I've just been googling news about Oracle and Sun after today's Sun/Oracle Town Hall meeting at Oracle Headquarters, a mini Oracle World keynote was my first impression - lights/music - If you've been to an Oracle World keynote you know what I mean. Then  Scott and Larry on stage for an hour, 10 minutes of jokes mostly around acquisitions, a 40 minute presentation, 10 minutes of questions.

Its interesting to see how a one hour event gets compressed into a paragraph or two by different news organizations and the points that they decide to focus on. If you read 5 or 6 articles you'll get a good overview of what when on.

Most of the news articles picked up on the Oracle preferred Sun, then Oracle preferred Linux, now Oracle prefers Sun again theme. You could just as easily interpret history as Oracle has always preferred Sun except for the time when the only easy way to use cheap x86/x64 machines was with Linux, when given the choice between cheap x64 boxes running Solaris or Linux Oracle choose Solaris.

There was one phone question   "So what does this mean for DBAs?" which didn't get the follow up deserved

We could follow this train of thought - going forward you will be able to purchase a Sun server with Oracle pre-installed. This gives us an opportunity to do some configuration of the server while at the factory so you don't have to. There are some easy setup decisions since we know you are going to be running oracle you will need a dba group and an oracle user. We don't have to modify /etc/system since in Solaris 10 we can configure shared memory, semaphores on the fly in /etc/project we could put oracle in the FX scheduling class, use the fair share scheduler, configure a zone(s) for oracle etc, all of these things will improve performance or ease of use, we can do more but where do we stop?

I suppose what I really want to know is what setup would most System Administrations and DBAs agree on so we can make them the default. Less  customization means less configuration issues.