Oracle + Open Source
two worlds inexorably colliding

For a while the new features in database automation had some DBAs scared that their jobs would somehow become obsolete in short order.

Paul Boutin’s recent article in Valley Wag discusses Robert Cringley’s declaration of the Death of the Database  that has everyone all excited.  At root is the idea of cloud computing, and the likes of the Google’s of the world storing all of our data, and managing all the dirty messy database storage seemlessly for us.

Yes, I’ll give you that for many applications, and small websites, this will certainly be the future.  Who wants to manage a database for every website.  But for the large clients of Oracle databases, the terrabyte datastores, datawarehouses, Oracle applications, and Financials, the backend datastore will remain a requirement.  This isn’t necessarily because a third party can’t do the job better, or that it wouldn’t make a business sleep better at night leaving the database management to the experts.   Nor is it that security couldn’t be implemented properly, to make the data available only to the business, and invisible to the prying eyes of the DBAs down the line.  No all of those problems are solvable.

The problem is one of handing over the keys to the kingdom.  Take the worldwide GPS system, for example.   Currently Europeans, Russians, and Chinese alike rely on a US built satellite system for GPS service.  Imagine military operations relying on US technology were the US to get into a scuffle with the Russians or the Chinese.  In the end business wants to see their data, if not physically, then confident of where those servers are, and who touches the data, the hardware, the backups etc.

I do agree with Cringley and Boutin that cloud computing will change things, and continue to put pressure on the big database vendors like Oracle, but I don’t think it’ll put them out of business anytime soon.

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!

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.

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!!

Although this years event was huge, and as such a bit of a jumble at times, I enjoyed it very much.  I made many many new contacts this year, spontaneous hellos, introductions, business connections, and so on.

There is a *LOT* of new stuff going on in the Oracle space, what with various new acquisitions, and no one person probably understands it all.

I’ll also say that I ran into an incredible number of new terms which I like to think of as reframing, or looking at things in a new way.  You might also call them buzzwords, so take your pick.  Some you may have heard before, some appear in a new context, and some are old and familiar.  At any rate go ahead,  mull over them and digest:

• information fabric
• information as a service
• service oriented architecture
• what’s the cookbook for doing that?
• oracle by example
• business process management - from order to cash
• extreme transaction processing
• data virtualization
• coherence
• data masking
• it comes baked in or built in
• moving from reactive to proactive
• we can triage their problem
• the democratic, approachable, modern leader
• preintegrated
• comprehensive
• hot pluggable
• go around the corner to find the treasure of an idea
• drinking the open-source koolaid

So long Oracle OpenWorld, see you in 2008!!

Well, Oracle has definitely drank the web 2.0 koolaid. It’s exciting to see it happen. From a new wiki, to a video cast, and even an unconference!

OTN has also been podcasting for some time via the OTN Techcasts which I like. We even see some twittering, and meeting with bloggers.  I also see an Oracle user on twitter, and Justin Kestelyn.

Overall I think Oracle’s moves to promote social networking and transparency are good ones.  Perhaps it will be widgets and OpenSocial next, or maybe mashups!!

It seems that Friedman’s “flat world” is now doctrine.

Certainly The World Is Flat is a powerful book, and a powerful idea about what is happening to our global marketplace of ideas, products, and services. But once something becomes a marketing slogan you know it has reached another level of headiness, and universal application. Folks in technology may have had a particular propensity toward those ideas because of such outsourcing pressures on our skills in recent years.

But hold on, haven’t you heard about the new trend? The world is *not* flat, or so says the Economist, after reading Pankaj Ghemawat new book Redefining Global Strategy: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter. I agree wholeheartedly. Granted the pressure to outsource has been felt, but if economic numbers are to be trusted, it is quite small as a percentage of the whole, and now it seems the pendulum is swinging back the other way.

Rob Preston at Information Week argued something similar, that “The new ‘Flat World’ tilts back and forth and does not stay horizontal for long!”

Still it looks cool as a slogan on a stairwell anyway… Cheers!!

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.

SQL can be tricky. Here’s a way to display date based summations across one row of output…

Suppose you have quarterly totals for 2006 like this:

SELECT TO_CHAR(orderdt, 'Q') Q, sum (price) the_total
FROM my_orders
WHERE orderdt >= '01-JAN-2006'
AND orderdt < '01-JAN-2007'
GROUP BY TO_CHAR(orderdt, 'Q')
ORDER BY 1;


The results would be like this:


Q THE_TOTAL
- -----------
1 1000
2 1500
3 1300
4 2000


Now let’s throw some SUM and DECODE functions into the mix.


SELECT
SUM (DECODE(TO_DATE(orderdt, 'Q'), '1', sale_price, 0)) Q1,
SUM (DECODE(TO_DATE(orderdt, 'Q'), '2', sale_price, 0)) Q2,
SUM (DECODE(TO_DATE(orderdt, 'Q'), '3', sale_price, 0)) Q3,
SUM (DECODE(TO_DATE(orderdt, 'Q'), '4', sale_price, 0)) Q4
FROM my_orders
WHERE orderdt > '01-JAN-2006'
AND orderdt < '01-JAN-2007'
GROUP BY TO_CHAR(orderdt, 'Q');


Results would then look formated I think how you would like:


Q1         Q2         Q3         Q4
---------- ---------- ---------- ----------
1000       1500       1300       2000


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.

This is the fifth in a series of abstracts I’ve submitted for the Collaborate 2008 conference in Denver CO.
There are healthy databases and their are unhealthy ones. We’ll take a look at what you feed your database, and how to keep it fit with just the right diet of hardware, configuration, and SQL query tuning.

1. Introduction - Diet of a Champion Database
2. Disk, Memory, CPU - Body by Intel
3. Applications - Lean & Fit
4. SQL Queries - High Fiber, Low Fat
5. Conclusions

This is the fourth in a series of abstracts I’ve submitted for Collaborate 2008 in Denver CO.
As an independent consultant for twelve years, I’ve encountered a lot of interesting and challenging projects. I’ll discuss five different cases, and what lessons I took away from each.

1. Intro
2. The Right Hardware
3. Importance of Good Testing
4. Patchwork or Good Design
5. Don’t Mix Opposites
6. Use The Technology
7. Conclusion

This is the third in a series of abstracts I’ve submitted for Collaborate 2008 in Denver CO.

Security is on everyone’s radar these days. You may be wondering yourself whether your database systems are really as secure as they should be. We’ll discuss some of the latest vulnerabilities, and what you can do to protect your systems.

1. Introduction
2. Authentication
3. Privilege Escalation
4. SQL Injection
5. OS Security
6. Network Security
7. Conclusions

This is the second in a series of abstracts I’ve submitted for the Collaborate 2008 conference in Denver CO.

A little known fact is that Oracle’s standby technology - the stuff DataGuard is built on top of - is available in Standard Edition of Oracle. With a little elbow grease, and some simple scripts, we can have a rudimentary and functioning HA solution in Oracle SE.

1. Intro
2. Anatomy of a Standby Database
3. What’s there in Oracle SE
4. Setup standby
5. Shipping logs
6. Applying logs
7. Verifying setup
8. Manual Failover
9. Conclusions

This is the first in a series of abstracts I’ve submitted for Collaborate 2008 in Denver CO.

Marketing is one thing, bulletproof technology is quite another. Operating Systems have bugs, Database Software has bugs, and so does your application, probably. A better question is how hackable are you? We’ll look at some of the nefarious ways intruders can get in, so you’ll better know how secure your systems really are.

1. Unbreakable As a Pie In the Sky
2. OS level
3. Database level
4. