Oracle and Sun - will this spawn a new DW appliance?

OK, I admit it - I'm a big, big fan of Solaris. Why? Well, it's rock solid, has great productivity features and is full of practical and pragmatic ways to deliver high value enterprise class systems management. And, best of all, it's free on x64 platforms.

But that's just one of the goodies waiting for Oracle following their purchase of the once mighty Sun Microsystems. Java and MySQL are also headliners in terms of software, but there's also the rich vein of hardware products, most notably (for Data Warehousing) the server storage line.

Having all this software and hardware experience and technology all in the same business looks very compelling in order to provide customers with a seamlessly integrated offering from a single supplier.

Oracle ventured into the DW appliance space alongside partner HP last October with the HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server and HP Oracle Database Machine. These can be compelling offerings, particularly if you have a lot of internal Oracle experience and DBAs. But they're still offerings from 2 separate vendors, and purchasing departments like to have one throat to choke.

Enter the Oracle Sun acquisition stage right. But it's not as simple as replicating the HP Oracle offering. For all the performance benefits of Exadata, there's is still a significant overhead in maintenance that typically comes with a row oriented storage DBMS.

This is one of the killer features of appliances like Netezza (among others like Greenplum, HP Neoview and Sybase IQ) - it really is plug and play as they demonstrate repeatedly in their proof of concept demonstrations. They turn up, plug it in, suck in a huge amount of data and leave it running. So if Oracle is really going to effectively compete in the appliance market, they need to make some serious improvements to the ease of setup and management of their appliance offerings.

The good news for Oracle is that, if Solaris is anything to go by, they now have the ability to take advantage of the huge brainpower and track record at Sun to build low maintenance, high productivity, holistic systems to serve the DW appliance market. The lingering doubt I have is that Netezza has already taken a lead, and I suspect Oracle will be playing catch up for some time.