Sun Microsystems has released Solaris Express Developer Edition 1/08, Sun's free OpenSolaris-based distribution targeted at developers.

This release brings together integrated web stack (Apache, MySQL, Ruby, Php, PostgreSQL), NetBeans 6.0, interoperability with Microsoft's CIFS protocol, support for virtual machines via Sun xVM hypervisor, based on  technology developed by the Xen community, Sun HPC ClusterTools based on the Open MPI effort.

There are …

It's kind of funny. Whenever I go to conferences, almost invariably I get asked by people, "So, you guys compete a lot with PostgreSQL, right?" My answer is typically, "No, not really", much to the surprise of the inquirer. What's more, I enjoy a pretty friendly relationship with a few folks in the PostgreSQL community. I remember at OSCON last year hanging out drinking beers with the PostgreSQL team members, and I even had Robert Treat take a photo of me at Ohio LinuxFest this past year wearing a little PostgreSQL elephant pin on my bag.

When it comes down to the perceived animosity between the MySQL and PostgreSQL communities, I am sure that in the past there were bitter debates and disagreement. But, from the MySQL AB and my own personal perspective, we welcome the achievements of the PostgreSQL community and developers. Sure, there are licensing and philosophical differences, and certainly there are many areas where each database server …

Solaris Express, Developer Edition 1/08 or SXDE 1/08 as its affectionately called within Sun is being released on monday. There are certain new features that I think needs to be highlighted specially for the PostgreSQL community.

Well for starters the versions of PostgreSQL included in SXDE are PostgreSQL 8.1.10 and PostgreSQL 8.2.5. (Unfortunately not all security fixes made it to the release though). However the big news is the PostgreSQL servers which are pretty hidden now has an administration GUI. Yes pgAdmin III is now included in SXDE.

Also there are lot of new features which now are quite well integrated with PostgreSQL.

For example take …

Jonathan announced that Sun is acquiring MySQL. Of course classic questions will pop up - What about PostgreSQL? Will Sun de-invest in PostgreSQL?, etc. I dont think that any such thing will happen, but choice of databases for OpenSolaris has just become broader to suit  one's  preferences and needs, thanks to Sun.

The 79th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published on H. Tonguç Yilmaz Oracle Blog. Next week, LB#80 will appear on Chen Shapira’s I’m just a simple DBA on a complex production system. Have you done one yet? Publishing Log Buffer is an excellent way to introduce yourself and your [...]

As days goes by, more and more multi-core systems are popping up everywhere. Infact, with the advent of the new 4-socket quad-core Sun Fire X4450 , 16-core systems are soon becoming common out there.

However,personally, I think these systems are still underutilized from their true potentials.  Of course virtualization is a way of increasing the utilization but  that is like working around the symptoms and not fixing the real problems. Software Applications fundamentally has lagged behind the microprocessor innovations. Operating Systems too have lagged behind too. Solaris, however advanced opertating system has still lot to achieve in this area. For example, yes the kernel is multi-threaded, yes it can scale well easily to 100s of cores but that scaling is generally achieved by creating copies of the process (or multiple connections or multiple threads however you look at it) at the APPLICATION level.  One area however …

This post wants to be:1. A quick glance at the new "common table expression" (aka hierarchical queries) in Firebird 2.12. A call to action for other opensource databasesSo, on with 1., Firebird recently added another great feature, common table expressions (CTE) which, to my eye at least, boils down to hierarchical queries.This is basically the ability to efficiently and easily query hierarchical

My posts lately have been mostly progress reports and release notices. That's because we're in the home stretch on the book, and I don't have much spare time. However, a lot has also been changing with Maatkit, and I wanted to take some time to write about it properly.

Welcome to the 77th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. This is the last Log Buffer of 2007. . . a time for looking back at the year, looking ahead to the next, and generally focusing on time. It may not be the Oscars, but Firebird News is thrilled that Firebird is Sourceforge’s [...]

Times of change are upon the database market. The major established database companies are being challenged by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL. For years, Open Source Databases (OSDBs) have been quietly increasing their penetration, but until recently they have lacked the capabilities to seriously threaten proprietary databases like Oracle, IBM's DB2, and Microsoft's SQL Server.

All that has changed. OSDBs now boast the necessary features and robustness to support commercial databases hundreds of Gigabytes in size. And a growing trickle of competitive benchmark results shows them …