Oracle aims to secure future of Sparc, Solaris and Sun hardware

Interesting article on ComputerWeekly.com about how Oracle are looking to secure the future of Sparc, Solaris and Sun Hardware. They don't mention it but I wouldn't be surprised if we see 'Database as an Appliance' coming soon with Oracle Database running on Sun Hardware with management taken out of the hands of the local DBA and automated or made accessible only to Oracle themselves. This isn't a 'Death of the DBA' thing, the sort of sites that could go for something like that are probably the ones that don't have a DBA, just a support tech who has a couple of books, the sort of sites that probably run M$ SQLServer now.

One thing they mention, as an aside, is that Oracle plan to OpenOffice.org to position it as a competitor to Microsoft Office. If they want to do that then I think the thing they really need to introduce to the suite is a desktop RDBMS to beat Access. Ideally something that can also act as a front end to Oracle with a tool that will let you take a desktop database and export it to a full blown Oracle server then use the existing database (or copy thereof) as the front end. A similar process already exists for Access and SQLServer. This might look like a competitor for their development tools arm but then there are already plenty of competitive development tools from other vendors (including Access from Microsoft) in that market.