Is Oracle A Legacy Technology?
One of the nice things about working with the Oracle RDBMS, compared to say working with technologies such as AS/400, COBOL or mainframes is that it's generally perceived as a "hot" technology. Salary surveys show Oracle skills as being one of the most in-demand skill sets, the Oracle database is way ahead of the competition in terms of features and use of new technology, and most of the world's top companies use Oracle as their database of choice. But what if in fact we've gone past the peak of Oracle's ascendancy, and it's now a legacy product, with all work in future being mainly about maintaining systems in place, and migrating them to newer, more fashionable systems? A couple of excellent recent articles by Mogens N?rgaard raised this as a possibility, and certainly give you a few things to think over when you consider the Oracle database technology stack.

The first article was at the end of Mogens' chapter in Oracle Insights : Tales Of The Oaktable, where he looks at the key factor that makes Oracle particularly suited to effective tuning - the fact that the database kernel is heavily instrumented (the famous "wait interface"), and because of this, you can obtain precise details about exactly what is slowing down your application. Other databases, such as DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server, don't have this instrumentation (or at least it's not publicly accessible) and therefore it's much more "hit and miss" with those platforms.

A point that Mogens makes mid-way through the article though is that, whilst it's all well and good instrumenting the database, in most cases an application consists of a SAN, operating system, an application server, application code and so on, and if you've only got feedback on how the database is performing, you've only got part of the story. Mogens makes the good point that, whilst Microsoft haven't exposed SQL Server's internals in the same way that Oracle have, in fact they've got a historical chance to instrument the entire application platform, as they own the technology behind Windows Server, IIS, .NET and so on, a point made again by Niall Litchfield in a thread on comp.databases.oracle.server.

Where this goes on to though is that, whilst it's fantastic what Oracle's done with instrumenting the database kernel, what Mogens is actually finding in real life is that, like disk storage and operating systems before it, the database itself is now becoming a commodity, with no-one these days getting fired for buying Microsoft SQL Server, and many organisations looking to open source databases such as mySQL to handle their day-to-day database needs. Whilst this is moving databases as a whole into the legacy category, it particularly hurts Oracle badly as firstly, the Oracle RBDMS is expensive and still to this day requires a level of administrative skill well above SQL Server and mySQL, and secondly, for Oracle, database revenues are still the majority of their total license revenues. According to the article,

"Oracle and DB2 are now legacy databases: very few truly new sales compared to license renewals and add-on sales to existing customers, very few young people coming out of schools wanting badly to learn about them. SQL Server is the safe choice that won't get you fired, and the open source databases such as mySQL will prevail when they can deliver the neccessary (rather few, basic) functionalities that the developers of tomorrow will require (such as handling transactions correctly, have good backup methods, and so on)."

The irony as far as Mogens is concerned, is that "whenever a system or technology reaches a level of perfection (in other words, science is used as a rule) it will be replaced by something more chaotic that looks (and perhaps even is) cheaper", something that happened to mainframes before and, just at the point where it reaches the level of "technical perfection", could possibly be the fate of the Oracle RDBMS itself.

Mogens made the same points again in his column in the Autumn 2004 edition of Oracle Scene, and, thinking about the earlier point about databases in general being made into a commodity, says that this will have the following effect on database professionals:

"So the DBAs are slowly being replaced, outsourced, diverted to other tasks, or being asked to focus on other things, too. That means three things for our database world:

1. The databases will usually run, because nobody is fiddling with parameters and other stuff.

2. No new features will be tested and implemented (after all, 7.3 is still plenty of database technology for most uses).

3. When things finally go wrong, a lot of other complications, due to the lack of daily nursing, fiddling, and caring, will be discovered, making the troubleshooting and restore/recovery process even harder in an even more critical situation.