NoSQL Rebels Aim Missile at Larry Ellison's Yacht

It’s not time for Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to sell his yacht. Meanwhile not but. Although leading NoSQL database MongoDB is the second most in-demand research skill on In actual fact.com, it and every other NoSQL innovation is a comparative pygmy when stacked against the demand for Oracle relational database management system and Microsoft SQL Server skills.

Ellison isn’t one to get rattled easily. In short, this is the same guy that pooh-poohed cloud computing for years and has deprecated threats from infrastructure partners like Red Hat. When you’ve got billions to spend, you can buy relevance even when you can’t build it.

That’s the hope, by all means, as Oracle truly seems incapable of building a winning NoSQL strategy. Even though you’ve probably never heard of it, Oracle does, actually, have its own NoSQL database, which it says is great for online display advertising and mobile social gaming. Unfortunately, Oracle to all appearances can’t point to a single customer in either segment for its NoSQL product. This might be because Oracle presents its NoSQL innovation as inextricably linked to its more expensive RDBMS: “Complementing the Oracle NoSQL architecture is the Oracle RDBMS in other words critical to the overall solution.”

The long run buy a leading NoSQL vendor

So maybe Oracle will in the long run buy a leading NoSQL vendor and hope to corral its community, the way the company has done with MySQL, with largely positive results. Meanwhile, but, Oracle more than most is in essence locked out of the NoSQL game in ways that IBM and Microsoft aren’t, with long-term negative effects for its core RDBMS business.

Microsoft, all things considered, has been actively partnering with NoSQL upstarts like 10gen, not to mention talking up the research with developers. IBM, in its turn, not only is doing its own Oracle-esque blocking-and-tackling of NoSQL by incorporating some of its functionality into DB2 in a nod to developers, nevertheless has the benefit of being fueled in large part by services dollars, which services can be around its own DB2 innovation or third-party NoSQL research.

Services arm

Oracle lacks such a services arm, and it has so much invested in SQL through its core database business, along with its acquisitions of BerkeleyDB and MySQL, that it will be difficult for the Redwood Shores giant to in point of fact embrace NoSQL.

“I want to save a customer millions of dollars and charge them a modest fee,” Schireson says. “Why? Because when that happens they'll be aggressively looking for the straightway place to use MongoDB. They will tell their friends not just about how great the product is, nevertheless how easy 10gen is to deal with and what great value we provide. Short term earnings may be less, yet if this makes the business grow faster over time earnings will be much higher.”

This will start to accelerate given that developers increasingly drive enterprise innovation decisions, and those developers are opting for NoSQL. Oracle may own yesterday’s database administrators, however it’s losing tomorrow’s database developers.

This same trend impacts Microsoft and IBM, nevertheless both are hedging much more effectively than Oracle. And during I’m not expecting Oracle’s earnings to drop off a cliff, especially given the long-term maintenance contracts it has in place, NoSQL is cutting Oracle out of the future of enterprise computing. If that isn’t keeping Ellison up at night, it should.

Longtime open source software advocate

Matt Asay is a longtime open source software advocate and pundit.Currently, he is vice president of business development at Nodeable, an outfit offering real-time data processing for the Hadoop open source number-crunching platform, and he was formerly chief operating officer of Canonical, the commercial operation behind the Ubuntu version of the Linux operating system