Posts by Paul Vallee

Oracle has now confirmed that as of July 8, each core of the new multi-core processors from AMD and Intel will be licensed as if it were 75 percent of a CPU. Still, many in the industry feel it isn’t enough. Ron Zapar, CEO of Oracle partner Re-quest has been getting substantial pushback from his customers. He says of the new policy “This is a step in the right direction, but they’ll have to do better.”

Thus far Oracle has been counting each core as a full processor, but now it will count each core of a multi-core chip as three-quarters of a processor. Both Microsoft and IBM have already made licensing concessions for multi-core chips from both AMD and Intel.

Oracle 10g Release 2 Available for Linux

Oracle TimesTen Free Download

Oracle has just announced it will acquire ProfitLogic, a privately held company that develops mathematically intensive analytic software to help retailers determine optimum product pricing.

Oracle believes it is winning the heavyweight bout between Oracle 10g and IBM’s DB2. “Basically, we are the gold standard,” said Mark Townsend, senior director of Oracle Database product management. Townsend pointed out advantages such as scalability, unique features like multi-version read consistency and Automatic Storage Management, as well as 10g’s ability to do database “updates” without blocking access to the affected rows of data.

Oracle’s stronger than expected quarterly profits have sent its shares up almost 6 percent. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison contends that customers are spending more as global economies grow and that “the North American economy is extremely strong and so is Asia and Britain.

Oracle expects that the restructuring costs associated with the PeopleSoft acquisition will be lower than anticipated, coming in at around $546m instead of $611m, a reduction of 10.6%. The company has also completed most of the legal, information system, and operational integration work for PeopleSoft and expects to be completely finished within six months.