Some recent posts regarding Oracle (See Smart moves by MySQL AB and Larry Ellison still doesn’t understand open source) leads me to put in my 2 cents worth.

My background I’m sure like a lot of experienced MySQL people is in Oracle, and indeed in Ingres before that (starting in 1988). I have also worked for a number of years at Oracle Corporation. Ironically I started as their resident Ingres Specialist, in an international research project of DMS (Design & Migration Services) of re-engineering Ingres applications into an Oracle Designer Repository some 10 years ago in 1996. I of course moved into a number of other Oracle roles for clients following that. I still retain some …

AUSTRALIA PRESS: Telstra To Charge More For Fixed Lines

great - I get to pay more for a service I DON’T WANT! I just want internet, not a phone line (which I aparrently have to have to get ADSL).

Oracle bought 2 companies which develop 2 open source storage engines that MySQL uses. Those storage engines are both transactional.

There’s the possibility Oracle does the stupid (from a PR perspective) move of making those databases proprietary. But it’s OPEN SOURCE right now. Which means that it’ll branch.

Worst case scenario? The developing stops here, and InnoDB and BDB never get any more functional than they currently are.

The “bad” scenario? MySQL is a company. With hired staff. They pay the hired staff to get familiar with the source code for those engines and continue to develop them. Hence the branch.

The likely scenario? 1) Oracle tries to have a pluggable storage engine architecture like MySQL. Oracle Express or Lite or whatever would be free with those engines, pay with the original. 2) Oracle tries to go on the good partnership of “we support MySQL by developing their architecture, we’re …

Folks, I‘m going to be involved in (giving the first, available for questions on the second) webcasts on Java and MySQL related topics, so if you read this blog because you‘re interested in those topics, you should check them out (they‘re free).

The first, For Java Developers Only: Developing and Deploying JDBC-based Applications with MySQL is on March 2nd. I‘ll be covering some common pitfalls, new features available with MySQL-5.0 (including XA and stored procedures), and a look at what‘s coming in JDBC-4.0.

The second on March 9th, Cost-Effective Enterprise Content Management Using Alfresco and MySQL is a webcast from Alfresco‘s founder and CTO, John Newton. Alfreso is an open source, enterprise content management system that …

Folks, I'm going to be involved in (giving the first, available for questions on the second) webcasts on Java and MySQL related topics, so if you read this blog because you're interested in those topics, you should check them out (they're free).

The first, For Java Developers Only: Developing and Deploying JDBC-based Applications with MySQL is on March 2nd. I'll be covering some common pitfalls, new features available with MySQL-5.0 (including XA and stored procedures), and a look at what's coming in JDBC-4.0.

The second on March 9th, Cost-Effective Enterprise Content Management Using Alfresco and MySQL is a webcast from Alfresco's founder and CTO, John Newton. Alfreso is an open source, enterprise content management system that happens to …

Folks, I‘m going to be involved in (giving the first, available for questions on the second) webcasts on Java and MySQL related topics, so if you read this blog because you‘re interested in those topics, you should check them out (they‘re free).

The first, For Java Developers Only: Developing and Deploying JDBC-based Applications with MySQL is on March 2nd. I‘ll be covering some common pitfalls, new features available with MySQL-5.0 (including XA and stored procedures), and a look at what‘s coming in JDBC-4.0.

The second on March 9th, Cost-Effective Enterprise Content Management Using Alfresco and MySQL is a webcast from Alfresco‘s founder and CTO, John Newton. Alfreso is an open source, enterprise content management system that …

The topic at hand is Oracle buying one dual license open source company after another. This is getting a lot of people worried. Of course it also got me thinking.

Dual licensing is a business model associated with companies distributing their code under two very different licenses. One license is a classic proprietary license. It usually includes all the goodies like warranties and the right to embed the code into own proprietary code without any additional requirements.

However the same code is also provided through some open source license, usually one of the so called reciprocal licenses (GPL and friends). Reciprocal means that these licenses require that any code that is linked with …

With Oracle Corporation purchasing InnoBase, the company providing the InnoDB Storage Engine, and now reliable rumors of the acquisition of SleepyCat, the BDB Storage Engine, both key transactional storage engines for MySQL are effectively owned by a competitor.

While the is a strange and probably unchartered territory for both organisations, I’m personally concerned. I use InnoDB extensively, however if there was a comparable alternative within MySQL I’d consider switching out of principle. Is Oracle purchasing these organisations a bad thing? We don’t know. That’s the problem. While MySQL will undoubtly continue to provide these storage engines as part of the MySQL Database I believe a call to arms is needed.

It’s true that Oracle helped more general adoption of Linux …

Last year saw a record number of acquisitions by Oracle Corporation. Of note was in October 2005 InnoBase (Read Press Release) which had a direct relationship with MySQL providing the InnoDB Storage Engine. It’s too early to tell what the impact to MySQL will be if any.

I’ve been in Singapore, and have not read any news in the past few days, but all information I’m receiving from those collegues in the know is that Sleepycat Software (the company behind Berkley DB, and the MySQL BDB Storage Engine) is now firmly in the sites of Oracle Acquisition. The rumors of JBoss is also definitely on the …

I was talking to a friend at a party (I know it sounds pathetic, but we also talked about non work related stuff) about a java banking application he is working on. The application needs to run with whatever RDBMS is already installed at the client. He noted that they have the most trouble with IBM DB2. He did speak favorably about Apache Derby aka IBM cloudspace, but then again he actually likes java, so go figure ;-)

One of the issues is that appearently DB2 is so configurable that it becomes very difficult to be able to determine if the queries will even run at the clients site. I guess you can configure all sorts of buffers and thresholds that if set too aggressively will simply prevent their application from running at all. Now you could say thats the DBA's fault. But the fact of the matter is that they are trying to sell an application and it does not help things if this requires the DBA to change parameters that affect other …