But IBM offers a very different view of its recent competition with Oracle/Sun, saying that Ellison is more concerned with slinging mud than with describing what's really going on in the business-technology world, and that Oracle is hemorrhaging server revenue and server market share.

Evans colleague Doug Henschen  notes that the vendors leading the big-data era are Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum and a few other independents and upstarts. And he offers seven questions for shoppers to ask Oracle.

• Can you provide the names of customers who can be readily interviewed and quoted about their successful Exadata deployments?

• Teradata and Netezza in particular have pretty rich plans and partnerships -- at least three years in the making -- around in-database analytics. Is Oracle pursuing anything along these lines?

• Vendors including Teradata, Greenplum and Aster Data are out there pioneering techniques and technologies such as cloud-based sandbox environments and MapReduce. Is that too nichey and exotic to show up on Oracle's roadmap?
• If the name "Exadata" really fits, are there any namable/quotable customers managing hundreds of terabytes, let alone petabytes?
• On the business intelligence front, Oracle 11g seems like a pretty conservative release; as analysts and competitors have questioned, why no in-memory technology, text analytics capabilities or sign of a cloud strategy?

• Also in the BI realm, Oracle has Siebel-style analytics and analytic applications (offering trending off of historical data), but Oracle doesn't seem to offer anything in the (SAS- and IBM SPSS-led) realm of advanced predictive and statistical analytics. Does Oracle have offerings that go unrecognized or does it have plans to add advanced analytics capabilities?

• Oracle has a strong Master Data Management (MDM) portfolio, but the recent SilverCreek acquisition points to gaps in the data-quality area, widely identified as the number-one obstacle to successful BI deployments. What's coming from Oracle to address data quality and data governance?

Nice footnote too, in the form of a comment on the seven questions from the original Q1 2010 Oracle White Paper writer, Merv Adrian urging "reasonable filters to this kind of analysis."