OraNA :: Oracle News Aggregator

As can happen, in reading about women and diversity I manage to find good tips for everyone.

The topic today is the difference between a mentor and a sponsor

To net it out:

A mentor will help you become a better you, a sponsor will help you get ahead.

I first got a clue about this was reading an excellent post From Lynn Harris where she nets this exact point out.

A sponsor is more than a mentor. Sponsors make introductions to the right people, facilitate career moves and guide you through the unwritten rules of organizational life.

Today I noticed another juicy article in HBR entitled Why Men Still Get More Promotions Than Women

All mentoring is not created equal, we discovered. There is a special kind of relationship—called sponsorship—in which the mentor goes beyond giving feedback and advice and uses his or her influence with senior executives to advocate for the mentee. Our interviews and surveys alike suggest that high-potential women are over-mentored and under-sponsored relative to their male peers—and that they are not advancing in their organizations. Furthermore, without sponsorship, women not only are less likely than men to be appointed to top roles but may also be more reluctant to go for them.

I don’t know about you, but I’m personally using this information to redefine what kind of help I’m getting for my own career goals.

______________

The Cornell Bear is intended to make Amy laugh.

As part of our daily work life – there are many instances where we give compliments / coaching tips to our teams and similarly we receive the same. I see that the “timing” of the feedback plays a key role in the quality of the feedback and the impact it has on the recipient.

In Physics – there is Inverse Square Law which says that the physical quantity or strength is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. Similarly, I propose an Inverse Feedback Law which says that the quality of feedback is inversely proportional to the time delay in giving the feedback. In simpler words, the longer we delay in giving the feedback, the smaller the impact on the recipient. Yes – that’s the outcome of my engineering brain mixing up with my managerial role

Looking at the role of a Manager, it’s important for him/her to continuously monitor the performance of their team members. For tasks done individually, it will be good for the Manager to quickly review it with the team member and compliment on the work done. If there is a scope for the task to have been done in a better way, the Manager should share it immediately with the team member. If the task has been done through collaboration, the Manager should collect feedback from the involved team members and share it with their team member. If there are tasks done by the Manager – they also should be open to get feedback from their team. Now you can see where this is heading – the feedback process should be a continuous activity – not something that’s done every 6 months or one year. The employee and manager shouldn’t have to go back into memory and think about all the work being done and similarly the 360 feedback reviewers don’t have to go through the same exercise.

As long as the Employee’s work is being tracked through their Goals, we should be able to collect the feedback instantly – I call this “Real time feedback” and Justin also talks about this in his post on performance reviews. Going into the depths of the feedback process – some individuals are very diligent. They give feedback / collect feedback promptly but some people put it off due to work pressure / time constraints. I see that this is where the Goal Management system should step-in and help Employees / Managers to collect feedback. Let’s say that a Goal has been completed and the system should trigger off notifications to people asking for feedback and make it available for review. We also can show the Activities that the individual engaged or contributed to so that we can get a more qualitative feedback. This way – we are having the continuous feedback activity and by the performance review time – most of the grunt work is already done !!

Welcome your comments.

Well now here’s an odd thing. In an otherwise frankly insulting article supposedly about visa fraud our old friend Don Burleson refers to Oracle Corporations salary survey for Oracle professionals which apparently shows US DBAs earning $97k on average whilst DBA staff in the rest of the world were close to about half of that [...]

Having discovered that it’s now easy to create polls, I find that it’s a little addictive.

There have been requests for help going all the way back to 7.3 fairly recently on OTN, so I thought I’d set up a poll to see which versions people had in production. If I’ve got it right you’ll be able to mark multiple choices from the list. 

View This Poll
Market Research

Update from Mumbai 2nd Sept 2010: It’s fascinating that two percent of the current vote (9 / 527) goes to 8.0 or earlier.

This week I’m at VMware VMworld in San Francisco. Yesterday was day one of the event and the Oracle related highlight for me was session

EA7061 Creating an Internal Oracle Database Cloud Using vSphere by Jeff Browning of EMC.

I’ve been to Jeff’s sessions before and always found them entertaining and informative. Below are some of my thoughts from what was covered at the session.

The most striking informative graphic was an X-Y graph where the X axis was scalability and Y was availability. At the high end of both were Oracle RAC. At the low end of both was MS Access and MySQL. In the sweet spot was Oracle standard edition coupled with VMware vSphere HA clusters.

