Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage

Interesting to see this eWEEK.com interview finally show up. It sure sounds different when it is presented there; as if this was the complete conversation. In fact, this was a small part of a long set of interviews back in February 2007. I wish now that I would have been clearer about what ‘production’ means. There are production applications at the core of the enterprise and there are production applications at the edge. Any application that can be developed and deployed using any open source database would most certainly not require Oracle’s carrier-grade edition (Enterprise Edition) were it to be developed and deployed with Oracle. That is, any application that can be deployed with an open source database could be deployed with a limited-feature edition of Oracle such as Standard Edition (or even perhaps Standard Edition One). On the contrary, it is unreasonable to think that one could migrate enterprise-class applications to any of the open source stuff out there (or even most of the closed-source stuff for that matter). I think I’ve made that point pretty clear in my thread about EnterpriseDB for warehousing and many other posts here in the blog.