Oracle, Sun To Unveil OLTP Database Server

On Tuesday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will debut what Oracle is calling "the world's first OLTP (online transaction processing) database machine," incorporating Sun server and data storage hardware and Oracle software.

Oracle has been quiet about the proposed $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun ever since the original announcement back in April. But with the deal having won the approval of Sun shareholders and U.S. antitrust regulators, Oracle now seems determined to begin leveraging Sun technology even though the deal has been delayed " possibly until January -- by a European Commission investigation.

Monday, Gartner analyst Donald Feinberg said he expects that Oracle will now begin "making a little more noise" about its Sun plans. While the company kept a low profile while approval by U.S. regulators and Sun shareholders was pending, the company feels it's under no such restrictions while the EC investigates whether Oracle's acquisition of the MySQL database, which Sun owns, will hurt competition in the global database software market.

The delayed acquisition is causing angst among Sun customers and channel partners. Last week Avnet CEO Roy Vallee told an investors' conference that customers are delaying purchases of Sun servers because of uncertainty created by the pending acquisition. And Sun resellers, worried about the future of Sun's hardware, are considering reselling IBM and Hewlett-Packard servers.

Over the weekend, Oracle issued an invitation to a Tuesday Webcast for the OLTP Database Machine announcement. Ellison will be joined by John Fowler, general manager of Sun's system group.

It's unclear just what Sun technology the database machine will incorporate. But published reports speculate it could be based on Sun T5440 Sparc T2+ servers and F5100 disk array storage systems.

At Oracle OpenWorld last year, Oracle debuted two hardware-software systems it co-developed with Hewlett-Packard: the HP Oracle Database Machine and the HP Oracle Exadata Programmable Storage Server. It's unclear how the new systems based on Sun hardware will relate to those products, although the HP Oracle Database Machine was designed for data warehouse applications, which is very different from an OLTP database.