Ellison touts large databases

Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison made a pitch for large databases this week at the E-Gov conference in Washington, D C.

Ellison told an audience of government IT personnel that "fragmentation" is the biggest information management problem facing them. "We are in the business of selling databases, and you are buying too many of them," Ellison said. The consequences of database proliferation within enterprises include cost overruns and organizational conflict, he noted.

Ellison's remedy: big, centralized databases. "You should have fewer, larger databases," Ellison said.

When asked about the practice of linking multiple databases to appear as one large database, Ellison called the approach a "fantasy." He said semantic differences among databases--differing ways of formatting records--made database integration an "insolvable problem".

Ellison added: "Middleware will never solve this problem. It's a nitwit idea, but it's conventional wisdom".