Oracle + Open Source
two worlds inexorably colliding

As many of you may have already heard, Sun officially announced their purchase of  MySQL today.  After the last few years with Oracle pushing Linux and commodity hardware, Sun has certainly taken the hit.  I guess this is their turn to hit back.

With MySQL 6.0 out, increasingly we find the full compliment of sophisticated database features in MySQL.  But a lot of the devil is in the details.  Where Oracle has had problems with the sheer size of the codebase, and addressing security vulnerabilities, and other bugs in a timely manner, MySQL has the problem of a mature codebase.  Some of these features are newly available, and if my experiences with replication are any indication, often have hidden gotchas and “features” which are not emphasized in the literature.

The next question on my mind is, how does Oracle’s purchase and now ownership of Innobase impact the above purchase.  It means a direct competitor owns a core component which provides transactional support to your database.  A very good question.

Time will tell, so stay tuned.

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!

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.

A lot of folks are sounding the alarm bells over Unbreakable Linux.  Given that this direction at Oracle speaks squarely to my topic here at Oracle + Open Source, I thought I should at least comment.

Oracle’s decided to provide their own support for Linux.  Are they rolling their own distro?  Well actually, no.  They’re doing what CentOS and a few other folks out there are doing.  They’re rebuilding from RedHat’s distro, effectively repackaging their Enterprise Linux distro and in the process testing rigorously, and reporting bugs and issues back, or fixing those themselves.   What’s the deal?

Due to various license requirements with the GPL, RedHat’s distributing Linux must be done as source, so that means third parties can freely recompile that source, effectively using those same tweaks and packaging it up as their own.  Well gee, that’s not fair is it?

I have to admit I’m on the fence on this one.  Honestly folks, the open-source community, of which I consider myself a part of, has been championing Linux, and pitching it to Wall Street,  and big business for over a decade.  So in that vein, hey we’ve done it, and we’re continuing to do it.  That’s great.

It does seem a little odd though that CentOS and Oracle can redistribute RedHat’s sweat and tears.  Or does it?   The logic at CentOS goes if you want support, you can buy RedHat.  If you don’t, you’re free to go ahead and install CentOS as you like.  So despite CentOS being free, Oracle charging a license fee for the support they’re providing, that seems to make sense too.  The truth is that with open-source, we effectively throw IP (intellectual property) to the wind, and let it land wherever it likes.  So if Oracle wishes to capitalize on this, more power to them.

The truth is that the complaints from some camps miss a really important point.  Despite Oracle’s marketing message about making Linux Unbreakable, and Larry’s various trumpeting, Oracle actually does contribute a *LOT* to the Linux community.  Take for example this huge site of open-source projects all by or directly supported by Oracle.   Or another example, Oracle’s rolling Apache into it’s middle tier Fusion product.  Or take another, it’s building of a better driver for PHP.  All of these are very real, very measurable contributions back to the community.

Obviously it’s in Oracle’s interest for open-source technologies to work, as a lot of their customers want that interoperability.  So do I, frankly.  I’ve been working as an independent consultant for over twelve years providing professional services for Oracle and open-source technologies, and making a healthy income, thank you.

I’ll also admit that some of the folks in the Unbreakable Linux team I know personally, and very much respect professionally.  I’ve also met a few of the folks who head up the initiative at Oracle OpenWorld.  They’re all bright, approachable technologists who are as excited about open-source as they are about the Oracle core database product.

I know this may disappoint some of my open-source colleagues, but hey what’d you expect from Mr. “Oracle + Open Source”, hmm?

 In the spirit of a long line of O’Reilly “missing manuals”, and hacker opuses, take a look at Chris Jones opus: The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual.

It’s a short week, so we’ll catch up with you all next week.  Happy Holidays!!

Gosh I really love that word “open”.  When I hear it, I just get all warm inside.  I’ve always liked that Oracle used the word in it’s big annual conference name.  And this year’s show is bigger than ever.  I heard a rumor that there were 50,000 people here this year.  With an ever increasing round of acquisitions, the exhibitor and user communities just keep growing.

As you can see from this photo, they’ve totally blocked off Howard Street.  The video billboard there is at the 3rd street end.  I managed to catch it showing a frame of an open world!

Behind the billboard are tents where the lunchtime cafeteria was, because all the other square footage is now taken by exhibitors big and small.

And wow, were there a lot of vendors.  Even MySQL AB was here, as I blogged about earlier.  Open-source is a huge and growing component to the Oracle landscape now.  Oracle users seem to concur.  In 2000 when I was writing my book “Oracle and Open Source” no one would have believed that.  But the market pressures are working their magic, whether we like it or not.  I talked at length with Anand Pandey, a Senior Consultant with MySQL.  He handed me a very interesting whitepaper “Open Source in the Enterprise: New Software Disrupts the Technology Stack“.  A very interesting read indeed.

