Rating: 
Summary: Merry X'mas Larry
Review: I particularly enjoyed the pictures in this book -- especially the one when Larry was little holding his good brother. He continues to hold various things and people that are dear to his heart. I also like the fact that Larry starts to think about philanthropy, not just as competition to Bill Gates, but as something he wishes to take active control of. It is about time. Melanie Craft is beautiful, although I prefer her sleepy-eyed look in the past over her eyes-wide-open look nowadays. It is a gift to be able to stay by Larry's side for so long.
Rating: 
Summary: Long But Interesting
Review: I picked up this box at the airport and I work for Oracle. So read this review for what it is worth. A must read for folks in the software industry. Larry has
driven a lot of thinking in this Industry no doubt due
to his almost messianic approach to the war on complexity
and his vision in the last 20 years. You will see a lot of repetition in the book but most of
them are worth repeating. People who like to read what Larry thinks about BillG
are in for a treat. And Larry offers some startling
insights into Bill's psyche. The unique thing about this book is Larry's commentary
on the events at Oracle and his perspective occasionally
agreeing and disagreeing with the author who is sometimes
critical. So this not exactly your Jack Welch kind of book. A good biography of Oracle And Ellison, this book offers
some contrarian insights on how to run a business and how
to take a stand in an industry against conventional wisdom.
The main crux is that when unconventional wisdom is correct
and you can recognize and leverage it, you can gain
significant competitive advantage (SCAM, Sustainable Competitive
Advantage Model, OK I made it up..;) ). This is kind of
necessary in a lot of industries where a lot of me too
thinking and action happens. If at all, you can take
anything away from this book, this would be it. I would definitely recommend reading it, though a lot
of folks may find it difficult to follow the players
and participants in the game. Apart from some digressions
and repetitiveness, this book is something you can keep
handy.
Rating: 
Summary: Some interesting history
Review: I was intersted in the history of relational. There is one lamentably brief chapter: System R, Sybase, Ingres, two-phased commit, stored procedures, etc. Apparently 4 was the first version written in C.
By the way, what happened to Power Objects (Oracle's answer to Visual Basic)? A victim of Ellison's internet epiphany, I assume?
Most is management history: Ray Lane, Geoff Squire etc. Good if you're interested. You'll probably want to skip the girlfriends and sailboats.
Rating:
Summary: He's not a buffoon...
Review: I was really impressed with the quality of this book -- both the writing and the research. All I ever heard about Larry was the sensational Playboy stuff... But after finishing this book, I realized this guy's got a lot of smarts. He's bet the farm a time or two. When it needed to be bet. But Oracle's come out better because of it. And of course, I never heard his side of the story with regards to Ray Lane. Larry's decision to take direct control of the sales force will prove to be another solid decision. Too often, salespeople forget the basics of business -- we're here to make MONEY. Larry's got that one down cold. In a well-run business, margins go up. Not down. Many salespeople, including Ray Lane, get so creative. And sloppy. Next thing you know you're losing your shirt. (As a technical lead, I've had my share of run-ins with the used-car guys...) Thanks for a great read. Fantastic book. Worth every minute.
Rating:
Summary: Why I Read This At Starbucks
Review: I've been drinking a lot of coffee at Starbucks while reading 'Softwar.' It's such a great read, I can't put the book down (and don't want to go to sleep). I have read a few books and articles about Larry Ellison and Oracle and this book is the most insightful and interesting piece of work. Larry's footnotes, which counter, clarify or expand on the authors passages are a unique and worthwhile addition - adding credibility to this title. 'Softwar' comprehensively covers both the business of Oracle and offers a surprisingly intimate view of Larry's life and thinking. At the same time, Matthew Symonds presents a balanced portrait of the man who admits in his footnotes to making some mistakes, but who also demonstrates a keen intellect, foresight and a sense of humor.'Softwar' is an extraordinary book about an extraordinary man and his enterprise - a must read for those who want to be inspired and have a better understanding of business, technology and human nature.
Rating:
Summary: The Good, the Bad, the Fantastic...
Review: If you're interested in technology and the future of the human jouney, this book is loaded with data points. The closeness and trust of Matthew Symonds is clearly evident in Larry relaxing into giving us all a glimspe of what life is like on the front end of the bell curve. Intimate was a good word choice. Read for yourself what liIfe at full throttle is like. Matthew's grounded observations and experience serve us all. This book is one that you think about again and again: the patterns, the success, the disappointment and the outrageous good times. Thriiving is its own art form in Larry's life. CLICK the box and bring this book into your life......then read it, sit with it, and read it again.