What does this say to the DBAs? What many of us already knew – not every workload is appropriate for being virtualized under VMware. If your system or the business it’s supporting cannot survive the downtime you’d have in the event of a host failure and subsequent HA restart, you should spend the $$ for Oracle RAC. However, Jeff pointed out that in his experience roughly 90% of systems can survive the downtime associated with a HA event – that’s 90% of the databases out there being good candidates for virtualizing Oracle under VMware vSphere.

One of Jeff’s great examples of why to virtualize was to reduce database sprawl. He cited a Fortune 100 company with 824 physically booted Oracle databases and they pay $228 Million a year to support those machines.

To reduce this sprawl, you’ve got two approaches – according to Jeff, Oracle’s preferred way is to use RAC and come up with one global instance where you can put all your various products. Unfortunately that just doesn’t strike me as realistic in any sort of large company. I run primarily Oracle’s own products and even they can’t run on the same database version in many cases. Oracle E-Business requires Oracle 10g or Oracle 11gR2. Yet Oracle Email Center requires an Oracle 9i database (which needs RedHat 4). A global RAC instance just doesn’t make sense.

The other approach is to virtualize the machines – now I’ve got a RedHat 4 32-bit OS machine running Oracle 9i database on the same hardware as a RedHat 5 64-bit OS running a 11gR2 database. There’s lots of cost savings on both Oracle licensing and reducing the amount of hardware that one can gain with this approach.

One thing I hadn’t really thought about that Jeff brought up with regards to VMware vSphere and Oracle is that the time to vMotion your Oracle database can be longer than with other types of virtual machines – sometimes taking as long as twenty minutes. The reason for this has to deal with how vMotion works – its basically copying the contents of RAM for that VM to another server and then copying over memory blocks that have changed since the first copy, over and over till the delta is very small. Oracle heavily uses memory for its SGA (System Global Area) and so for heavy transaction OLTP systems, vMotions can take a longer than expected time.

The final thing I want to share from Jeff’s presentation was the relevant performance of different protocols and file systems with regards to Oracle and VMware. On the NAS (NFS) storage side, Jeff assigned a value of 95% efficiency when accessing database datafiles via Oracle Direct NFS (DNFS) offering. Compare this to 65% efficiency running VMDKs over traditional NFS. That’s a huge performance difference. As a result, Jeff recommends just using this for a boot / OS disk and definitely not for your database files. On the SAN side, Jeff noted the best performance (100% relative efficiency) comes from using Oracle’s Automatic Storage Management (ASM) with VMWare Raw Disk Mapping (RDM) containers. Compare this with a 98% efficiency with ASM using VMware Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK) containers. This is another example of how the Oracle DBAs need to communicate with the VMware administrators when planning out their environment. Many times DBAs don’t even realize they’re running in a virtual environment, and you can’t expect a VMware admin to know about the performance benefits of Oracle DNFS or ASM.

Overall it was a great session and I’m definitely looking forward to applying what I learned to my environments when I get back home.

For bloggers attending OpenWorld I wanted to get the word out about a blogger meetup organized by our friends at Pythian.

So… all of you Oracle bloggers attending Oracle Open World 2010…
… you are invited to attend this Oracle Bloggers Meetup during OOW 2010 — a chance to meet your online buddies face-to-face in relaxed and informal atmosphere.

When: Wed, 22-Sep-2010, 5:30pm

Where: Lower Dining Room, Jillian’s Billiards @ Metreon, 101 Fourth Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

I hope you can make it.

You probably also want to keep an eye on their blog for any any changes as OOW can be a pretty dynamic event.  If you scroll down to the photos you will see that Vivian came quite close to winning the contest for the most signatures last year.

Some time ago I added the “subscribe” option to the right-hand panel to allow people to register for automatic email whenever I posted a new article. (I’ve also checked how easy it is to unsubscribe if you change your mind  - and it’s very easy) Since then I haven’t been paying attention to how many [...]

August 26, 2010 In June 2010 an article appeared on another blog that identifed three blog articles appearing on a blog operated by an Oracle Certified Master (OCM) that were copied nearly verbatim from three other blogs, thus saving the OCM a considerable effort in not only typing verbage appearing in the article, but also [...]

