Oracle has been developing a heavy parallel processing system that
would be the "OS" and the database all in one. Larry Ellison even went
so far to announce that this would replace the entire line of Oracle
products. Well... this turned out to be a silly idea and very
difficult to implement but the basic concept is sound. If you have a
box dedicated to being a database server (which most corporate servers
are) then you don't need to overhead or general, but not as efficient,
computing model that a POSIX OS provides. Instead you can have all
drive and memory access be specific to the model that the database
software needs. You can explicitly setup the tasking model to be
prioritized more efficiently and make all kinds of other tradeoffs
that a general model OS can't do. The interface to the database would
be identical to what is normally there, perhaps with some
enhancements. Also, the security would be generally improved (or at
least improvable) since the normal systems services that are likely to
be broken simply wouldn't exist (this presupposes that Oracle doesn't
introduce new security flaws of course). Really you should just
consider this concept a really really big embedded system and you'll
get a better picture of what this means. I think its a good idea and a
sign of things to come. As hardware becomes more and more of a
commodity, you'll see more specialized systems like this coming down
the road.
regards & later,
Ben Scherrey
"Jones, Tommie" wrote:
>
> About 6 months ago Sun announced a partnership where a special Oracle DB/Sun
> hardware would be available without a proper OS. My question is has anybody
> thought of doing something similar with Linux/Mysql or Linux/Postgres.
> Something like a Cobalt web server where you just plug it in, do some online
> configuration and let it go. It seems like it would be a good idea.
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