[Info-vax] Comment on the future of OpenVMS

[Neil Rieck]

This week I e-attended the 2-day Oracle-RDB in Nashua, NH. I just
wanted to pass on a few quotes from the presentation which can also be
found in the presentation material.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/rdb/tech_forums/index.html

1) Oracle on OpenVMS continues because Oracle Database & Oracle Rdb
business is healthy & valuable

2) Cooperation between Oracle & HP development teams means better
performance and manageability for you

3) 150,000+ combined customers…
– 41% of Oracle customers run HP servers
– 70% mid-range HP-UX servers & 90% of Superdomes run Oracle
– 90+% HP OpenVMS database servers use Oracle (either DB or RDB)

The following two points were presented verbally (so are not in the
presentation material)

4) Itanium blades (running OpenVMS) are making new inroads into
semiconductor manufacturing.

5) Itanium blades will soon appear with 32 and 64 cores

Here are two comments of my own:

1) In the porting presentation we were all told how Oracle-DB (not
RBD) was ported from VMS to Solaris and then developed from there. As
time passed it became more difficult to port back to VMS. VMS changes
when morphing into OpenVMS, as well as ODS-5, made back-porting for
them somewhat easier. Back-porting got even easier with the "UNIX
portability initiative" which they contributed to.

2) In all this I sensed some enthusiasm from all participants (both
Oracle and HP) which I haven't sensed from HP-only gatherings for 3 or
4 years. I kept on thinking that if HP really did something really
stupid to OpenVMS, that Oracle would be there (with deep pockets) to
pick up the pieces. After all, 150,000 combined customers is nothing
to ignore.

Neil Rieck
Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/