In our earlier post, we unpacked the mechanics of MySQL HeatWave maintenance, the behind-the-scenes process that keeps your MySQL environments secure, stable, and optimized without changing your database version. We also touched on how Auto Minor Version Upgrades occur when a version reaches the end of its lifecycle. With this update, MySQL HeatWave introduces Configurable Maintenance Windows and Auto-Upgrade Controls, giving you […]

Yesterday I participated to the Oracle Technology Roundtable for Digital Natives in Zurich.

It was a good opportunity to learn more about AI, Cloud and HeatWave with the focus on very trendy features of this product: generative AI, machine learning, vector processing, analytics and transaction processing across data in Data Lake and MySQL databases.

It was also great to share moments with the Oracle and MySQL teams and meet customers which gave feedback and tips about their solutions already in place in this area.

I’ll try to summarize below some key take-away of each session.

Unlocking Innovation: How Oracle AI is Shaping the Future of Business (by Jürgen Wirtgen)

AI is not a new topic. But how do we …

“We made it a point to hire really smart, visionary people and then let them do their work.
I wanted to delegate and let people be in charge of things. My own decision-making process was to decide who got to decide. To make decisions, you have to first outline the problem, and if you hire really great people, they’re going to know more about the problem they’re dealing with than you ever will.”–Scott McNealy

I have interviewed Scott McNealy. Scott is a Silicon Valley pioneer, most famous for co-founding Sun Microsystems in 1982. We talked about Innovation, AI, Big Data, Redis, Curriki and Wayin.

RVZ

Q1. You co-Founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, and served as CEO and Chairman of the Board for 22 years. What are the main lessons learned in all these years?

Scott …

It's again that time of the year. Analysts are spending oceans of words to predict the future, companies are making plans for the next year and people are resting and enjoying the break with their families. To me, this is the perfect time to reflect on my choices, the direction I'm headed to and consider if I still love what I do.

At the beginning of the year I decided to join MongoDB (formerly 10gen). The more I think about it, the more I realize I've been wrong. Yes, it's been the worst decision in my life not to join MongoDB when I was first offered the opportunity years ago. At that time an insightful friend asked me to consider the opportunity. At that time I didn't see what I see today.

I didn't see the …

It's again that time of the year. Analysts are spending oceans of words to predict the future, companies are making plans for the next year and people are resting and enjoying the break with their families. To me, this is the perfect time to reflect on my choices, the direction I'm headed to and consider if I still love what I do.

At the beginning of the year I decided to join MongoDB (formerly 10gen). The more I think about it, the more I realize I've been wrong. Yes, it's been the worst decision in my life not to join MongoDB when I was first offered the opportunity years ago. At that time an insightful friend asked me to consider the opportunity. At that time I didn't see what I see today.

I didn't see the …

Cloud-powered BLOB type provides ACID guarantees and fast direct access to blobs via Web URLs.

Storing unstructured data

Typically unstructured data (such as pictures, media files, documents)

a) Is either stored on the file system, unlike the related with it relational data which is stored in the database. This is well known, “convenient” practice that allows fast access to files but offers no transactional story and no unified data management (for db and filesystem)

b) Or is stored in BLOBs. This ensures transactional consistency and reduces management complexities, but is really bad for performance and scalability.

We took advantage of the cloud, and came up with an upgrade to the BLOB – a solution that combines the benefits of the two.

Weblob data type

Weblob is a new data type that is supported by the Cloud Storage Engine for MySQL ( …

MySQL Innovation Day held on June 5, 2012 was a great event for the MySQL engineers, users and customers to gather, share and network. I was able to get a few minutes with Tomas Ulin, Vice President of MySQL Engineering at Oracle, to ask him some questions. Here are the highlights of my interview with Tomas.

Monica: This was the first MySQL Innovation Day, correct?  Why now, what was the strategy behind hosting this kind of event?

Tomas: In the last year, we have rolled out an incredible number of MySQL events worldwide – some targeted at developers that are new to MySQL and others for the MySQL savvy. At the MySQL Innovation Day, our first event of this kind,, we had a number of our key engineers presenting lightning talks delivering previews of key new features as well as discussing roadmap. …

Recent news that Microsoft and Barnes & Noble agreed to partner on the Nook e-reader line rather than keep fighting over intellectual property suggests the prospect of more settlement and fewer IP suits in the industry. However, the deal further obscures the blurry IP and patent landscape currently impacting both enterprise IT and consumer technology.

It is good to see settlement — something I’ve been calling for, while also warning against patent and IP aggression. However, this settlment comes from the one conflict in this ongoing war that was actually shedding some light on the matter, rather than further complicating it.

See the full article at TechNewsWorld.

Working with replication, you come across many topologies, some of them sound and established, some of them less so, and some of them still in the realm of the hopeless wishes. I have been working with replication for almost 10 years now, and my wish list grew quite big during this time. In the last 12 months, though, while working at Continuent, some of the topologies that I wanted to work with have moved from the cloud of wishful thinking to the firm land of things that happen. My quest for star replication starts with the most common topology. One master, many slaves.

It looks like a star, with the rays extending from the master to the slaves. This is the basis of most of the replication going on mostly everywhere nowadays, and it has few surprises. Setting aside the …

We’ve written about how a bad economy is indeed good for open source software. We’ve also recognized that with open source software’s maturity and place at the enterprise software table, a bad economy can be a double-edged sword for open source since the failure or fade of large enterprise customers, say big banks, hurts open source vendors right alongside traditional software providers.

What is interesting is that after a couple of years of economic rebuilding, we’ve seen recently how open source is being driven by innovation, particularly in cloud computing, …