Some readers have noticed that a few links to my blog seem to be broken. Don’t panic, it’s not permanent it’s just the result of Don Burleson losing his temper. Let me start by telling you about DMCA, the “Digital Millenium Copyright Act”. DMCA is a mechanism designed to protect Internet service providers (ISPs) from [...]

It’s been more than 2 years and a half since I last blogged on Oracle performance. I had the feeling I could not carry on this extra time activity when I started managing a 20 people DBA team and 4 technologies (including 2  Oracle competitors- Microsoft and Sybase which has ASE and IQ). It would [...]

A tweet by meneer pointed me to this promotional video:

Don’t think this will settle the score for Java. However it is a good distraction… What are your thoughts? Please leave them in the comments.

So today, I had to figure out which sequences existed and which ones had to be added for a new set of books. No rocket science but still a little messy exercise. I ended up with an ad-hoc query and a couple of DataLoads. Here they are for future reference: Create Document Sequences DataLoad Create Document Sequence [...]

Lost a couple of hours trying to start a vmware image on linux. Turns out the solution was to remove /etc/vmware/not_configured as described here.

Share and Enjoy:

The title rather gives it away, but I have been invited to become a member of the OakTable network. For anyone not aware of the OakTable, it is a group of some of the very best Oracle practitioners around and you would recognise many of the names in the group. Most of them also present at conferences around the globe and set up the Oak Table challenge at various of these venues, where they try and address any oracle-based question you might have.

All of them are very bright, all very knowledgeable.

Which is where I come a little unstuck. Without wanting to sound like some vapid actor at a Hollywood award ceremony decrying “I am so unworthy of this nomination” whilst secretly thinking “I so deserve this”… Well, my initial thought when receiving the invite was “I am so unworthy…”. I’ve had the weekend to think about it though. And I still think “I am so unworthy…”

I’m actually on record as suggesting that we might also need a “Formica Table”, though the only online reference to it I can now find {I MUST put my old presentations on my web site} is from the archives of Andrew Clark’s Radiofreetooting blog about a presentation I did. {Follow the link and search for Widlake or Formica, it is way down}. If you can’t be bothered looking, Andrew said this:

I was particularly taken with the Formica Table. This would be a forum where “not bad” DBAs answered questions which fitted 95% of all scenarios; sort of an Oak Table For The Rest Of Us.

I think his quote of me was actually better than the original. The idea was that the real experts on the Oak Table {is it actually one word guys? “OakTable”!?} deal with the hard, tricky, complex issues and this secondary formica table could deal with the rest of the world. Because I could just about cope with formica level. The intention being, of course, that I would sit on said plastic-laminate-coated-chipboard table.

Am I being falsely modest here? I do not think I am. I know I am good at what I do and I know I have achieved some impressive things. I also know most people who employ me ask me to stay longer (and I usually do). But I am realistic. I’m very good but I am not fantastic (at Oracle anyway ). And no way as capable as many OakTable members. But the people on the OakTable have some other things in common. From the home page of the website:

The OakTable network is a network for the Oracle scientist, who believes in better ways of administering and developing Oracle based systems.

I impression I get from spending some time with the handful of members of the OakTable that they generally all feel that you need to not only be knowledgeable about Oracle (or whatever area of knowledge you are interested in) but you need to be able to demonstrate and show that the knowledge is real. You create test cases and try things out. Just saying “you should use a large block size for data warehouses” is just not really enough, it is so much more powerful if you can say why you think this is so and then produce test cases to show that. And if someone produces a test case to show the opposite, well you need to reconsider. It is what is at the core of the scientific method. You test things and have to adapt or change if the tests refute your theory. If someone will not provide test cases or real-world examples to support their facts, they are in fact, opinions. Which is fine, just don’t sell them as facts.

The other common thread is a willingness (and perhaps a worrying compulsion) to teach. I’ve seen many of the OakTable present and I know a lot of them do courses all over the globe. sometimes it is paid work, often it is not, it is done as a benefit to the community. That is nearly always the case with user group presentations.

I’m figuring that is why I’ve been invited to join. Technically, most if not all the OakTable are a step or three better than me and I reserve my right to respect that . But I really believe in demonstrating what you think is going on with Oracle is what is really going on and I have an almost worryingly compulsive willingness to teach.

