Oracle + Open Source
two worlds inexorably colliding

Justin Kestelyn has posted an excellent article on his blog listing the Most Popular Technical Articles of 2007.  Among the top ten articles an amazing SIX discuss open-source technologies such as running Oracle on Linux, Linux administration, or PHP programming and integration.   Good stuff!

The folks over at zmanda who specialize in MySQL backup are doing a webinar on December 13th, this Thursday.  They specifically mention it as relevant for Oracle DBAs or anyone moving to MySQL.  Looks to be an interesting event.

Wim Coekaerts is the VP of Linux Engineering at Oracle.  He was basically the guy who put Linux on Oracle’s radar back in the day.  I remember his OCFS project, oss.oracle.com and the Oracle RAC on Linux with Firewire project.  Those were interesting days.  I had the opportunity to meet Wim this year at Oracle’s OpenWorld.  He’s a very down to earth, no-nonsense guy, and gives the straight scoop on all the exciting things that are happening on the technical side.

The latest newsflash for those who have been sleeping at the wheel is that Oracle is offering support for RHEL called Unbreakable Linux Network.  ULN is basically an up2date or yum network service which will feed you the latest RPMs.  These RPMs have been rebranded for Oracle, but are not a fork or a new distribution.  What you’ll also find as a ULN subscriber is that a little rpm called oracle-validated-configuration is available.  This little package will include lots of Oracle specific tweaks to make installing on Linux that much easier!

For those who’d like to hear all of this from the horses mouth, please read Wim’s Post on Unbreakable Linux.

For those of you out there of love all things Apple, a new store is opening in Manhattan’s meat packing district.

Oh, and don’t confuse the high-design below with train lines. You’ll use the L or A/C/E trains to get there!

The latest issue of Open Insights is out, hot off the presses.  You can view it online here. Other recent issues can be viewed online as well.

This month’s topic is Reputation Management, or Search Engine Reputation Management.  Related closely to Search Engine Optimization, it is all about building your personal or business brand around your products, services, writings, and social networking memberships.

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