Is it possible to migrate Oracle SOA BPEL instances from one environment to another with history?

What is the history of Oracle's success?

• How did Oracle win the relational database market? Is the story nearly as simple as the one copied below from their website? What mattered most -- strong business relationships, early technical advantage, general ruthlessness, or something else entirely? Here is how Oracle opens the story at http://www.oracle.com/corporate/story.html : "More than three decades ago, Larry Ellison saw an opportunity other companies missed when he came across a description of a working prototype for a relational database and discovered that no company had committed to commercializing the technology." This is a follow-up question to .

• Answer:

  The best book I've ever read on the early history of Oracle is Mike Wilson's The Difference between God and Larry Ellison. (The answer, of course, is that God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.) The book is especially credible because the author had direct access to Ellison and many of the early execs at Oracle, yet felt free to poke at Ellison's sense of grandeur, and, shall we say, narrative flexibility. (He also goes into the Adelyn Lee episode in a way that makes both Ellison and Lee look bad; this isn't a hagiography by any means.) The biggest reasons given in the book for Oracle's success were: IBM had huge internal friction/conflict over the very idea of a relational database (vs. their hierarchical existing offering, IMS); and so even though IBM had developed their System R relational product internally by 1977, they wouldn't release it commercially until 1982. Oracle (at the time, called SDL) got a multi-year head start. Between this enormous mistake, and Microsoft grabbing the nascent PC operating system market, the IBM of the early 80's may have given away more value than any other company, at any other time, in history. Maybe they wanted to make Xerox PARC feel better. Oracle/SDL focused on portability rather than performance or even correctness. Early Oracle installations were famously buggy, likened to "roach motels" (your data gets in, but it never gets back out); yet portability meant, for large clients (like the government), that their application developers and sysadmins had one interface to work with. The CIA even teased Ellison about being his QA department, yet was willing to pay the price. Larry Ellison was "willing to do or say anything to get the business," and this attitude trickled down into the sales force of 1980's Oracle. The most aggressive sales people in the Valley found a welcoming home within the company. Tactics included selling discounted software license "futures" and pushing deals in return for soft deadlines on payments (e.g., a year rather than NET30/NET60). At one point, the legal department, which reviewed sales contracts and was seen as a major brake by the sales department, was moved...under the sales department. Unsurprisingly, there were fiscal years when receivables were half of Oracle's revenue. Besides IBM, Oracle's primary competition was Ingres (Relational Technology, Inc), which had standardized on the QUEL relational language rather than SQL. In 1985, IBM announced that they would be releasing DB/2, and chose to support...SQL. Immediately, Oracle was given the stamp of credibility, and Ingres was left in the dust, for good. The book isn't in my top 20 or anything, but it's definitely in the top quarter of tech corporate histories, and worth reading. You can probably find it at Fry's in the bargain bin.