So, have I turned down the invite? Are you kidding!?! It’s great to be invited and I really look forward to having more to do with this bunch of talented and helpful people. And I am also looking forward to contributing my little bit to the group and, through it, to the wider Oracle community.

It is slightly ironic that I have been asked to join a group of people right now who are characterised by their willingness and drive to scientifically investigate and then disseminate information on Oracle-based technology when I have spent the last month doing nothing of the sort. I have been digging ditches, cleaning out ponds, chopping down trees and doing major DIY, all of which I am utterly unsuited to but I enjoy. So I now feel obliged to stop that, pick up a keyboard and continue to investigate the edges of my ignorance. I’ll try and keep you informed of progress.

Oh, and I have another problem now. How do I get the OakTable Icon onto this blog? Somewhere on the right I think…

As well as the three Rittman Mead OBIEE 11g Training Days events we’re running in London, Atlanta and Bangalore later this year, I’ve also agreed to do a number of Enterprise Business Intelligence Masterclasses for Oracle University, including a visit down to Australia and Singapore. These events are seminar-style, cover OBIEE 11g as well as OWB11gR2/ODI 11gR1 and a bit of Essbase 11.1.2, and are an ideal high-level introduction to the technology behind the Oracle 11g BI&DW technology stack.

More dates will be announced over the next few months, but for now, here’s the current set of confirmed dates and venue:

• De Meern (Utrecht), Netherlands, 10-11 November 2010
• Bratislava, Slovakia, 25-26 November 2010
• Melbourne, Australia, 6-7 December 2010
• Sydney, Australia, 9-10 December 2010
• Singapore, Singapore, 13-14 December 2010
• Oslo, Norway, 14-15 February 2011

I’ll post details of any future events on our Events website page.

August 22, 1010 I posted the first blog articles on this blog roughly nine months ago.  In the last nine months I have published roughly 230 blog articles, which is roughly 210 more than anticipated.  What happened to just posting Oracle Database test cases to demonstrate Oracle Database behavior?  I started seeing somewhat unusual search terms appearing in WordPress’ statistics for the [...]

Starting this week, Oracle has publicly started really pushing Oracle’s virtualization products. I attended a seminar on Tuesday covering the road map and yesterday was an all day online Virtualization forum.

Oracle’s server virtualization is focused mainly on two products – Oracle VM for Sparc and Oracle VM for x86. I’m going to focus on Oracle VM for x86, as commodity x86 hardware is the big industry focus and Oracle is really focusing on why you should go with Oracle VM versus VMware.

I’m hear to tell you Oracle VM just isn’t ready for the enterprise. Sure, there are large reference customers out there, but Oracle VM doesn’t have the features I consider necessary to be called enterprise ready. I run VMware vSphere in my enterprise environments and so I’ll compare Oracle VM to VMware vSphere, since I believe VMware vSphere is enterprise ready.

Load Balancing – with virtualization you can run many virtual servers on one physical server. Oracle VM’s load balancing works by performing automated load balancing at each virtual machine power on. Basically what that means is when you start a VM it gets placed on the least busy (in terms of memory and CPU usage) physical server in your server pool. That’s it. VMware’s load balancing called DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduling) not only does this but also checks the load on each host in the cluster every 5 minutes and (if you have it set to fully automated – the VMware best practice) automatically redistributes VMs for the best possible performance.

In my environments, and I suspect almost everyone’s, the workload on the servers changes throughout the day. During the business day, much of the system load is OLTP type loads – users entering data, querying data, placing orders, etc. After the primary business hours, the system load becomes much more batch intensive as things like reports are generated, statistics are gathered, and backups are performed. With Oracle VM, this isn’t taken into account. I could have some Oracle VM servers completely idle while others are overwhelmed. I believe overall system performance to be critical to a product being enterprise ready.

