Open source and SMBs. New funding for Lucid Imagination. And more.

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On open source and SMBs
Savio Rodrigues contrasted Dell’s plans to target SMBs with bundles of hardware and open source with research from Forrester that indicated that SMBs are still wary of open source, while Matt Asay noted that there are significant opportunities for open source vendors if they can work out how to crack the SMB market and suggested that the way to make software easier for SMBs and to monetize it might actually be cloud-based computing.

OStatic noted that the issue may well be one of lack of awareness and that Dell’s initiative, as well as the …

I uploaded all of my past presentations to Slideshare recently, and realized that I hadn’t actually posted some of these on my blog in the past as well.

So I’ve created a new Presentations Page that has all of these together now.

It’s kind of funny to see the “MySQL for Oracle DBAs” presentation again - a lot has changed since 2006!

In any case, enjoy if you haven’t seen them - give them a look over if interested, and feel free to post comments or questions on the page!

Image by ToniVC via Flickr

In a prior blog post , I explained how the "open source + paid support " business model only works for software products that address extremely large markets. However, even those large market products rely upon a rich collection of niche market products that combine to deliver solutions.

As the book Crossing the Chasm explains, every technology product must make the move from its early adopter or hobbyist roots to a mainstream application. The hobbyists are willing to accept tinkering with the product to make it work, but the much larger mainstream market wants to buy proven solutions .

As John Donne once said, "no man is an island." Similarly, no software application is an island; each one relies on an orchestra of tools, applications and services necessary to …

This is the 150th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Someone accidentally left Dave Edwards‘ cage unlocked, and he escaped, thus leaving me with the pleasurable duty of compiling the 150th weekly Log Buffer.

Many people other than Dave are finding release this week. Giuseppe Maxia explains some details of MySQL’s New Release Model. Andrew Morgan announces a New MySQL Cluster Maintenance Release. Aleksandr Kuzminsky of the MySQL Performance …

In a prior blog post , I explained how the "open source + paid support " business model only works for software products that address extremely large markets. However, even those large market products rely upon a rich collection of niche market products that combine to deliver solutions.

As the book Crossing the Chasm explains, every technology product must make the move from its early adopter or hobbyist roots to a mainstream application. The hobbyists are willing to accept tinkering with the product to make it work, but the much larger mainstream market wants to buy proven solutions .

As John Donne once said, "no man is an island." Similarly, no software application is an island; each one relies on an orchestra of tools, applications and services necessary to …

Image via Wikipedia

Todd Hoff has posted a link to a Los Alamos National Lab presentation on Graph Databases.  In this paper they provide a revisit on the classic RDBMS vs Graph database debate.

The Relational Database hasn’t maintained its dominance out of dumb luck.  Instead the RDBMS has consistently outperformed while providing the most general use capability of all the variety of platforms that have been available.  Many other approaches have been tried, often these have provided better object model integration (OODBMS) or better data model representation.  But when the …

The German Oracle User Association (DOAG e.V.) has published a statement (in German) about the acquisition of Sun/MySQL by Oracle and its impact for Oracle users. You can find the statement here.

Oh and btw, I'll give a session about "PHP5 & Oracle" at the local Oracle usergroups in Frankfurt on June, 23rd and Hamburg on Sep 14th. The main goal is to promote the usage of PHP5 in Oracle environments (and how you can leverage PHP's potential in Enterprise environments) as there are good Oracle database connectors for PHP5 available. See you there!

About six months ago, the question of storing images in a database came up. This is one of my favorite topics, and has many database-agnostic parts.

Personally, I think “tell me about storing images in a database” is actually a great interview question, because you will be able to see the difference between someone who has just memorized “what’s right” versus someone who is really thinking. It also helps you see how someone will communicate — if they just say “NEVER do it, it’s as bad as crossing the streams!” then they are a type of person that gives you a short answer, without much explanation, and without many nuances. (That may be what you are looking for, but usually you want someone who gives reasons for why they strongly feel one way or another).

Consider the following cases:

What about storing …

The last 24 months has seen the introduction of Map/Reduce functionality into the data processing arena in various forms.  Map/Reduce is a framework for developing scalable data processing functionality, and was popularized by Google (see this earlier post).

Pure players like Hadoop are starting to find their own niche, helped by organizations such as Cloudera.  However there has been a number of for & against arguments relating to Map/Reduce functionality inside the database.

These arguments are now really serving a moot point.  Customers have recognized value in Map/Reduce prompting some (b)leading edge database vendors to introduce such …