While I have spent a lot of time recently helping the MySQL community interact with and integrate with various Oracle User Groups including ODTUG, IOUG, NoCOUG, NYOUG, DAOG I thought I’d share some resources for the MySQL Community that wanted to know more about Oracle.

The Oracle family of products is huge. You only have to look at the acquisitions via Wikipedia to get an idea. The first thing is to narrow your search, e.g. Database, APEX, Middleware, BI, Hyperion, Financials, development via Java, PHP or Oracle Forms etc.

While Oracle is a commercial product you can download all software for FREE via Oracle Technology Network. There is also documentation, forums, blogs and events.

Some Oracle bloggers I have already been reading however I’m expanding my list. People you may want to …

Wednesday night of the MySQL track of ODTUG Kaleidoscope will include an evening with Last Comic Standing comedian, John Heffron. It should be great way to unwind after day 3 of the conference. Black vodka anybody.

Check out the MySQL Schedule for more information of presentations for the 4 days. More details is also available here.

Glyn Moody has an interesting piece on Why Patents are Like Black Holes where he looks at the situation when a large patent holder goes bankrupt - or is about to. His point is that even if a company otherwise can go out of business cleanly, the patents often remain as a piece of "IPR" that can come back and haunt us like a zombie.

Also Matt Asay recently weighed in on the subject:

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Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly roundup of database blogs.

Kicking off this week in Log Buffer #191 are posts from Alisher Yuldashev:

Randolf Geist blogs on an Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting Session – PGA/UGA memory fragmentation for when a batch process takes significantly longer than expected.

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Everybody working on Unix or in the database world stumbles over Oracle Berkeley DB every now and then. DB is an Open Source embedded database used by applications like OpenLDAP or Postfix. Traditionally it followed mostly a key-value access pattern. Now what caught my attention was the fact that the recently released DB 5.0 provides an SQLite-like C API with the promise of providing better concurrency and performance than regular SQLite. Time to give it a shot.

So I grabbed the source distribution, checked the documentation and saw that I shall use the …

Starting from tomorrow (1st of June) I will officially become an Oracle employee. It is quite funny how many companies you can change without even applying for another job. ;-)
I've been hired by MySQL in the beginning of 2008, a few months later it has been acquired by Sun and after about a year we've been acquired again, this time by Oracle.

I personally consider this a new beginning and I join Oracle with a lot of enthusiasm. After all I'm now part of a company that has a huge set of products and technologies and it is like a playground for me.

I'm afraid I've not blogged frequently in these months, but I plan to write more and more in the future. This short post is just to wish good luck to all the Dolphins who have joined Oracle and all those who are swimming in a different ocean.
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Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly roundup of database blogs. We’re back this week with a short Log Buffer #190. Only ten more issues, and we’ll be celebrating our 200th edition post.

Chen Shapira was eager to share news early this week, sending along her favorite picks on Tuesday.

Prof. Neil Gunther doesn’t like the way commercial load testing software distributes think times.

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One thing I haven't seen anybody commenting on is the fact that with SAP acquiring Sybase, it will be the last major independent database company to be merged into a larger SW company. (To say this, you can qualify MySQL AB as a major database company, but disqualify, say, EnterpriseDB or InterBase, which imho is entirely reasonable.)

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As I promised in my previous blog posting, I got the opportunity to ask Ronald Bradford some questions.  I hope this serves as an introduction to Ronald, and that you’ll attend Kaleidoscope to learn more from Ronald in person.

Ronald Bradford

MR: Would you like to share some background information about yourself for our ODTUG readers?

RB: “I have worked with various RDBMS technologies for 20+ years.   I was first introduced to Ingres at university and after my Bachelors Degree in 1989. I started my professional IT career performing Ingres database architecture, system design as well as software development.  I worked solidly with …

Tekes, a Finnish government agency funding R&D in Technology and Innovation (including MariaDB) has recently published a book on Finnish startups, (PDF), which contains a whole chapter on MySQL AB.

It seems to be a well researched chapter and references many past interviews over the years, as well as being based on interviews of at least Mårten, Monty and Kevin Harvey of Benchmark. This is the most comprehensive narrative I've ever seen of items like "InnoDB Friday", a phrase I thought until now was company confidential, since talking about it would have revealed there was something negative about the day Oracle …