This post is by no means suitable for people to feed off of for technical resource on Inmemory DB or NoSQL, I am an Infrastructure Architect, not a DBA or Data Architect. However I do have usually quite a good idea about what goes on in the world of IT vendor acquisition and what the underlying business driver is for that relevant company who is buying the new tech.

Last week Springsource a division of VMware who are a division of EMC (Still with me?), recently acquired Gemsoft, when reading the jargon on how the core Gemsoft technology works I think its an excellent choice to go to market with. Gemsoft is an inmemory  DB that scales across multiple server nodes, with this having the goal of being able to start to remove dependency on the scale up RDBMS that so many Applications have today. And when you think about this what is one of the top barriers that get in the way within your datacentre when you want to Virtualise…..the RDBMS DB or more to the point should I say Oracle!

Oracle is One ISV that EMC/VMware really don’t get an opportunity to play nicely nicely with. As much as VMware hate to say it they really would love customers to have flexibility to run Oracle on a virtual machine with confidence (and I agree), and although I’m skeptical about some specialised DB Workload that are touted as being capable of being virtualised most DB workloads can be, when the business case is put together it falls short at how Oracle license there suite on virtualised environments. Gemsoft or a DB Caching layer may not completely mean you have to dump Oracle, it may mean that you can still use SQL if the application requires by stored conventional DB on disk and Gemsoft DBC driver connectivity, however it is inevitable that the goal is to completely ween off of DB’s like Oracle.

Licensing limitations are not the only barrier in the way of running Oracle applications/db on VMware, for those who were on the moon for the last 18 Months or so, Oracle bought Sun and several over companies who have Virtualisation technology within its portfolio. With the continual dominance that Oracle in the current marketplace has it will be only natural that Vmware begin to lose more and more market share due to Oracle portfolio technology being only supported on Oracle Virtual technology, so this I feel is a measure to stop the rot and is a dam fine way to start a pincer movement on Oracle and remove the monkey that is firmly on EMC and VMware’s back.