Larry Ellison's racing yacht is awesome, according to comments from Larry Ellison at a San Francisco party attended by his salespeople and biggest customers. As quoted by Software Development Times' Alex Handy, who writes that Ellison's "behavior in keynotes is getting worse every year:"

He started his talk with a five minute video of [Ellison's] Oracle BMW sailboat ... After the video, Ellison comes on stage with this massively smug look on his face, grinning like he's just bought the last candy bar in front of a herd of little kids at the candy store.

His first words? "It's a great boat, you should get one."

Ha ha ha! Oh, and did he follow up with, "but I guess you're probably pinching pennies, since unemployment is 10 percent, and your colleagues are getting laid off, and your mortgage is probably under water, and Oracle shares have been trading sideways for two years!?" Because that would be hi-larious.

Then Ellison brought out Aerosmith, who were there "because Oracle outbid their other gigs." They led with Eat the Rich, so at least Oracle workers had that.

Attached is a video in which we've spliced Ellison's rant, delivered last week at the Churchill Club and recorded by TechPulse 360, with excerpts from an interview Ellison gave to Charlie Rose in 1996. At the time, Ellison was campaigning for the world to adopt "Network Computers," jargon for Web applications operated from stripped down computer terminals. "Cloud Computing," meanwhile, is the contemporary jargon term for Web applications.

As he told Rose, Ellison was convinced PCs were way too complex for ordinary people, and would eventually be replaced by his "NCs." Of course, things didn't turn out that way; in the ensuing 13 years PCs have spread not only to many more homes but also to many more datacenters, where clusters of cheap boxes with the same hardware guts as home Windows machines have displaced large servers from the likes of Oracle's Sun division. As Ellison alludes to in his more current rant, Google runs on such machines.

Maybe it is precisely because Ellison himself once employed "NC" jargon and hype to predict the imminent decline of certain competitors, Microsoft chief among them, that he can so eloquently rant against people who are trying to do the same thing with "cloud computing" today. Of course, Ellison's newfound distaste for hype also might have something to do with the fact that his company, Oracle, is now the supposedly declining competitor, and ex Oracle executive Marc Benioff's SalesForce.com is the company pumping out the hypey internet jargon.

Oracle's Wall Street Journal ad (above) said its database ran "faster" on Oracle's own Sun hardware —at "XX transactions per minute" — than competitor IBM's database and server combo. Some of our commenters insisted that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison must have had the "XX" numbers to prove his claim but was, as his ad seemed to imply, sitting on them until an Oct. 14 event.

But Ellison, known for commissioning ads about capabilities that don't yet exist, shouldn't have been given the benefit of the doubt. He's just been fined $10,000 by the benchmarking council Oracle belongs to "because Oracle did not have a [benchmarking] result at the time of publication."

Oracle has not submitted any current evidence to the TPC to sustain this claimed result. Oracle has been directed to cease publication of the advertisement in print or online.

Lesson: Never assume that Larry Frickin' Ellison, of all people, is being coy and modest. Larry Ellison does not do coy or modest. If he has numbers, he will use them. And then some!

[Via All Things D]

Attached is the ad Oracle ran in the lower right corner of today's Wall Street Journal. An early edition posted to the newspaper's website illustrates how Ellison likes to operate. Check out the highlighted bit — Oracle never bothered to fill in the data to support its certain conclusion. The attitude: "Definitely say we're way 'faster' on hardware from Sun, which we now own, than on IBM, which makes a competing database; we'll find some numbers later to prove it."

All tech moguls, to some extent, play this marketing game, but Ellison has historically been an especially egregious example; his brazenness, in fact, helps explain why Oracle, through a series of mergers, has come to utterly dominate the market for the most complex types of large corporate software.

An example: Ellison in the late 1980s commissioned an ad to tout a hugely complex clustering feature for Oracle database software — and did so before one line of code had been written to support that feature. This according to Mike Wilson's biography of Ellison:

About 1987 word got out that the Ingres database would soon have a sexy new function: It would be able to do distributed queries... Ellison told [Oracle ad man Rick] Bennett to prepare an advertisement announcing Oracle's distributed capability. Then he assigned an engineer to whip up a distribtued feature so the company would actually have something to sell when the ad appeared. Ten days later Bennett's advertisement hit the trade press: "Oracle Announced SQL*Star," it said. "The First Distribtued Relational DBMS..."

"The fact of the matter was Oracle didn't have anything," said George Schussel, the trade show promoter who had followed Oracle from the beginning. "But that was the way they worked. Everything was marketing, everything was image. You simply announced the product and then figured out later how to deal with it from a technological point of view."

Another time, Wilson writes, Oracle took out an ad implying, outlandishly, it had ported a competing database to the PC from mainframes — "IBM SQL/DS AND DB2 DBMS NOW ON PC," read the ad headline. Ellison "exploded" when an engineer challenged the ad, Oracle vet Kirk Bradley told Wilson:

"He said, 'All companies do this. It's standard stuff. You don't know anything about business.'"

It's somehow comforting to know that, while hot companies like Twitter, Google and Netscape may come and go, some longtime CEOs basically haven't changed for decades. Larry Ellison will always be a shameless truth-bender. Just like some of his closest friends.

UPDATE: One commenter supposes, quite plausibly, "They're going to announce the results at OpenWorld on Oct 14 and we're all supposed to tune in then to find out what XX equals." So maybe Oracle is doing the same fill-in-the-blanks thing it's always done, just in a very open and shameless way. Transparency. People do change!

UPDATE 2: Oracle has been fined over this ad, since Oracle did not possess any TPC benchmarks to back up the ads claim. Oracle was, again, hoping the facts would fit the claim, when said facts came into existence, which at the time of this ad they had not.

