In his most straightforward comment to date on the power that comes from optimizing hardware and software from the ground up, Ballmer sounds a lot like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who launched the the engineered-system concept about four years ago with the first version of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine.

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With the newest addition to its engineered-systems family, the Exadata X3 Database Machine, Oracle is giving customers more justification to realize they need to move beyond the traditional and non-optimized systems of the past.

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If you haven't heard by now, the malware exploits a flaw in the Java Virtual Machine, which Oracle pushed a fix for back in February, but Apple didn't patch until a botnet consisting of as many as 650, 000 Macs was identified on March 4th.

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However, if the new Oracle 8i database would run on a non-NT machine that allowed users to connect to the database using the proprietary interface they are used to, it would be very interesting to MDS, he said.

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In commissioning its study about how businesses can take full advantage of this dynamic new world, Oracle sought to shed some light on the requirements for turning machine-to-machine raw data into actionable intelligence, along with an eye toward how those demands might shift over time.

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For example, most organizations have their data in structured relational databases like Oracle, but much of the data generated today is unstructured, high-volume web data or machine data.

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