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<< Back from Blogging Hiatus - Update 2

IngresNo specific announcements from Ingres other than I think the VectorWise stuff is progressing well.

To me Ingres is a bit of a dark horse.  They are open source and doing reasonable revenues.  And they are active in the enterprise market (something MySQL hasn’t really achieved).  But they remain largely off the radar in commentary surrounding the DBMS industry.

My personal pick is this will start to change …

Optimizing Oracle Performance

Optimizing Oracle Performance. By Cary Millsap, O’Reilly 2003. Page count: about 375 pages with appendices. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site.)

This is easily one of the best books I’ve ever read on performance optimization. I’ve just finished reading it for the second-and-a-half time in two weeks, and I very rarely read a book more than once. I’ve been telling a lot of people about it.

Despite the title, it is actually not about Oracle performance. It is a book on how to optimize a) any system, …

I have had a few MySQL DBAs ask about how to get started learning Oracle. I will admit that it has been on my to-do list for quite a while1. It never hurts to know more than one database system and a great deal of DBA help wanted ads mention Oracle. Someone once said that you must make sure your capabilities exceed your limitations2 and recently I have been feeling limited when others have started to talk about Oracle capabilities.

So what does it take for a MySQL DBA to get their hands on their own Oracle instance? I used my Ubuntu box to go to Oracle's web site to get the free Oracle XE software.

1. 
   
2. Download and feed to package manager
   
3. Add my account to dba group
   
4. As root, /etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure to set passwords and …

This is the 168th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Let’s give the wheel a spin and see who comes first . . . 

MySQL

Brian “Krow” Aker has something to say about Drizzle, InfiniDB, and column-oriented storage: “I have been asked a number of times ‘do you think there is a need for a column oriented database in the open source world?’ The answer has been yes!  . . .  I was very happy to see Calpont do their release of Infinidb last week.”

Vadim of the MySQL Performance Blog said, “As Calpont announced availability of InfiniDB I …

Funambol acquires Zapatec. Open source gains Closure. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

# Funambol acquired Zapatec, an AJAX web 2.0 frameworks vendor.

# The top ten issues facing open source users, according to Mark Radcliffe.

# Google …

Image via Wikipedia

FYI - the thoughts here have been gathered from conversations with several individuals, including an interesting conversation yesterday.  As these conversations were off the record I won’t name names here but thanks to those people.

I love open source software and I am a big supporter of many companies that produce open source offerings.  Here I am not going to debate if Oracle acquiring MySQL will be better for MySQL or not as that has been done to death.  But I do think it is relevant to discuss the dangers of blocking a commercial vendor from acquiring a potentially competitive open source vendor.

Many open source software initiatives are purely community backed and are …

Here is a summary of the key discussions I have had over the last month.  Keep in mind, I’m no analyst.  This is largely opinion based on various conversations I have had with the relevant companies (for analyst insight see Curt Monash).

KickFireI think Kickfire has been doing it a little tough lately.  The difficulties in a startup launching a hardware appliance (and associated logistics) combined with being too focused on the MySQL customer base has impacted the growth of this interesting start up.  But they aren’t taking it lying down and have adjusted the strategy and have added a new appliance to the range.  Kickfire now seems to have a stronger focus on the enterprise …

Yahoo! Open! Sources! Traffic! Server! Funding for 10gen. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

# Yahoo! Open! Sourced! Traffic! Server!

# Red Hat launched Enterprise Virtualization for Servers for managing Linux and Microsoft Windows servers.

# 10gen, the company behind MongoDB, has …

It's been almost two months since I have posted anything on the Scale-Out Blog, as our entire team has been heads-down working on Tungsten. We now have a number of accomplishments that are worth writing articles about. Item one on that list is community builds for Tungsten clusters.

Tungsten community builds offer a bone-simple process to check out and build Tungsten clustering software. The result is a fully integrated package that includes replication, management, monitoring, and SQL routing. The community builds work for MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 and also allow you to set up basic replication from MySQL to Oracle.

Community builds do not include much logic for autonomic management, including automated failover and sophisticated rules that keep databases up and running rain or shine. Those and other features like floating IP address support are part of the …

Welcome to the 167th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Since all that OOW news forced Gerry to give them short shrift last week, let’s begin with blogs on . . . 

SQL Server

Jeremiah Peschka gets our week going with his refresher introduction to SQL Server system databases.

Likewise, Pinal Dave reviews the difference between candidate keys and primary key.

…