public this week. They’re saying that prospects for NetSuite’s stock prices are mixed, but Ellison, who also back NetSuite rival Salesforce.com, as well as, of course, Oracle, is poised to bring home a giant sack of cash.

According to the article, even if NetSuite’s stock prices tanks, Ellison has already profited and will continue to profit from the Software-as-a-Service trend.

Once the IPO is completed Ellison and his family will control more than 65% of NetSuite’s common stock, says Forbes. But Ellison will not be in charge of the company.

Veteran Oracle DBA Richard Foote recently posted an interesting article/diatribe about the myth of rebuilding Oracle indexes. He states:

There are still many people who think indexes should be rebuilt regularly if they experience lots of DML, that indexes should be rebuilt if they’re have a height greater than some level. . . . [But] most indexes never need to be rebuilt. Never, ever.

It’s an entertaining read, with some lively discussion from readers. On a related note, we also have posted several myth-busting articles you might be interested in. For example,

1. Tom Kyte’s frequently asked questions and myths about indexes, including

• Myth: Space is never reused in an index
• Myth: Most discriminating elements should be first

2. Mike Ault’s Oracle myths debunked

• Myth: Indexes and tables do not need to be separated
• Myth: Multiple blocksizes don’t improve performance

Sure, Mike and Tom are no Adam and Jamie (they’ve caused no explosions that I know of), but newbies need to be aware of some of the controversies, half-truths and outright errors percolating in the Oracle community. Do you know of any myths that you’d like to see busted? Let us know!

Have a good week, Tim

Oracle’s acquisition of Moniforce fills a gaping hole in Oracle’s monitoring technology lineup, according to one IT industry analyst who pays close attention to Oracle Enterprise Manager and other systems management products.

Oracle, said Jean-Pierre Garbani, an analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc., has been laboring to build a system management portfolio that centers on Oracle, web and J2EE-based applications. And Oracle isn’t alone.

Garbani went on to say that the leaders in the monitoring space — CA-Wily Technology, Hewlett-Packard, Compuware and Symantec — have historically broken their offerings up into two major components: An end user monitoring product similar to Moniforce and a J2EE application monitoring product.

“Oracle just announced a new J2EE monitor [but] was missing the end user experience monitoring,” Garbani explained, “hence the acquisition of Moniforce who appeared to be the best available solution on the market.”

The analyst said that Moniforce will become an important component of Oracle Enterprise Manager, but Moniforce’s existing customer base probably won’t feel much pain as their vendor joins Oracle’s stable of acquisitions.

“One thing that may happen, however, is that the subscription business model used by Moniforce in Europe will be dropped,” he said. “I cannot say that with any level of certainty, but it would be a logical move.”

According to the IT blogger known as Captain Blackbeak, Moniforce will also be a boon to Oracle business intelligence (BI) efforts as they relate to the web.

“Oracle is the first BI solution to make a strategic acquisition into the web analytics space by acquiring Moniforce,” Blackbeak wrote. “It was only a matter of time, the only real surprise is that it has taken this long. […] It will be interesting to see if Oracle make further moves in the industry.”

What do you think? Is Moniforce all it’s cracked up to be? And do you have an interest in buying such a product from Oracle? Let us know.

– Mark

SOA guru Steve Jones recently wrote an amusing riposte to a blogger who warned budding developers not to go into corporate IT because it was “soul suckingly bad.”

The original post, from coder Joel Spolsky, argued that corporate IT development is not a fulfilling career because:

1. You never get to do things the right way. You always have to do things the expedient way. . . . You’re going into Visual Studio, you’re going to click on the wizard, you’re going to drag the little Grid control onto the page, you’re going to hook it up to the database, and presto, you’re done. It’s good enough. Get out of there and onto the next thing.

2. As soon as your program gets good enough, you have to stop working on it. Once the core functionality is there, the main problem is solved, there is absolutely no return-on-investment, no business reason to make the software any better. So all of these in house programs look like a dog’s breakfast: because it’s just not worth a penny to make them look nice. Forget any pride in workmanship or craftsmanship . . . You’re going to churn out embarrassing junk, and then, you’re going to rush off to patch up last year’s embarrassing junk.

3. [Unlike in corporate IT], when you’re a programmer at a software company, the work you’re doing is directly related to the way the company makes money. That means, for one thing, that management cares about you.

Steve responded by saying that Joel must have had a bad experience at a crappy company. “The real reason to me that corporate IT is a great place to work,” he says, is that “if you are good and have good communication skills, you can actually see what you do makes a difference. . . it’s corporate IT where the real achievement is. Software vendors provide the bricks and mortar, they quarry the stone and provide you with the rough hewn pieces for you to carve and give purpose to.”

Plus, he points out, in a corporate setting, there’s better “societal balance — by which I mean women.”

In-house developers might be an endangered species anyway. A Ventana study last year found that many companies prefer to buy, for example, off-the-shelf business intelligence applications rather than build them.

What do you Oracle developers think?

Cheers, Tim

Don Burleson posted an interesting article today on Oracle virtualization and makes the point that it is leading us into the “second age of mainframe computing.”

He writes,

It’s back to the future for the Oracle database world. The inefficient one server/one database approach of 1990s client-server technology is long gone and Oracle shops are now re-consolidating their data resources, moving back to the mainframe-like centralization of the 1980s. . . .

Moreoever, he says that this trend is bad for the DBA job market:

Server consolidation is bad for the DBA job market because one of the main reasons for consolidating hardware resources is the savings from reducing DBA staff. A typical shop can save a million dollars a year by removing a dozen DBAs.

Add virtualization to the list of DBA complaints. . .

-Tim

Is Oracle cool again?

That’s the question that Oracle Apps insider David Haimes asks in a personal account of his ten years at the company. He brings up an interesting point that I’ve been pondering as well:

“Oracle is gobbling up competitors and that is all anybody talks about when you mention you work for Oracle; nothing about our products or new technologies, it’s just who we bought or who we will buy next. . . . [but] this year at Open World people were talking about cool things we are doing again, some of the highlights are Oracle Mix, Oracle Wiki, the No Slide Zone, The Unconference. It feels like we’re trying new things and pushing the boundaries taking some risks.”

Do you agree that Oracle is becoming an “innovative” company again? Can Oracle compare to a company with a risk-taking, cutting-edge reputation such as Google? One look at the labs.google.com page shows a lot of new ideas, albeit most are consumer-level widgets and not mission critical business applications (so far!).

If so, what do you think is the most innovative product/feature Oracle has launched in the last few years? It’s probably not VM, which is just “yet another Xen” product. And Oracle was quite late jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon.

Let me know what you think!

Have a good week,
Tim