Encountered a problem while running the RODBC library from the R prompt as the root user, as follows:

> install.packages('RODBC')

It failed with the following library dependency:

checking for unistd.h... yes
checking sql.h usability... no
checking sql.h presence... no
checking for sql.h... no
checking sqlext.h usability... no
checking sqlext.h presence... no
checking for sqlext.h... no
configure: error: "ODBC headers sql.h and sqlext.h not found"
ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘RODBC’
* removing ‘/usr/lib64/R/library/RODBC’

The downloaded source packages are in
        ‘/tmp/RtmpdT1gay/downloaded_packages’
Updating HTML index of packages in '.Library'
Making 'packages.html' ... done
Warning message:
In install.packages("RODBC") :
  installation of package ‘RODBC’ had non-zero exit status

I installed unixODBC-devel and unixODBC-gui-qt libraries to …

Upstream platform vendors have announced the general end of life (EOL) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) and its derivatives, as well as Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. With this announcement comes some implications to support for Percona software running on these operating systems.

RHEL 5 was EOL as of March 31st, 2017 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was end of life as of April 28th, 2017. Pursuant to our end of life policies, we are announcing that these EOLs will go into effect for Percona software on August 1st, 2017. As of this date, we will no longer be producing new packages, binary builds, hotfixes, or bug fixes for Percona software on these platforms.

We …

The place is still frantic here at Percona Live 2017 as everybody tries to squeeze in a few more talks before the end of the day. One such talk was given by Red Hat’s Stefan Negrea on Hawkular Metrics.

Hawkular Metrics is a scalable, long-term, high-performance storage engine for metric data. The session was an overview of the project that includes the history of the project, an overview of the Hawkular ecosystem, technical details of the project, developer features and APIs and third party integrations.

Hawkular Metrics is backed by Cassandra for scalability. Hawkular Metrics is used and exposed by Hawkular Services.The API uses JSON to communicate with clients.

Users of Hawkular Metrics include: …

Stephen O'Grady at RedMonk has launched a new Podcast called Hark. In his second episode, he and Agile programming guru Kent Beck have a thoughtful discussion around the ideas in O'Grady's book "The Software Paradox."  Even though software is "eating the world" and become more widespread and strategic, its economic value appears to be declining rapidly. Certainly, we've seen a shift in the …

This post shows you how to add the menu option and GUI to set users and groups. It’s quite a bit easier than mastering all the command-line syntax. It makes setting up the required user and group accounts for an Oracle Enterprise or MySQL database solution much easier.

You add the utility by calling the yum (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) utility like this:

yum installed -y system-config_users

You should see the following:

Loaded plugins: langpacks
adobe-linux-x86_64                                       |  951 B     00:00     
ol7_UEKR3                                                | 1.2 kB     00:00     
ol7_latest                                               | 1.4 kB     00:00     
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package system-config-users.noarch 0:1.3.5-2.el7 will be installed
--> Processing …

A bit of history

The latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, one of the most popular and respected Linux distributions in the server market, was released in June 2014, followed by CentOS 7 and Oracle Linux releases in July of the same year.

There are very interesting changes for database administrators in these new releases, among which I would like to highlight the fact that installer now chooses XFS as its filesystem by default, which substitutes ext4 as the preferred format for local data storage. Red …

Congratulations to the entire team at Red Hat, for the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL7). The release notes have something important, under Web Servers & Services:

MariaDB 5.5

MariaDB is the default implementation of MySQL in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL database project, and provides a replacement for MySQL. MariaDB preserves API and ABI compatibility with …

One thing that gets tedious in the IT community and Oracle community is the penchant for Windows only solutions. While Microsoft does an excellent job in certain domains, I remain a loyal Apple customer. By the way, you can install Oracle Client software on Mac OS X and run SQL Developer against any Oracle Database server. You can even run MySQL Workbench and MySQL server natively on the Mac OS X platform, which creates a robust development platform and gives you more testing options with the MySQL monitor (the client software).

Notwithstanding, some Windows users appear to malign Apple and the Mac OS X on compatibility, but they don’t understand that it’s a derivative of the Research Unix, through BSD (Berkeley Software …

If you use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), you are always given choices of AMIs (by default; there are plenty of other AMIs available for your base-os): Amazon Linux AMI, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Server and Ubuntu. In terms of cost, the Amazon Linux AMI is the cheapest, followed by SUSE then RHEL. 

I use EC2 a lot for testing, and recently had to pay a “RHEL tax” as I needed to run a RHEL environment. For most uses I’m sure you can be satisfied by the Amazon Linux AMI. The last numbers suggest Amazon Linux is #2 in terms of usage on EC2.

Anyway, recently Amazon Linux AMI came out with the 2014.03 release (see release notes). You can install MySQL …

In teaching, I had a problem because my students have different base operating systems, like Windows 7, Windows 8, Linux, and Mac OS X. I needed a teaching and lecture platform that would let me teach it all (not to mention support their environments). That meant it had to virtualize any of the following with a portable device:

• Windows 7 or 8 hosting natively an Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or 12c and MySQL Database 5.6
• Windows 7 or 8 hosting a Fedora or Oracle Unbreakable Linux VM (3 or 4 GB) with Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or 12c and MySQL Database 5.6
• Mac OS X hosting a Fedora or Oracle Unbreakable Linux VM (3 or 4 GB) with Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or 12c and MySQL Database 5.6
• Ubuntu hosting a Fedora or Oracle Unbreakable Linux VM (3 or 4 GB) with Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or …