I just read Björn Schotte's post on the activities of the European Union antitrust regulators concerning the intended takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle.

Björn mentions a news article that cites EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes saying that the commission has the obligation to protect the customers from reduced choice, higher costs or both. But to me, this bit is not the most interesting. Later on the article reads:


The Commission said it was concerned that the open source nature of Sun's MySQL database might not …

According to Yahoo News (and WSJ, only for subscribers - thanks to @Oswald for mentioning it on twitter, see also Reuters), the EU opens an in-depth probe to the Oracle-Sun deal.

According to the source, EU Competition Commisioner Neelie Kroes said:

"The (European) Commission has an obligation to ensure that customers would not face reduced choice or higher prices as a result of this takeover,"

Furthermore, the commision set a January 19, 2010 deadline for its decision, Yahoo …

Baron Schwartz started a good discussion about MMM use cases that quickly veered into an argument about clustering in general. As Florian Haas put it on his blog, this is not just an issue of DRBD vs. MySQL Replication. Is a database cluster something you cobble together through bits and pieces like MMM? Or is it something integrated that we can really call a cluster? This is the core question that will determine the future of clustering for open source databases.

I have a strong personal interest in this question, because Tungsten clustering, which I designed, is betting …

Intalio acquires Jetty. Red Hat updates JBoss platform. $12m funding for Medsphere. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Intalio acquired Webtide, developer of Jetty application server.

# Red Hat delivered JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0, as well as JBoss Operations Network (ON) 2.3 and launched Catalyst partner program.

# Medsphere raised $12m to support ongoing development and expansion in open source health IT.

This is the 159th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome.

MySQL

Sun’s Trent Lloyd cautions Watch out for hostname changes when using replication!, for there is a gotcha there.

Justin Swanhart was also in the cautioning business this week, saying Be careful with BETWEEN clauses, because the MySQL optimizer is not smarter than a fifth grader!. The readers say, that’s SQL.

Anyway, it’s probably unwise to underestimate the intelligence of a child. …

Over the last month I have been working on a ZFS Tuning for Databases presentation. I'll be presenting it live tomorrow 8/26/09 at 8 AM PST.

This based on a lot of work done at Sun as well as in the community. With the massive adoption of Solid State Devices (SSDs) (thank you iPOD) the storage market just got a whole lot more interesting. Incorporating SSDs into a ZFS pool is a breeze. This presentation is meant to help you get the best out of the ZFS + SSD combination for databases. We look into Postgres, MySQL and Oracle. I also provide a quick into into Sun's unified storage 7000 series systems.

If you are interested do Register Now

This is the 158th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

SQL Server

Simon Sabin has a TSQL Challenge – counting non zero columns. He says, “I’m working on a project where I need to cycle a flag amongst a set of columns. To achieve this I am storing a position value in each column which allows me to cycle them . . .  So the challenge is to find out the how many non zero columns there are, the twist is to use as little code as possible.”

On a cue from Simon, Aaron Bertrand shares …

Peter Fenton’s open source investment tips. Boxee raises $6m. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

*451 CAOS Links will return on August 25*

Digesting the VMware-SpringSource deal
In the wake of VMware’s acquisition of SpringSource the WSJ examined Peter Fenton’s open source investment portfolio and what he looks for in an open source vendor. Meanwhile Matt Asay noted that VMware’s purchase of SpringSource is the first big acquisition of a company based on an Apache license, while Charles Babcock reported …

Welcome to the 157th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly, cross-platform review of database blogs.

SQL Server

We start with Michelle Ufford, the SQL Fool, who gives us the poor (wo)man’s graph, a fast and ingenious way to create handsome text-based graphs.

What is the importance of running regular consistency checks? Paul S. Randal returns with some survey results and analysis. He writes, “The results are actually surprising – I didn’t expect so many people to be running consistency …