The agreement between Novell Inc and Oracle Corp, to be announced in the middle of the month (CI No 2,178) will see the two companies bundling a NetWare Loadable Module version of Oracle7 with NetWare 4.0 with the resulting combination to be marketed by both companies, US PC Week reckons: the paper suggests the alliance signals a desire on both companies’ parts to deliver a competitive blow to Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT and SQL Server for NT database server, which is based on Sybase; the two will adapt their products for better integration, with NetWare 4.0 being reconfigured to support transaction processing journalling more effectively across multiple distributed databases in a network, and Oracle Server will gain direct access to NetWare print, file and other services; the deal makes good on a threat by Oracle chief Larry Ellison after Microsoft refused to bundle Oracle database server with NT.
