Re: AIX for databases...
Larry Ellison said it in his keynote speech at OpenWorld this year.
"We're faster for Java, Mister Blue," Ellison said at Oracle World, touting Sparc chips. "You're faster for integer arithmetic. If you think companies do a lot of arithmetic, cool. We think they access a lot of data and run a lot of Java." "We're better than IBM in Java, and we're going to beat them in integer arithmetic, and then there will be nothing left,"
Note that "faster for Java" is based on Oracle's totally fraudulent T4 benchmarks that used many more cores, many times more disk, many times more memory, etc than the Power benchmark they were comparing it to. Oracle did everything possible to make that benchmark about anything besides processors. Oracle has since been fined by the national advertising council and forced to take their Sparc ads down because they were lies.
Sparc is toast. Oracle is well aware that it is, to borrow a phrase, "dead, dead, dead" and "a pig with lipstick... at best." Oracle is moving on to x86.