Stories about: Oracle

Oracle is escalating its rivalry with German business-software maker SAP and plans to pay $US1.9 billion ($A1.77 billion) for Taleo Corp, a company that helps businesses hire and manage their employees.

Oracle is buying cloud-based talent management and employee recruitment software vendor Taleo for roughly US$1.9 billion, the company announced Thursday. The move comes shortly after SAP's move to acquire SuccessFactors, a close competitor of Taleo, for US$3.4 billion in a deal that has yet to close.

Oracle is hoping to carve out a prominent place in the world of R, the open-source statistical modeling language with roots in academia but an increasingly high profile in enterprise IT shops. It announced a new Advanced Analytics product on Wednesday that ties R to its database and family of software-hardware appliances.

The NoSQL movement has spawned a slew of alternative data stores, all of which attempt to fill voids left by traditional relational database implementations. But while it's easy to fit the various relational databases (MySQL, Oracle, DB2, and so on) under a single categorical umbrella, the NoSQL world is much more diverse, and the NoSQL label is too general. NoSQL data stores such as MongoDB and Cassandra are so vastly different from each other that apples-to-apples comparisons are practically impossible. Thus, within the world of NoSQL, there are subcategories such as key-value stores, graph databases, and document-oriented stores.

Oracle's plan to drag its legal fight against rival SAP's defunct TomorrowNow subsidiary through a second trial is not surprising, analysts said Tuesday.

Although it is just three years old, Node.js is gaining traction as an application development platform, letting developers extend JavaScript beyond the browser and into servers. But questions remain about JavaScript's appropriateness on servers and developers' readiness to use it.

Oracle has chosen a new trial in its lawsuit against SAP for copyright infringement, rejecting the reduction of a jury verdict by about US$1 billion by a federal court in September last year.

Google has failed in its latest attempt to keep a potentially damaging email out of the lawsuit Oracle filed against it over alleged Java intellectual-property violations in the Android mobile OS.

Serious technical problems that have delayed the rollout of an upgrade to SAP's community portal are persisting, to the point where the company is no longer specifying a launch date.

To the world at large, computers are scary machines that are impossible to understand, and programmers are the mysterious geniuses who know how to manipulate them even if they are never able to fix yours for whatever reason.