Oracle announced partnerships last week with competitors Microsoft, Netsuite and, most surprising, Salesforce.com. These announcements serve an identical purpose because the Argentine junta’s invasion of the Falklands — they seem to be a riveting diversion from what is going on wrong at home.

Oracle is missing its numbers, and that i do not know when Oracle last missed three out of 7 quarters. One drain on Oracle is its decline inside the CRM market. Earlier this month, Gartner declared Salesforce.com, approaching a $4 billion run rate by the tip of 2013, the market leader for the primary time. Among other things, the hot Oracle/Salesforce partnership signals that the CRM battle is over and Oracle has lost it. The subsequent threat is the growing presence of Workday, which has conquered human resources and is looking for to become the Salesforce of online financial applications. And behind Workday is Intacct, ServiceNow, SugarCRM and 100 online software startups, all marching on Fortress Oracle.

Oracle desires to do something, anything, to slow the expansion of Workday, which threatens to eat into two more of its revenue streams. Heretofore, Workday’s biggest ally was Salesforce, which has wear stage the gigantic figure of Marc Benioff, brandishing his “No Software” sign while defending the effectiveness of online applications and providing thought leadership about how packaged software is being disrupted. Salesforce itself uses Workday financials and human capital management, or rather it did, until the Oracle partnership was announced June 25. Salesforce will start using Oracle products instead. Count one punch landed on Workday; don’t be concerned, the effect will quickly wear off.

In a press and analyst teleconference Thursday, Ellison and Benioff combined to provide an explanation for the recent partnership. Benioff said the Salesforce cloud infrastructure was in-built 1999 at the Oracle database and with a purpose to continue be so for next 12 years. Combined with Benioff’s exultant tweet that Salesforce is buying 50 Exadata machines (“I’m super excited our new 12 year @oracle partnership includes 50 @Exadata to make our DB for our 1B customer transactions run faster!”), this pact looks increasingly more like an incredibly big Salesforce purchase order, with a number of “partnership” flourishes thrown in.

There were rumors that Salesforce was experimenting with open source PostgreSQL, the database system that could match Oracle front-end features, run Oracle applications and soak up wholesale transfers of Oracle data. Unlike MySQL, PostgreSQL is fully ANSI SQL compliant and is an open source competitor to a commercial relational system. It’ll has been an intolerable blow, at the eve of the Oracle 12C launch, if Salesforce converted to PostgreSQL.

If Salesforce wasn’t testing PostgreSQL, it may were. Three years ago, Oracle gave Salesforce an incentive to take action when Ellison went from database supplier to an attacker of Salesforce’s ability to keep up its customers’ data integrity.

At Oracle OpenWorld in 2010, Ellison warned that Salesforce’s multi-tenant approach “co-mingled” its customers’ data in a single application system. It appeared like Salesforce mixed its customers’ data in a shared memory pool; good luck on getting your transactions out. This, after all, will not be how multi-tenant applications work. But with customers worried about data privacy, Ellison fastened onto the shared resources of multi-tenancy because the cloud’s Achilles heel. Anything could happen with this kind of “weak security model,” he said. In his address here year, he carried the analogy a step further and said a Salesforce multi-tenant application can be co-mingling your data with that of your competitors at the same server, and you would be lucky to flee them seeing it.

Salesforce have been a primary Oracle customer for 11-12 years on the time these statements were made. At an all-Oracle event, there has been little chance of rebuttal. Instead, Ellison used the CEO’s keynote to attack the information integrity of 1 of Oracle’s largest customers. As Salesforce’s sole database supplier, he was able to find out about its data architecture. Ellison didn’t know — or chose to disregard — how multi-tenant applications actually work. They build virtual machine boundaries to wall off each customer’s data. The walls cannot be breached by application logic, and there is no case history of failure. Perhaps wisely, there has been no outcry from Salesforce over these false charges. Nevertheless, it was still unusual to peer a massive technology vendor attack a tremendous customer’s operations.

Under other circumstances, Benioff (or someone) need to have stood up for Salesforce CTO Parker Harris and his team. That they had built the primary multi-tenant, software-as-a-service product successfully used on a mass scale. Was it wise to shrug off an attack from this type of prominent industry leader? Salesforce was probably spared the necessity to respond by Ellison’s previous statements that the cloud was “complete gibberish” and an approach for “nitwits.” That’s, he had already established his reputation as a subjective and reckless critic.

Still, Benioff’s previous relationship with Ellison, when Benioff was a tender executive at Oracle, came into play besides. In his 2009 book Behind the Cloud, Benioff relayed how Ellison have been his mentor and the way he needed to be talked into resigning from Oracle — he did not want to go away — to guide Salesforce full time. He named Ellison to the Salesforce board, then was furious and desired to fire him when Ellison financed online applications supplier Netsuite. That, too, was an unusual move to have a board member launch a possible competitor.

For Benioff, the more youthful of both, there seems to be an unrequited, cherished big brother aspect to his relationship with Ellison. For Ellison, there’s the always difficult choice, where a tender competitor is anxious, between big brother and huge Brother.