It is sometimes refreshing to crawl out from the hothouse of SQL Server to take a look at other platforms. I returned from the recent Oracle Open World show with my head full of all the hottest new features in Oracle 11g, but what struck me most was not so much the features themselves but the manner in which they were presented. It was fascinating to see how well Oracle understands the pressure points of their high-end corporate and government customers, and is able to present their products in terms that the senior manager in a short-staffed and beleaguered IT department wants to hear.

• “Worried about protracted and expensive downtime while upgrading?” Oracle 11g comes with Edition-based redefinition! You create a new copy (edition) of an object, and upgrade and test it while the applications continue to use the existing object. No downtime!
• “Apprehensive about potential performance issues after an upgrade?” Try SQL Plan Management. It will guarantee that only your existing set of plans gets used, after an upgrade, and will only introduce new plans after the Oracle RDBMS has quietly tested them in the background and confirmed they will improve performance!
• “Concerned about potential data loss, HIPAA and auditing?” Our flashback features allow you to instantly undo erroneous changes, or go back in time and query your data as it existed at some previous point. No need for time-consuming, full database restores.
• “Under pressure to increase server response-time?” We can deliver Exadata, a combination of high-end hardware and an “optimized storage system” to enable massively parallel SQL processing and intelligent flash caching to substantially reduce I/O.

I’ll stop there before this turns into an Oracle marketing exercise, but I hope the basic pattern is clear. Oracle is good at presenting solutions in a way specifically designed to relieve the pressures on the decision-makers in the larger enterprises. Although the offerings were of great technical sophistication, they weren’t generally presented as such, but as a means to help specific aims of its clients. It is a strategy that seems to work, but one not generally liable to raise many smiles among the DBAs and developers.

By contrast, Microsoft has always done well by marketing their products directly at the mass of developers in the IT departments; geek to geek. New and ingenious technologies are often presented more as engrossing playthings, than as a means to a specific end. It is great for the small to medium enterprises, but cuts less ice with the very largest customers

Microsoft is making significant moves towards the enterprise/BI market with Project Madison, with the promise of massively parallel processing for data warehouse applications, and it will be interesting to see how it is presented. In order to succeed at this end of the market, they will need to learn from Oracle, and speak more directly to senior managers and decision makers. Of course, that will make it a lot less fun for the rest of us.

Cheers,

Tony.