Oracle chairman and chief executive officer Larry Ellison announced on Monday that Dell would be the second vendor to ship a database appliance based on Oracle 8i. Ellison hinted Compaq might be next.

Last Friday, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle jointly announced that HP would be the first to ship an Oracle 8i database appliance, an Intel based server pre-installed with Oracle 8i running on top of Sun?s Solaris microkernel.

Speaking at the Nationsbanc Montgomery Technology Week in San Francisco this week, Oracle chairman and chief executive officer Larry Ellison said his company had just signed Dell to be the second database appliance vendor. He did not reveal details of Dell?s product plans.

?I think we will get Compaq signed up pretty soon as well,? said Ellison.

Ellison on Monday also unveiled the first HP built database appliance. He said Oracle 8i running on a database appliance would outperform the same Oracle database running on top of Windows NT. In a demonstration, a the database ran about three times as fast on the database appliance. The appliance was managed from a browser interface.

While the appliances ship with a limited version of Sun?s Solaris, customers will not pay for the operating system, said Ellison. They will pay for the server hardware and the Oracle database user licenses only, bringing prices below those charged by Microsoft for the combination of NT Server and SQL Server, Ellison claimed.

Ellison also said that preconfigured database appliances would be more reliable than traditional database servers, because the configurations can be tested more extensively.

Oracle 8i was expected to ship late last year, but has slipped. Ellison said the code is now frozen and the database is set to go on sale on 1 March.