Snapshots - being able to take a snapshot of a VM is, in my belief, critical to an enterprise virtualized environment. Oracle VM doesn’t do snapshots. Simple as that. When I asked on Tuesday at road map seminar with Oracle if that would be available in the next version (officially due sometime in the next 12 months, though I suspect it might be released in the next month), I was told they couldn’t answer yes or no. The fact is, Oracle VM doesn’t have snapshots and VMware vSphere does. But what really is the big deal? Why do I want snapshots?

o Patching – enterprise systems frequently have patches and code changes and need to have a failback plan if something doesn’t go right. With Oracle VM I’m out of luck. Sure I can go back to the last full system backup I took, but we’re probably talking hours of downtime if I need to failback. With VMware vSphere, I take a snapshot of the VM before I start patching (something that takes only a couple of seconds – no exaggeration) and then start my patching. If I need to fail back, I just go in the vSphere menu and choose “Revert to current snapshot” and the VM will restart right back to where it was when you took the snapshot. You even have the option to “snapshot the virtual machine’s memory” meaning if you revert back, your system won’t be in a state as if it had just rebooted, but will have all the processes running as if the machine never stopped.

o Backups – with Oracle VM, if I want to take a backup of the entire VM, I have to use a software agent running inside the VM. As anyone who has ever dealt with Windows knows, you frequently have troubles backing up open files… you know, like an Oracle database or the OS itself. As that backup runs, something that frequently takes hours, files are changing and you’re not getting a completely consistent image of the system. In VMware vSphere, there are many software packages, both from VMware and from third-party vendors that utilize snapshots to take a consistent image of the system. To me, enterprise ready includes good backups. Maybe I’m too demanding.

o Cloning – with Oracle VM if you want to clone a VM, you need to power it off. Yes, if I want to clone my production ERP system VMs, Oracle VM requires I turn VMs off to perform a clone. It’s on page 68 of the Oracle VM Manager 2.1.5 Manual . In VMware vSphere, I can clone with the VM up and available to users. In addition, with the latest version of VMware vSphere, vSphere uses public vStorage APIs to push much of this work onto the SAN itself, thereby reducing and almost eliminating network traffic AND freeing up compute resources on your cluster.

Memory usage - One of the benefits of virtualizing is consolidation – putting many VMs onto one physical server and thereby getting getting better usage of my resources. Oracle VM offers no memory consolidation technologies to increase your consolidation ratios (how many VMs you can put on a physical server). VMware vSphere offers FOUR technologies to increase your consolidation - Transparent Page Sharing, Ballooning, Memory Compression and Swapping. If I’m going to virtualize to consolidate my infrastructure, why not use the product that allows the best consolidation?

There’s many more scenarios where VMware vSphere is a much better and mature product than Oracle VM, but that’s not my point here. My point is that Oracle VM doesn’t meet what I would consider to be an enterprise ready product.

For the people, partners, customers attending Open World and interested in Forms and fusion technologies I’ve made a little resume of the interesting sessions you could attend:

• S315945 : Oracle Forms in the Middle of Middleware with Oracle Product Management – Wednesday, September 22, 13:00 | Marriott Marquis, Salon 9
• S317234 : Moving from Oracle Forms to Java and Oracle Application Development Framework – Tuesday, September 21, 09:30 | Hotel Nikko, Carmel
• S313982 : Forms2Future: Journey into the Future for Organizations on the Oracle Platform – Tuesday, September 21, 13:00 | Hotel Nikko, Golden Gate
• S313280 : PL/SQL Developer, Quiz Thyself! – Monday, September 20, 10:00 | Hotel Nikko, Bay View

Sessions regarding Fusion Middleware, Enterprise Architecture, Upgrading to 11g:

• S313466 : Oracle Fusion Middleware as an Enabler for Transformation and Innovation – Monday, September 20, 15:30 | Moscone West L3, Rm 3018
• S317629 : Best Practices in Enterprise Architecture: Case Studies – Tuesday, September 21, 17:00 | Moscone South, Rm 301
• S316135 : From Oracle Forms to a Service-Oriented Architecture with Oracle SOA Suite 11g – Tuesday, September 21, 17:00 | Marriott Marquis, Salon 9
• S317403 : Oracle Internet Application Server 10g to Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g R1 – Wednesday, September 22, 10:00 | Marriott Marquis, Salon 8
• S315685 : Stay Away If You Are Technical: This Is Oracle Fusion Middleware for Business – Sunday, September 19, 16:30 | Moscone West L2, Rm 2010
• S317474 : Oracle Fusion Middleware Application Server Roadmap – Monday, September 20, 11:00 | Marriott Marquis, Salon 9
• S316409 : Oracle Fusion Middleware Architecture: Choices, Choices, Choices – Monday, September 20, 17:00 | Marriott Marquis, Golden Gate B
• S316855 : Oracle Fusion Development Platform: Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF Overview – Tuesday, September 21, 11:00 | Marriott Marquis, Salon 9
• S316075 : Telenet: The SOA Challenge – Tuesday, September 21, 14:00 | Marriott Marquis, Salon 4
• S316906 : Adding Web 2.0 Interfaces to Your Enterprise Applications: The Oracle Fusion Way – Thursday, September 23, 09:00 | Moscone West L3, Rm 3016
• S316615 : Migrate: Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE to Oracle WebLogic Server – Sunday, September 19, 15:30 | Moscone West L2, Rm 2010

If you’ve got other interesting sessions to add, please comment so no one misses out on interesting tips, tricks during Oracle Open World.

