SAP, Oracle Ready to Square Off

SAP seeks speedy discovery and mediation; Oracle seeks an 18-month discovery process and 2009 trial. In a joint statement filed Aug. 28 by SAP and Oracle—a requirement for the upcoming Sept. 4 case management conference to kick off Oracle's legal claims against SAP—both companies make their initial arguments to the United States District Court, Northern District of California, San Francisco Division.

Not surprisingly, SAP is seeking a speedy resolution to what surely has become a public relations thorn in its side. Equally predictable is Oracle's desire to draw its case out through a lengthy discovery process and 2009 jury trial.

What's a bit more explosive are Oracle's seemingly new claims that SAP has been stealing from Oracle for years—and that it will take at least 18 months of discovery, at least 69 customer witnesses and dozens of depositions around the globe to prove it.

Oracle filed suit against SAP on March 22, alleging that SAP, through its subsidiary TomorrowNow, which provides third-party support for Oracle applications, illegally downloaded support material. In a June 4 amendment Oracle added copyright infringement and breach of contract claims that include allegations that SAP hacked into Oracle's computer systems to steal documentation and code.

Both companies are seeking a jury trial to decide the case. SAP, in its part of the statement, is looking for two considerations: A speedy resolution to Oracle's suit against SAP—that is, one unhampered by a lengthy discovery process—and the commencement in the next couple of months of court-ordered mediation by a retired or acting Magistrate Judge.

Oracle, on the other hand, is seeking the court's approval for an in-depth discovery process leading up to a 2009 trial. Oracle's extended timeline is based on the claim that the scope of SAP's crimes far surpasses the amended complaint that SAP knowingly hacked into Oracle's systems to steal confidential product documentation.

"The evidence of unauthorized downloading detailed in Oracle's First Amended Complaint is likely only the tip of the iceberg. Oracle's best records cover only a period of a few months, but SAP's own public statements suggest that SAP downloaded Oracle's intellectual property over a period of years," read the Aug. 28 joint statement. "If true, the actual scope of SAP's unauthorized taking may exceed by many times the numbers reflected in the First Amended Complaint. Oracle expects difficulty in determining the actual scope of SAP's misconduct, in part because SAP did not have a policy of preserving the records of its access to, and taking from, Oracle's computer systems."

In its part of the joint statement, SAP said Oracle's dramatic statement is inaccurate.

"[Oracle's statement] ignores that TomorrowNow, on behalf of its customers, had a right to access Oracle's Customer Connection Web site and to download support materials for the customers," SAP's statement said. "It ignores that the downloads were performed by TomorrowNow, not SAP America or SAP AG. It ignores that none of the support materials downloaded by TomorrowNow were provided to SAP America or SAP AG. This case, in short, is about whether TomorrowNow exceeded its customers' rights in downloading certain materials. That is not a matter of 'corporate theft on a grand scale,' as Oracle says in its complaint, but a matter of contract interpretation."

In a July 3 press conference, Henning Kagermann, CEO for SAP, based in Walldorf, Germany, responded publicly to Oracle's claims and admitted that TomorrowNow inappropriately downloaded "some" Oracle files, but said the scope of the wrongdoing is not close to what Oracle claims in its more than 150 allegations against SAP. Kagermann also asserted that SAP had no knowledge of TomorrowNow's misdeeds, and, more importantly, no access to Oracle documentation or code.

As such, SAP is seeking "prompt resolution" of the case through the Court's ADR, or Alternative Dispute Resolution process.

ADR processes are defined in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal Act of 1975 as "procedures and services for the resolutions of disputes" that include alternatives to normal court proceedings leading up to a trial. Alternatives can include conferences, mediation, neutral evaluation, case appraisal and conciliation. ADR does not include arbitration or court procedures and services—nor does it do away with the need for a trial. As a general principle, all disputes are potentially suitable for referral to ADR, and the majority wind up in mediation.

In its joint statement to the court, SAP said it believes the San Francisco court's ADR process would be a "useful forum for Oracle to identify and quantify its alleged harm so that discovery, motions and trial can be appropriately focused."

Oracle has its own timeline in mind. In the joint statement, Oracle, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., proposed, "due to the complexity and scope of the issues that includes at least 69 customer witnesses and dozens of depositions around the world," an 18-month discovery period followed by a jury trial in the latter half of 2009, as Oracle's trial council will be otherwise occupied in a separate trial in Delaware scheduled to begin in April 2009.

