Despite the apparent cost benefits of DB2 over Oracle (especially with Oracle's price rises last year) a  quick straw poll  asked;  What are the inhibitors to migrating from Oracle to DB2? The answers were pretty consistent.

1. Cost and time of application migration and

2. Cost of training staff on a new database/skills in the DB2 market

These costs "were" such that business cases to convert quickly fell down. However in the month that saw Oracle buy Sun from under IBM's nose, the latest announcement of DB2 Cobra suggests a momentous change to this perception. DB2 now runs native PL/SQL.  No translation, no porting, Native. I have heard stories of complicated applications migrating in less than 1 week and all the DBA skills remained valid. I expect this to become a focus area of budget discussions in the coming year.

To update my comments on Solaris on Power in a now out of date IBM to buy Sun post. Given that neither the Oracle President or CEO mentioned hardware or Sparc and it almost seemed like an afterthought when it did appear in the press release, I still don't believe that there is mileage in the Sparc chip due to its limited extra-data centre appeal. I still see Solaris LPARs running on Power, but maybe not as quickly as first anticipated.  

Finally 2 thoughts to leave you with .

How will all the MS SQL server customers with STK hosted services now be feeling ?

and

Given that Oracle's law suit against SAP looks no closer to resolution what will the SAP on Solaris landscape look like in a years time?