Earlier this summer, Siebel was at a Tanzian watering hole with his guides when an elephant broke from an otherwise quiet pack about 200 yards away, the former software executive told the San Jose Mercury News. He charged Siebel's party; a guide's attempt to hit the elephant with a gun missed.

Siebel said he was trampled and gored in the leg, until he just "curled into as tight a ball as I could." The guide suffered broken ribs and other injuries.

Siebel spent 18 days in four hospitals on two continents and is now using a wheelchair. He follows in the rich-guy-accident of the man who acquired his company, Larry Ellison, who is also Siebel's former boss. Ellison swore off yacht racing after a harrowing 1998 storm off the Australian coast bruised him and the crew of his Sayonara. The storm killed six sailors on other boats.

Of course, there are plenty of not-so-rich people in Africa who are hurt by elephants, and plenty of not-so-rich Pacific fishermen who are hurt by storms. But in America, only a select few are willing to leave perfectly comfortable homes and perfectly safe occupations to actively seek out that sort of danger. And they are backstopped by having the only form of health insurance that is really truly reliable in this country: Being a billionaire.

(Elephant pic via jsrcyclist's Flickr.)

Thanks in part to Larry Ellison's hard work and rapacious libido, databases are to be found everywhere. They lie at the bottom of most web applications and in nearly every bit of business software. We're all using databases all the time.

But that's about to change. Chips with two and four processor cores are common and Intel hints that we'll eventually see hundreds of cores per chip, which brings us right back into the 1970s and '80s and the world of parallel computing. That's where databases start to screw up. More than just slow reads and writes, relational databases also create false dependencies between pieces of data. If one chunk of data (A) is dependent on another chunk of data (B), then no work can be done on A until all work on B is complete.

While the database guys are busy figuring out how to add more and more concurrency internally, in reality when you take a few steps back and think of a large set of commodity boxes all executing a single data munching app, then no matter how sophisticated we get, the relational database will still effectively be a single thread to that app.

To scale the Google search service, Google first had to free itself of the false dependencies. So they created MapReduce — a set of operations and a way to store the data for those operations while preserving the natural independence that is inherent in each problem, building the whole mess atop the Google File System.

Google led the way but many other companies have followed suit, opening doors to a wide range of new ways of thinking about large-scale data manipulation. Suddenly there are different ways to store the data, new ways to write applications, and new places (thousands of cheap boxes) to run such applications.

For the most part, Oracle was playing nice this year. No acquisitions announced at the last minute. No wild claims about bullshit products. It was a much more subdued conference for the company.

Not quite so for Sun Microsystems, a shrinking violet at this year's show. Sun's made quite a business out of selling Unix and Oracle systems together. While Sun's head of PR was in attendance, and no doubt countless underlings as well, there wasn't much there to tie the two companies together. Rather a shame for anyone who's been betting that Oracle would buy out Sun as a way of backing into the hardware market.

Not that that would ever have happened anyway. Really, the reason Sun's not here is that it acquired its own database, MySQL earlier this year. Why play with the big boys when you can own something that's really not ownable?

It should be noted that Larry Ellison is far too in love with his sail boat.

(Photo via Oracle Apps Blog)

And isn't there something that's just completely unagreeable about giving Oracle employees space in the press area? Even if they are paid-for bloggers.

HP's woes don't tie to anything more than personal illness. As a bonus blind item, which HP'er showed up late, didn't have a badge, fainted, then vomited all over the registration desk?

Anyway, all the drunken out of town soccer moms, PeopleSoft devs and DBAs are on Treasure Island tonight watching UB40 earworm its way into their subconsiousness. Normally, the ConFonz would be all over this shwanky free food and booze event. Too bad the Fonz can't stand to be within 5 miles of UB40. Auditorily-mandated restraining orders are a bitch.

Ellison goes through this like a Ron Popeil pitch but with less enthusiasm and a stiffer delivery. The audience responds with silence when Ellison issues his applause lines, and can someone get the man a remote control so he doesn't have to terrorize a minion with requests to change the slides? We know the topic doesn't lend itself to the crazed consumer fervor of something like the iPhone, but seriously, I can see attendees muttering "More like Bore-acle OpenWorld" under their breath as they step into the Market Street Cinema.

"Not a lot new really," tweeted a conference-goer. "Beehive demo isn't that great — hard to follow the screens" an Oracle employee helpfully typed.

Oracle's bigger-than-Larry-Ellison's-yacht PR machine wants me to blog that "customers and partners are buzzing about Beehive." It's a phony press-release story, for which they've helpfully provided a Google News-friendly headline and a geekbait mention of the European Space Agency. In reality, the online silence about Beehive has been conspicuous. I'm serious: Larry, get your buddy Steve Jobs to help with your next launch. (Photo by AP/Ben Margot)

Rosenblum has been on vacation for a month after Greene's firing, possibly to lessen the bad publicity ahead of VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas which starts next Monday — while Microsoft has been busy introducing its own virtualization technologies in a barnstorming campaign this week. My advice to Greene and Rosenblum? Sell those pre-IPO options as soon as you can, because the stock is bound to dip below the initial price sooner rather than later.

Illston, who won fans among copyright wonks for ruling in favor of fair-use DRM hacks, is pretty clear that she doesn't see the lost evidence as an accident: "It is appropriate to infer," she wrote, "that the emails and software materials would demonstrate Ellison's knowledge of, among other things, problems with Suite 11i, the effects of the economy on Oracle's business and problems with defendants' forecasting model." Oracle spokespeople are keeping a tight lip on the situation.