Microsoft saw the Raw Iron announcement as an attempt by Oracle to offer another competitive database to Microsoft's SQL Server.

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Every time an SAP or Oracle application was sold, every time a server was sold by Dell or Hewlett Packard, every time a major consulting product was sold by IBM, Accenture, or Capgemini, Whitehurst wants Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its other products in the mix.

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Oracle first announced support for big data with its new Big Data Appliance and Oracle NoSQL database at the Open World conference, and was followed by Microsoft which announced Hadoop support for SQL Server 2012.

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