Stay tuned for more tomorrow.

Incredible, but true.  It seems that MySQL AB will be exhibiting next week at Oracle Open World.  This of course isn’t the first time a competitor would advertise or exhibit on it’s rival’s home turf.  Still it certainly signals a changing landscape, and heats up the battle for market share.

Here’s a longer list of exhibitors at the conference.  I don’t see Enterprise DB there, but anything’s possible.  You will see RedHat as well as Suse, now owned by Novell, represented there as well.  Also if you make it to the conference, be sure to visit the Oracle pavilion section, where there are sure to be smaller booths for the Open Source Group, as well as Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support program.

Though I haven’t seen much of them in the news lately, I thought I’d do some digging.

• June 19th xStarter job scheduler
• July 13 IB LogManager v2.8.0
• August 27 - Firebird 2.0.2
• August 31 - Firebird 2.0.2 recalled (oops!)
• September 27 Firebird v2.0.3 released
• October 5th - IBReplicator Server v2.5.1
• October 22nd 2.1 beta 2 released
• November 5th, released for Mac OS X Leopard.

There are of course many other news flashes, so if you’d like to catch up on Firebird, take a look at the .

We blogged about Facebook’s Open API over at #comments as a guest blogger. It seems everyone wants in on the social networking openness. Tomorrow, Google is slated to release it’s OpenSocial.

Oracle and Salesforce.com are also jumping on the bandwagon with Open Social support, along with Linkedin, Plaxo, hi5, and Friendster. Does anyone still use friendster?

The exciting thing for developers, and ultimately the user community who may use such apps is that developing for Google’s new API will easier, and will work across a lot of differen social networks. Granted Facebook has a huge inertia behind it, but still build-for-one and deploy-across-many is a powerful motivator for everyone.

And if my experience with Friendster, then Tribe, then MySpace, and then Facebook is any indication, people will get excited about the next great community, social networking site and forget about Facebook just like they did every single one before.

NOTE: As of Thursday, you’ll be able to go to Google’s homepage for the project: OpenSocial

In Part II in this series, I talk about how these three databases compare in some particularly crucial areas.

For instance how do the optimizers of these different database engines behave, and why does that matter?  What type of indexes are available, particularly with respect to typical applications.  I then move on to datatypes available and which are missing.  You’ll find some surprises here.

Lastly the holy grail of any modern relational database, I discuss transactional support. Relevant concepts include ACID compliance, read-only versus insert and update activity, and so on.

Recently I had some trouble with the server where all of my websites are hosted.  Business site, various blogs, there is lots of stuff on there, not to mention backups of work, email, and all sorts of things I do not really want to lose.

I first noticed the trouble when I couldn’t login through the command line.  Strangely the websites were still running.  I called the hosting company, and after talking with them for a while, managed to login as root.  That was working.  But it was acting quite odd.  There were some errors in the /var/log/messages about ssh not being able to set uid 10003, the uid of my login, shull.  I pondered.  I thought.  I sat circumspect.

I investigated for a while, and called up 1 & 1 again.  I have a root server, but they’re not really supposed to support maintaining the machine itself.  Then I got to thinking, I could spend hours diagnosing this, searching for a rootkit, but why not just jump on a new server.  Cause things just don’t feel right with this situation as it is.

So that is what I did.  I got on the phone with support later in the day, after talking for a while with the guy it at first sounded like it would cost a *LOT* more for a new server.  But that was mostly because the names of server packages had changed quite a bit.  The $100/mo one worked quite well.  I asked how long it would take to setup.  The guy was being really helpful, but then he just said the party line, 24-48 hours, he explained.  I explained the urgency.  But there wasn’t much he could do.

I got off the phone, and ordered right away.  Checking a half hour later on my order status, what to my surprise, the server is setup already!  I got down to work right away.

I switched over all nineteen domain names.  This was easy enough since 1 & 1 handles them already.  Then I went to Godaddy, the registrar, and configured the nameservers as 1 & 1 instructed.

Then I went back and started copying over all of the home directories.  Most were small, so they copied over quickly.  Even my own at 6G only took about 30 minutes.  Both servers were on their own network, easy as pie!  I then copied over the mysql databases for each of the dynmic sites, six plus blogs, a couple sugar crm instances, and two phplist email list management configs.

The great part was I had already localized everything for apache into one iheavy_sites.inc file.  All I had to do was include that in the new server’s httpd.conf, edit some directory paths, and restart apache.  There were a few little things here and there, but primarily that was it.  After a few hours the domains started working, and I was so excited to see things really working.

