In the past Oracle has been the type of company where they provide a one stop shop for their customers: software for every department/industry, full suite packages, consulting. While the rest of the companies piece together software from different providers.

So its very likely that they would use their own hardware now that its an option.

When I was interviewing with the DB2 team for IBM, they mentioned that the high-end IBM database servers implement special instructions (CPU-level) for accelerating certain DB operations. I don't know any more details than that, but I'd guess that's where Oracle is going to go with SPARC.

I'm not aware of any DB2-specific instructions, but POWER6 and above implement a decimal floating point instruction set, allowing things like regulatoriliy-mandated financial computations to be hardware accelerated instead of computed in software. That's clearly a nod to the same market that is buying DB2.

That might be as simple as having super-low level operations that they hand write in assembly for each supported CPU, and all other layers staying the same.

Maybe. It could just mean that they are going to make Oracle software work better with the SPARC/Solaris stuff. As to be able to sell the software for other platforms as well as give you a reason to buy SPARC Boxes from them in the future.

SUN has variety of technologies especially in Storage(via StorageTek acquisition). Oracle can integrate backup and recovery strategy with StorageTek tapes, ZFS, for example. Also, db failover, High Availability can be achieved leveraging Solaris platform..

The StorageTek is a bit old school and horrid. The new Open Storage gear, on the other hand, is very interesting. Especially the web based analytics.