There is a new sheriff in town according to responses gathered from a survey conducted by the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG).

Of the 812 respondents surveyed in January, 49% of them were currently running Solaris.  However, 44% of those respondents indicated they would be running their databases on Linux next year this time.

Ari Kaplan, IOUG president, said this is a "huge" showing for open source, underscoring both its large-scale enterprise adoption and businesses' growing urge to unyoke themselves from Unix's high costs.

"Now the market has accepted Linux. [It] has accepted [that] you can run hugely scalable, Oracle RAC [Real Application Clusters], multinode, thousands-of-concurrent-user Oracle instances, on Linux," said Kaplan in Chicago. "[Combine that with] the overall lower cost of ownership, and you've got the best of both worlds, and we're seeing the results."