Of course besides these sessions there are enough things to see, do and visit up and around San-Francisco such as the cable car, fisherman’s warf, bicking (preferably with a tandem … hilarious) on golden gate bridge, eat a delicious Cioppino, visit Sausalito, …

Hope to see you all there !

Everyone likes to be on the side of the good guys, but just checking through the news today I’m starting to wonder whether Oracle cares how they come across.  Bear with me …

There’s no doubt in my mind that smart phones are a great thing and the iPhone has lead this.  I know Blackberry is tops in the US, and I don’t know what the sales figures are over here in the UK but it seems that 6 months ago everyone had an iPhone.

The tide is turning however, although iPhones are still popular, many of the early adopters are starting to become disenchanted with the Apple approach (and not just the issues with the iPhone 4, I’m thinking of the ‘walled garden’ that is the App marketplace too).  When their carrier contracts complete and they are no longer locked in, many of these early adopters are switching to Android.  To my mind it’s not going to be too long before Android phones are everywhere.

The same – I believe – will apply to tablets, although there’s a couple of years lag behind the mobile phone market.  The iPad is the one that breaks the mould.  I can imagine many people will buy a tablet in a few years time when their web browsing and email laptop breaks.  I don’t think it’ll be an iPad though.  Android tablets will be freely available and popular by then.

So, I have an idea that in the near future the mobile and tablet markets will be dominated by Android.  What does this mean for Oracle and how they’re seen in the market?

Most people in the IT Industry have an awareness of how ‘good’ a company is.  And by this I don’t mean their technical skill or the quality of their products.  I mean how positively they are viewed by the public.  Whether they do the right thing, whether they are ethically sound, their karma, if you like.

At one end you have Microsoft, they are (or maybe ‘were’) the ‘evil empire’.  I like a lot of MS products, but this is definitely how they’re perceived in the marketplace.  The other end – the ‘overwhelmingly positive’ end – is probably empty, the nearest incumbent being the open source movement.  Apple were viewed positively, but there’s been a definite shift towards the evil end of the spectrum over the last 12 months.  Steve Jobs doesn’t have the lustre that he had 12 months ago.  Google and their “don’t be evil” is to the right of centre (although they too have committed the odd dubious move recently – Streetview, Buzz, Verizon/Net Neutrality – they’re still positive thanks to the brand goodwill from Search, Android and their free tools).

So where is Oracle?  They took a hit when they acquired PeopleSoft (a hostile takeover of a very positively viewed company is always going to leave you painted as the bad guy!).  They were probably perceived to be somewhere between MS and Apple.

But now we have the lawsuit to extract money from Google for Java.  This is a patent that Sun hadn’t enforced (maybe they were just sneakily waiting for it to become prevalent enough before making their move?) but Oracle can smell the blood in the water.  According to this post in The Register, James Gosling (the father of Java) was grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google during the Sun acquisition and “could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle.”

“And yes, Oracle isn’t just after money, it’s after blood. In its complaint, Oracle doesn’t just demand monetary infringement damages, it’s seeking to have any code that is found to infringe upon Oracle’s copyrights “impounded and destroyed.”” (Daniel Eran Dilger – link to full article below)

They have to be careful that it’s seen as claiming what is rightfully theirs, rather than an aggressive attack on Google and the Open Source community.  That would be a dent to the Oracle image.

Even worse though, if the move negatively impacts Android then it’s going to clearly cement Oracle’s reputation as a doer of evil.

Further comment here:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/08/14/how-oracle-might-kill-googles-android-and-software-patents-all-at-once/

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/howlett/is-oracle-becoming-an-evil-empire/2389

Image Credits:

Apple/Android: MediaPost

Steve Jobs/Anakin: Casey Fleeser/SomeGeekIntn