Author: Renee Boucher Ferguson

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PHP Oracle Web Development book by Packt Publishing

PHP Oracle Web Development is a new book from Packt that helps users combine the power, scalability, and reliability of the Oracle Database with the ease of use, short development time, and high performance of PHP. Written by experienced author, Yuli Vasiliev, this book is built entirely around example code, covering the most popular and up-to-date topics on using PHP in conjunction with Oracle.

When building a PHP/Oracle application, users have two general options. The first is to use an Oracle database just to store data, performing all the operations on that data on the client side; the other is to use the database not only to store data, but also to process it, thus moving data processing to the data.

While building the key business logic of a database-driven PHP application inside the database is always a good idea, users should bear in mind that not all of the databases available today allow you to do. The Oracle database, which offers record-breaking performance, scalability, and reliability, does. The partnership of Oracle and the open-source scripting language PHP is an excellent solution for building high-performance, scalable, and reliable data-driven web applications.

This 100% practical book is crammed full of easy-to-follow examples. It provides all the tools a PHP/Oracle developer needs to take advantage of the winning combination. It addresses the needs of a wide spectrum of PHP/Oracle developers, placing the emphasis on the most up-to-date topics, such as new PHP and Oracle Database features, stored procedure programming, handling transactions, security, caching, web services, and Ajax.

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Source: www.linuxpr.com

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eHarmony Weds Oracle 10g

Oracle on Monday announced that eHarmony, a leading online dating and match-making service, is now using the Oracle 10g database to play Cupid to more than 17 million love-starved users.

While the actual transition from Microsoft's SQL Server database software only took an uneventful three hours, the planning, testing and installation took more than 14 months, according to Mark Douglas, eHarmony's vice president of technology.

But the days and weeks preceding those fateful three hours were every bit as nerve-wracking as those awkward, hesitant seconds leading up to a couple's first kiss.

"It went flawlessly, but a lot of our IT people were nervous," Douglas said in an interview with internetnews.com. "Some said they didn't know a lot about databases but it sounded risky. We’re a 24/7 business. We can't just shut our database down for the weekend."

To make it happen, Douglas and his five-person IT crew embarked on the tedious task of scripting custom code that would allow eHarmony to seamlessly transfer data from the SQL Server database to Oracle 10g without any downtime.

The eHarmony site handles more than 400 million page views a month and processes between 400 and 1,200 transactions per second. Douglas wouldn't comment on exactly how much revenue would be lost if the site went down but said it would "a lot more" than a $1,000 a minute.

"The analogy I like to use is that is was like transferring packages from one plane to another while both are in flight," he said. "We had to write a really significant amount of code."

eHarmony, along with competitors such as Yahoo Personals, Match.com, JDate and dozens of other more specialized sites, allows subscribers to build personal profiles, view other subscribers' profiles and access an array of dating services, including a match-making system that connects would-be lovers with others based on their dating preferences. eHarmony, based in Pasadena, Calif., charges $59 a month for the service but does offer long-term contracts at a lower monthly rate.

In the past year, eHarmony's registered user base has surged from around 11 million to more than 17 million, adding an average of 15,000 new daters each day. That kind of growth, Douglas said, couldn't be accommodated on SQL Server.

"There's nothing particularly wrong with SQL," he said. "We just needed functionality that Microsoft doesn't provide and didn't want to write it all ourselves."

Leading up to the live launch, eHarmony tested migrating more than five terabytes of its precious data every day for 100 days in a row. It uses more than 400 servers to process changes to customer profiles, queries for potential matches, searches and new customer orders.

Douglas said the total cost to move eHarmony to Oracle 10g was in the vicinity of $1.5 million. The site's perceived response time—essentially how fast individual pages load—has improved by about 30 percent and the IT department no longer has to schedule planned site outages to perform service operations on the system as it did with the SQL Server software.

According to a study conducted by the Online Publishers Association and comScore Networks, Americans in 2005 spent more than $500 million on online personals and dating sites.

For the record, Douglas is married, didn't meet his wife on eHarmony and said the company prohibits employees from using the service.

Author: Larry Barrett

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