Microsoft-Oracle deal: What you need to know

Microsoft and Oracle announced a lot of piece parts with their June 24 partnership around Azure and Oracle databases and middleware.

Here's your Cliff Notes version: Oracle apps are now certified to run on Windows Server, Hyper-V, and Windows Azure. Up until today, they were only certified to run on Windows Server. Oracle Linux also gets added to the list of Linux varianst supported in Azure's VMs, too.

Microsoft already has been certifying its own applications on Windows Azure, including its SQL Server database. (Here's a list of which versions of various database, security and other enterprise products are certified as running on Azure's persistent virtual machines.) Now Oracle's own databases and its WebLogic middleware are added to that list. Microsoft already has supported Java development on Windows Azure. Today, Oracle and Microsoft said they'd take Java support a step further, with Oracle certifying Java to run on Hyper-V and Windows Azure.