The next version of Oracle's database will be released in either December or January, CEO Larry Ellison said during an onstage interview at the AllThingsD conference in London.

During the upcoming retrial of Oracle's corporate-theft lawsuit against SAP, the companies plan to call a star-studded array of tech executives as witnesses including CEO Larry Ellison, former Oracle co-president and current Infor CEO Charles Phillips and SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott, according to court documents filed Thursday.

Google built Android using parts of Java that didn't require a license and it had the full support of Sun Microsystems in doing so, a lawyer for Google said in court Tuesday.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison claims his company will continue to bet on selling high-end custom hardware for its software products, even amidst a growing trend toward roomfuls of cheap, generic servers.

Oracle on Tuesday said third-quarter net income rose 18 percent to US$2.5 billion, while revenues grew 3 percent to $9 billion. However, hardware systems revenues sagged 16 percent to $869 million.

Oracle made a splash on Tuesday when it announced the general availability of its Big Data Appliance, but the company also quietly released pricing information for Exalytics, another new member in its family of specialized hardware-software appliances and a likely competitor to SAP's HANA product, suggesting that a general-availability announcement for that product is imminent.

Well, we erred in our 2011 predictions in not repeating a 2010 forecast that Carol Bartz would be ousted as Yahoo CEO -- it was bound to happen, we just called that one too early. Then again, we also predicted last year that Oracle would buy Salesforce.com and have decided not to repeat ourselves this year, so we'll see if we were just ahead on that one, too. Meanwhile, these are our predictions for the next 12 months:

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on Wednesday unveiled a public cloud service that will run its Fusion Applications and others, and while doing so delivered a withering broadside against competitors, with his harshest words for Salesforce.com.