Rating:
Summary: Master of the poison, master of the cure
Review: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was an open secret that if you were what was called then "one of the freaks" and you had, perhaps, taken a few physics or math classes involving computer usage, you could get work for any number of banks, insurance agencies and other mainframe users. The boss was grateful for your work, and, you could pretty much control the conditions. It appears that Larry Ellison was one of these early programmers, whose maturation is documented in this book. But as with any maturation, it includes the acquisition of blind spots. For while I in general support Larry's goal of eliminating "islands" within organizations of isolated and contradictory data and code, I am more pessimistic than he as to whether it can be accomplished. The well-known and by now well-worn theme of Derrida, that of the undecidable gap between writing and speech, means that the ultimate grand vision, of "one" data base, may never be attained. Larry is right about the Internet: it is the Last Big Thing. This can be proven apriori. For given two or more networks, and given zero cost and high benefit in their connection, whether through a narrow gateway or broadband, then we can say that the two networks "want" to become one network and instantaneously, at warp speed, shall do so. In the late 1980s, several networks operated in academia, government and privately did just this because there is, absent security considerations, a seemingly irresistable craving on the part of networks to join other networks and indeed to become the Internet. This is the synthetic apriori argument, for both the existence and unity of the Internet as a given. However, and as soon as it is constructed, the reverse, analytic argument against the Internet's usability by the corporation may be constructed, which will return us to Mr. Ellison: for I fail to see how the possibility, of constructing a single logical path to a single data base for the organization, means it can be actualized. I fail to see this because this has long been an unmet promise of ultimate managerial control within organizations (the "executive dashboard" being one such foolish idea), a control which manages to dismiss the fact that an organization consists of the labor of intelligent beings all the way down...to the person who picks up the trash. I fail to see this because as a form inescapably of writing, data systems imply their own multiplicity. The "scribe" in all societies develops his own agenda and there is no check on him available to power as such, because power as such relies on the self-interested "scribe" to transmit its will and an almost (but not quite) mathematical problem results in the self-reflexivity. The crisis is in Mr. Ellison's genuine concern with the way in which data and human intelligence systems failed to predict September 11, a concern which I happen to share. Indeed, I believe that September 11 starkly fulfilled a dismal prophecy of the late hero computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra. Unlike many highly-placed figures in the computer science establishment, hero computer scientist Dijkstra was concerned, all the way down, about the quality and even the basic correctness of the data systems being designed over his lifetime, and he said at one point that he feared that organizations would collapse under the cumulative overcomplexity of their unmastered data systems. The stark images of a collapsing center for symbol processing on September 11 may be the fulfillment of this prophecy. One of the FBI field agents assigned to investigation of terrorism prior to September 11, Colleen Rowley, testified before Congress that she did not even have the capability to enter Boolean format queries in the FBI data base, for example of the form "terrorist association and attends flight school". Of course, Oracle data bases of the sort Larry and his company provide, provide this capability in mass quantities. At the same time, their very complexity (which may be unavoidable) generates scribal bureaucracies which are in both Plato's and Derrida's sense pharmakon, poison and cure, and, in general, the hair of the dog. It is clear that these sorts of scribal bureaucracies at the FBI felt that some sort of extension or hack to provide rapidly the needed capability at the FBI was a "hard" problem, because these scribal bureaucracies reproduce themselves by insisting that such problems are "hard", and that the CEO is too busy to involve himself with writing...in a stark, if completely unconscious, replication of Plato's account of writing. The result today is that a great deal of social inequality, created in part by fortune-seeking by the scribal class, means that it's impossible to create a unified written "intelligence" for policy making, and the result is an out of control foreign policy which as I write is creating preconditions for further terrorism. Symonds breathlessly notes that Larry and his wife are both big fans of Donald Rumsfeld. Bush, and Bush's war, have deep roots in the self-interest of the new, successful American elite. This elite marched and protested its parent's war in Vietnam, and, Ellison was a supporter of Robert Kennedy's fatal bid for the 1968 presidential nomination. Rumsfeld, for that matter, was an anti-war Republican under Nixon. However, it appears that Larry may be blind to realities in much the same way that middle-aged managers were blind to the downside of enormous mainframe computing in the early 1970s. He views the future as one of large corporations competing, especially in his own industry, for a diminishing pie. However, large corporations are composed of intelligent agents, who act from a unique combination of self-interest and complete irrationality, and, just as Ellison's own generation constructed its own reality in the form of microcomputer and micro culture, the next generation may prove him wrong. Or, Dijsktra's prophecy may come true, in which case we'll be busy gathering firewood and not worrying about SQL.
