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by mhd 5741 days ago
They certainly know how to sell their database. Whether this translates into an equal success with their Sun IP has to be shown. The good thing for them is that they acquired pretty mature products, so they can probably "coast" along and still make a reasonable profit. It's still open whether they can foster enough innovation to keep things going with Java, Solaris… Their track record isn't very good in that respect.

Of course, it all boils down to whether they need to innovate in the first place. By now, Java is well established enough in the enterprise sector, just as BEA and Oracle DB are.
1 comments
hga 5741 days ago
ZFS, however, is not in that category, and everything I've heard says that it needs more work and a lot more polish.
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mhd 5741 days ago
On the other hand, I think that file systems are closer to the heart of a database company than quite a lot of other Sun technologies (e.g. JavaFX). Oracle does sponsor btrfs – which is even more in its infancy.

Also, Jeff leaving doesn't necessarily mean that ZFS is dead to Oracle. Maybe he left because they decided to focus more on btrfs, maybe it's just a personal issue.

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hga 5741 days ago
Indeed, 20 years at one company is a long time, plus his personal financial upside became strictly capped to salary once Sun was assimilated by Oracle. There's all sorts of reasons he might jump at a new opportunity, many of which don't mean the end of ZFS.
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barrkel 5741 days ago
You should try putting it through its paces before coming to that conclusion; I've heard different things from other people, and I currently use it for my media storage.
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hga 5741 days ago
The problem is that for this type of thing credible reports of failure carry more weight than reports of success. If you're making a big bet on the reliability of file system you want to mitigate risk, and for all I know either you haven't tickled a bug I would or you've just been lucky so far.

When I looked hard at this 2-3 years ago, it was clear to me that without a tape backup system I couldn't justify purchasing, ZFS just wasn't there yet. I've heard nothing since them to convince me it has been sufficiently polished to get over my threshold or required reliability.

ADDED: I don't think it can be said that ZFS is established to the same degree that the parent's examples are (Java, BEA and Oracle's DB).

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