Oracle is supposed today to announce “the world’s first” OLTP Database Machine based on what it calls FlashFire technology from Sun.

Reportedly FlashFire is solid-state disk (SSD) technology.

It’s Oracle’s way of thumbing its nose at the European Commission, whose investigation of the MySQL side of the proposed Oracle-Sun merger is holding up Oracle’s acquisition schedule and giving Sun rivals a bigger opportunity to run off more of Sun’s business.

There’s a revelatory webcast set for this afternoon starring Oracle’s frustrated CEO Larry Ellison and Sun’s hardware chief John Fowler according to an invitation sent to the press on Sunday.

The timing suggests that Oracle moved up the announcement.

Ellison said he wanted Sun’s hardware for Oracle appliances when Oracle said it would buy Sun back in April.

Oracle’s only experiment with hardware to date is its year-old Exadata product that uses preconfigured HP servers for high-performance data warehousing. It’s been speculated that Sun equipment could be used to replace HP’s.

The Sun storage is apparently going to carry the Exadata brand