Business 2.0 has an piece speculating if Oracles investment in linux is going to help it get atop the Database Market, getting the better of its arch rival DB2 (IBM)

For years, Oracle and IBM have fought over bragging rights for the $8 billion database software market - a key technological battleground upon which sales of almost all other business software depend.

In Gartner's survey, almost 60 percent of respondents plan to move their databases to Linux. That stands to reason: The hardware savings alone are staggering.($218,000 to buy a Sun server four years ago that have now been replaced with four H-P (Research) Linux servers, which cost $55,000 in total.)

Jefferies & Company analyst Robert Schwartz believes that Oracle will take share from IBM and outpace the rest of the database market precisely because of the growth of Linux.

Oracle & Linux
Oracle started a project six years ago to adapt Linux to large servers. At the time, Linux didn't handle the swapping of large chunks of data well, a flaw which made databases running on Linux unacceptably slow. So, Oracle assigned a team of engineers to the task of improving Linux's performance, and now offers technical support on the operating system to customers running its database and other software on Linux systems.

Recently, Oracle announced it was donating file-clustering technology to the Linux open-source project, a contribution meant to help make Linux a better operating system for running large databases.That's just the most recent investment Oracle has made in Linux. In its biennial survey of the world's largest databases, WinterCorp, a database research and consulting company, reported that Oracle dominated its list of 175 large databases. For the first time, databases running on Linux appeared on WinterCorp's list -- and all of them came from Oracle.

Prashanth Rai