Oracle ressurects mobile database plan

In hopes of wooing those interested in the mobile database wares of market leader Sybase, Oracle is reviving its mobile database strategy. According to Jacob Christfort, vice president of product development for voice and wireless at Oracle, Oracle is taking a deliberately different tack than Sybase. Rather than build tools to synchronize data on mobile devices with several different back-end databases as Sybase does, Oracle is seeking to optimize its mobile database for Oracle servers. But a license for Oracle Database Lite 10g costs $100 per named user and that pricing strategy could end up being the mobile strategy's ball and chain as long as it has to compete with Microsoft. Microsoft is also gunning to take away Sybase's marketshare and to do so, it gives away its mobile database which runs on desktops, notebooks, and Windows CE/PocketPC-based handhelds. Those in the market for a mobile database strategy shouldn't rule out IBM either. IBM has a version of DB/2 that runs on just about everything and appropro of that, calls it DB2 Everyplace. So far, the open source community has been relatively silent in terms of delivering an enterprise-capable mobile database that works with big iron servers.