Oracle Corp’s chairman Larry Ellison strolled into a press briefing held at Oracle’s Redwood City headquarters on Tuesday, and delivered an off the cuff bombshell that left many red faces among the executives who had been briefing editors and analysts about the imminent (June 24th) formal release of Oracle8, the company’s next-generation object-relational database. He contradicted his corporate officers’ vague assurances about the likely deliver date of the accompanying toolset, codenamed Sedona, by boldly admitting it may never ship. The reason: Oracle’s own applications group are unwilling to use the thing to rewrite their applications (the last clean-up was only two years ago). Hence, Oracle8 will only be able to deploy relational applications for some considerable time to come.