The new server was PHP5 and MySQL5 and things just worked.  This is just soooo good, I thought!  I still had to get mail working.  My good friend Jing went ahead and configured postfix & imap, as he is the email guru.  Not long after ask (Active Spam Killer) was installed, and I moved my Maildir into place, and voila, I’m happily sifting through my mail on my Mac OS X Mail.app client!!

While I was at it I configured the new ftp backup system so files get automatically archived there.  This is something I had been meaning to do for some time.  And while I was on the Unix Sysadmin binge, I setup a few domains and Wordpress blog for a friend who has a dance company.

All told I was really only down 24 hours, and most of that time primarily email was out.  The switch to the new server was so smooth, I barely got a headache from the whole affair.  I guess this is bound to happen once every other year if you don’t patch your systems regularly.

And like clockwork, just yesturday I got an email from 1 & 1 saying they noticed some strange and illegal pinging and packet activity coming from the old server.  Surprise surprise, it was compromised as I suspected.  I explained to them the situation, and they blocked the relevant ports.  That way I could leave the old server online for a little while longer, in case I need to get any other data off of there.

Thanks to Felix for some suggestions and advice, and thanks to Jing for email setup.  We’re back!!

Everyone waxes on and on about google’s search being so good. Don’t get me wrong, it is good. But many of our desktops are not enjoying that same goodness.

I’ve recently returned to the Macintosh world, with this Mac Book Pro I pickedup a year ago. It is a gorgeous machine in so many ways. When I first started using it, I was comparing all the things in Mac OS X to what I remembered from System 7 + 8. Believe it or not I used to program the toolbox, MacApp, Codewarrior, you name it. But I digress.

The first thing that struck me was how good Spotlight was. And how easy it was to access via Cmd-SPACE. It also struck me that it always seemed to be up-to-date, even with new files I’d just added to the system. It’s speed rivaled Unix’s locate, that I had grown to love using Linux for so many years.

That’s all changed now. It’s all part of an almost laughable past that I barely remember just one week ago, when I discovered the pornographically good Quicksilver.

What’s the big deal you say, another way to launch apps, another way to search your computer. No, this thing is much more. It’s like a whole new way to use your computer. It is so damn good at doing the right thing, that it just reduces steps, and brings you that much closer to communicating with your Mac by pure thought alone!

For starters you change the Spotlight shortcut so Quicksilver can come up with the same Cmd-SPACE you’re used to. You *MAY* wanna tweak some settings, but I didn’t have to do much. Another thing I recommend, remove all your apps from your doc, and from plain site, and use Quicksilver to launch them for a week. You’ll see what I mean. Ok, so it can launch, ok, so it can search, ok so it’s fast. What else?

Here’s an example of some of the surprises I found. Recently I spent a good number of weeks integrating my contact databases. I had one in my phone (a Sidekick which wouldn’t sync with my mac) that had mobile numbers. I had another that I was just putting together in Apple’s Addressbook, importing data from my old PINE addressbook that I had used for so many years. That had email addresses of everyone I’ve ever emailed for 15+ years. And then I had an addressbook in Sugar CRM and contacts in Linkedin. Don’t ask how I got to this sorry state of multiple database contact book madness, me being a DBA and all… Pulling these records all into Apple’s addressbook took time. It was a combination of various manual and automatic processes, massaging data, and eyeing names, for spelling inconsistencies, and redundant entries. After spending all this time, Quicksilver just illuminates my contact database. Search for a name, and the vcard comes up, you can launch addressbook, or display it in a big monster font right in the center of your screen. Of course with copy & paste at the ready! Now here’s the kicker, I went and manually indexed my old pine addressbook text file in Quicksilver, and now when there’s an entry I can’t find, that somehow never made it into the Mac Addressbook, Quicksilver will find it and display it real friendly like!! This is good.

To be fair the integration of all my messed up databases, the purchase of a blackberry which has all 2000+ entries that my Mac Addressbook does, *and* the discovery of Quicksilver all kinda happened at the same time, so that might have inflated my excitement (and don’t even get me started on why I didn’t buy an iPhone). Nah, Quicksilver brings you closer to god!

By now I know that those of you who haven’t used it are gonna go and download a copy, and the rest of you who have it installed but just don’t use it much are gonna take all your apps off the Dock and start using it everyday, right?! If you wanna learn from the horses mouth, I really recommend you check out Nicholas Jitkoff’s Google Tech Talk.

FYI, for the time being Quicksilver is only available for the Mac, though I hear Launchy is quite good on Windows.

This article was originally written while I was guest blogging over at the glorious #comments blog!