Netflix went down over three hours ago, and everyone is on edge here. My son just started reciting the script to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" in an attempt to keep our courage up. This may be the last thing I ever write, so — Oh, never mind, it's back up again ... Crisis averted, and on to this week's developer news.

We have an App Store Appstore for that!

Amazon this week unleashed their own Appstore for Android devices. Apple took umbrage at the use of the (evidently trademarked) term "App Store" and fired a salvo of …

Paranoid Android. Canonical and Gnome. A new OSI. And more.

Paranoid Android
If you are interested in the potential violation of the GPL by the Android kernel you have probably already immersed yourself in the numerous blog posts published on the topic. If not, start with Sean Hogle’s analysis or Bradley M Kuhn’s overview of the original allegations and work backwards from there, not forgetting a detour for the obligatory Microsoft connection. Linus Torvalds said claim “seems totally bogus”. In the meantime, Microsoft …

Oracle OpenWorld 2011 will be held October 2-6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and the Call for Papers is now Open!

MySQL will have excellent visibility with a dedicated track under the database stream.

Details and submission guidelines are available on the Oracle OpenWorld Call for Papers web site. The Call for Paper will end on Sunday March 27. Invited speakers will receive a free OpenWorld full conference pass. Go ahead and submit now! 

Registration for Oracle OpenWorld 2011 is also open. Super Saver Registration, which" offers the deepest discount on the regular conference price, ends April 1, 2011.

So, you are going to Collaborate (or thinking of going) and you saw my blog post about what to go to if you are a beginner with MySQL. But what if you are more experienced with MySQL? There is plenty of content for you too! I have put together this list of what I would recommend to an experienced MySQL DBA at Collaborate. This is not a complete list of all the choices at Collaborate.

Note that several weeks ago Sarah Novotny and I did an OurSQL podcast about Collaborate, including information on how to get $200 off the registration price. The information there is very different from what is in this blog post, so I would recommend listening to the podcast and reading this post.

Collaborate has a Deep Dive …

On September 8, 2010 Oracle announced the availability of Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3

Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3, built on the solid foundation of Oracle Solaris, offers the 
most extensive Oracle enterprise High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions for the 
largest portfolio of mission-critical applications.

Integrated and thoroughly tested with Oracle's Sun servers, storage, connectivity 
solutions and Solaris 10 features, Oracle Solaris Cluster is now qualified with Solaris 
Trusted Extensions, supports Infiniband for general networking or storage usage, and can 
be deployed with Oracle Unified Storage in Campus Cluster configurations. It extends its 
applications support to new Oracle applications such as Oracle Business Intelligence, 
PeopleSoft, TimesTen, and MySQL Cluster.

The single, integrated HA and DR solution enables multi-tier deployments in virtualized 
environments. In this release, Oracle Solaris Containers clusters supports even more 
configurations …

On September 8, 2010 Oracle announced the availability of Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3

Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3, built on the solid foundation of Oracle Solaris, offers the 
most extensive Oracle enterprise High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions for the 
largest portfolio of mission-critical applications.

Integrated and thoroughly tested with Oracle's Sun servers, storage, connectivity 
solutions and Solaris 10 features, Oracle Solaris Cluster is now qualified with Solaris 
Trusted Extensions, supports Infiniband for general networking or storage usage, and can 
be deployed with Oracle Unified Storage in Campus Cluster configurations. It extends its 
applications support to new Oracle applications such as Oracle Business Intelligence, 
PeopleSoft, TimesTen, and MySQL Cluster.

The single, integrated HA and DR solution enables multi-tier deployments in virtualized 
environments. In this release, Oracle Solaris Containers clusters supports even more 
configurations …

Well as predicted, with Aster Data recently being picked up by Teradata most of the key new generation MPP distributed analytics vendors have been acquired (Aster Data, Vertica, Netezza & Greenplum).  This had to happen and was expected to happen.  The MPP Analytics startup “revolution” is over and these technologies will now be integrated into the mainstream.

So what’s next?  As we now, if you are a massive multi-national software company it is a lot less risky to incrementally innovate and leave the development of “game changing” technologies to startups that can be acquired after they prove both the tech and the market.  So what follows MPP?

There are so, so many big data platforms in play at the moment it can be confusing for developers to know where to start.  For startups it used to be simple, MySQL, but dust clouds were created when all the NoSQL platforms started to crash the party 18 months or so ago.  But I do see the dust begin to settle and we are starting to see some market “leaders” appear.  A very unscientific approach is to list the technologies I hear about in the “big data startup” world on a daily basis.  These are, in no particular order:

• MySQL - yes it is still very much hanging in there despite the Oracle acquisition.  MySQL has been helped by technologies such as AWS RDS and Xeround making it more digestible for big data startups who want to minimize operational overheads.
• …

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Oracle just announced MySQL 5.5 Enterprise Edition. MySQL Enterprise Edition is a comprehensive subscription that includes:

- MySQL Database

- MySQL Enterprise Backup

- MySQL Enterprise Monitor

- MySQL Workbench

- Oracle Premier Support; 24x7, Worldwide

New in this release is the addition of MySQL Enterprise Backup and MySQL Workbench along with enhancements in MySQL Enterprise Monitor. Recent integration with MyOracle Support allows MySQL customers to access the same support infrastructure used for Oracle Database customers. Joint MySQL and Oracle customers can experience faster problem resolution by using a common technical support interface. Supporting multiple …