It may be the world’s best-known database without a Microsoft brand, but Oracle is running far behind IMAGE/SQL in the 3000 community — stalling any Oracle8 work for the platform.

HP 3000 division (CSY) R&D manager Winston Prather told customers at the recent HP 3000 Strategic Customer Forums that Oracle is only in use at “less than a few hundred installed customers” running HP 3000s. Customers in the 3000 installed base prefer to use IMAGE/SQL, he added, so that’s where the division is turning its database resources.

That shift is also prompted by some Oracle moves, Prather added. He reported that Oracle said it sells plenty of its product to HP-UX customers, a group which is accustomed to the complexity and endless flexibility which defines any Oracle investment. 3000 customers who evaluate Oracle often wind up installing it on their HP 9000s, HP said, perhaps because of an Oracle bias for that platform.

Support of Oracle is an issue that some market observers tie to the continued health of the HP 3000 — primarily because Oracle is seen as a font of new programs. The division has committed engineering resources to maintaining Oracle on MPE/iX in the hope of getting applications for the system in return. But after more than four years of effort, the division is limiting its investment to support of Version 7 of the database instead of helping develop the more advanced Oracle8 for MPE/iX.

“The current plan is that there is no plan to port Oracle8,” Prather said at last fall’s Forums. “That is the real fundamental issue with Oracle: Oracle’s position is that, ‘We’ve worked really hard with you to bring it to the platform and done joint marketing programs, and it’s not working.’ Oracle is looking at it and going, ‘Why am I doing this?’ They haven’t come close to recouping their investment. Their current feeling right now is that there’s not enough business on the 3000.”

Customers using Oracle say the database runs faster on HP 3000s than on HP 9000s, something that HP might want to use in making a case for additional development resources. Prather noted that customer adoption has been slight in the face of a more cost-effective 3000 database: IMAGE/SQL.

“It’s very expensive to implement an Oracle solution relative to a TurboIMAGE solution or even an Allbase solution,” Prather said. “The bottom line is that 3000 customers like TurboIMAGE. They don’t want to leave TurboIMAGE. Our application providers don’t want to move to Oracle, because they like TurboIMAGE.”

Prather added that some resellers are building a business case for additional Oracle investment on the 3000. A few application providers rely on Oracle to serve as the database for their HP 3000 software. Multiview Corp., which sells a financial suite by the same name for MPE/iX and HP-UX, uses the Oracle database to drive its applications. John Knight of the company asked Hewlett-Packard at the last HP World Management Roundtable to reconsider its Oracle policy for the 3000.

“We were one of the first companies to use it as an Oracle server for our products,” Knight said at the HP World meeting. “We made it a server solution, and we’ve sold a lot of it.”

The lack of Oracle8 support appeared to Knight to be a stumbling block for the HP 3000’s growth. “If you don’t get major application movement to that platform, that platform doesn’t make sense for some of the vendors out here doing the work,” he said, “pushing the 3000 along with the Oracle product line.”

Few other applications, however, have surfaced as a result of Oracle’s availability on MPE/iX.

“I’m certainly open to a business case being made around the Oracle investment,” 3000 division general manager Harry Sterling said in reply to Knight at HP World. “If you and a collection of vendors are really serious about getting new business for the platform with Oracle on the 3000, I’d happily meet with you. I do not want to make a huge investment only to have Oracle sit the way it’s sat for the last two years — without any new business as a result of that investment.”

The 3000’s new customer base has been growing, but not due to Oracle applications or databases. “Where we are seeing our major business growth in [1997-98] has not been with Oracle solutions — either [Oracle] applications or their database solutions,” Sterling explained. “Those growth areas are the ones I’m going to pay the most attention to, and right now those solutions are built on IMAGE.”

HP said it has a commitment from Oracle to make sure Version 7 remains supported. Sterling said HP has the final say, but needs Oracle’s investment as well.

“We’ll continue to monitor the need for Oracle8,” he said. “We have the control of porting. We have the engineers to do the porting, so it is our decision to make,” Sterling said.

HP’s decision to support IA-64 architecture on future HP 3000s means many of CSY’s projects had to be re-evaluated, Sterling explained. “We’re looking at moving our compilers forward, and that was certainly not in our plans [in 1997],” he said. “We have a lot of new things we had to review, and Oracle is certainly one of those.”

HP recently noted that Version 7.3.4.1 is the most current Oracle supported for the HP 3000, running under MPE/iX 5.5 PowerPatch 6. A later version, 7.3.4.3, will be required to support MPE/iX 6.0. Oracle and HP don’t expect to have that 7.3.4.3 version certified for 6.0 before summer of 1999.