Rating:
Summary: Oracle building the first RDBMS -- not quite
Review: Larry Ellison's claim that he/Oracle built the first RDBMS is wrong. The first commercially available RDBMS was built by the Multics Development Project (Honeywell, Phoenix, Az) in 1976."The Multics Relational Data Store (MRDS) was first released in June 1976. This is believed to be the first relational database management system offered by a major computer vendor, namely Honeywell Information Systems, Incorporated. The designers were familiar with, and influenced by, the work of Codd, the Ingres project at U.C. Berkeley, and the System R project at IBM San Jose.
MRDS provided a command-level interface for defining databases and views (called data submodels), and a call-level interface for queries and data manipulation. A separate Logical Inquiry and Update System (LINUS) provided an online query and update interface. The MRDS query language was similar to SEQUEL (as SQL was first called), with -range, -select, and -where clauses corresponding approximately to the FROM, SELECT, and WHERE clauses of SQL. Explicit set operations (intersection, union, and difference) were provided; there was no direct sorting support. A query was passed as a character string to the MRDS at runtime; there was no precompilation mechanism. Concurrent access to a database by multiple processes was supported; each process was required to explicitly declare the type of access (retrieval or update) and, for update, the scope (set of relations) of the update. The database could be quiesced and backed up in its entirety. A transaction mechanism for atomically committing multiple updates was added in a later release. As its name implies, MRDS ran on the Multics operating system, and its implementation took advantage of Multics mechanisms for security and virtual memory-based storage. MRDS was written in PL/I. When MRDS was released in June 1976, it was actually marketed as one of two components of a package called the Multics Data Base Manager (MDBM). The other component was the Multics Integrated Data Store (MIDS), which was a CODASYL database implemented as a layer on top of MRDS."
Rating:
Summary: Larry gets the last word
Review: My first fear when I bought 'Softwar' was that Matthew Symonds would be overwhelmed by the aura of Larry Ellison, resulting in a glowing whitewash of the man and his empire. Biographers' tendency to succumb to Stockholm Syndrome is all too typical, particularly when the author is granted generous access to a charismatic subject and those who work for him. (Read 'The New New Thing' by Michael Lewis for a case study of this unfortunate phenomenon.) But Symonds manages to be reasonably balanced in this informative and entertaining portrait of Ellison and Oracle Corp. The most interesting part of the book, to me, was the footnotes penned by Larry himself, a quid pro quo for the two years of access to Ellison's life that Symonds received. Ellison is humorous, humble and scathingly disparaging of his enemies (heads up Gates and Siebel!) in hundreds of footnotes scattered throughout the book. Sure, it's a bit frustrating that Larry always has the last word on controversial issues. And his attempts to spin the story may turn your stomach at times. But 'Softwar' would be a much drier read without Ellison's contributions. Besides, you're always free to make up your own mind when Larry's version of reality comes across as a little too convenient. At the end of the day, 'Softwar' may be the best Ellison bio out there, and a great read for folks who are interested in a classic American success story.
Rating:
Summary: Larry gets the last word
Review: My first fear when I bought 'Softwar' was that Matthew Symonds would be overwhelmed by the aura of Larry Ellison, resulting in a glowing whitewash of the man and his empire. Biographers' tendency to succumb to Stockholm Syndrome is all too typical, particularly when the author is granted generous access to a charismatic subject and those who work for him. (Read 'The New New Thing' by Michael Lewis for a case study of this unfortunate phenomenon.) But Symonds manages to be reasonably balanced in this informative and entertaining portrait of Ellison and Oracle Corp. The most interesting part of the book, to me, was the footnotes penned by Larry himself, a quid pro quo for the two years of access to Ellison's life that Symonds received. Ellison is humorous, humble and scathingly disparaging of his enemies (heads up Gates and Siebel!) in hundreds of footnotes scattered throughout the book. Sure, it's a bit frustrating that Larry always has the last word on controversial issues. And his attempts to spin the story may turn your stomach at times. But 'Softwar' would be a much drier read without Ellison's contributions. Besides, you're always free to make up your own mind when Larry's version of reality comes across as a little too convenient. At the end of the day, 'Softwar' may be the best Ellison bio out there, and a great read for folks who are interested in a classic American success story.
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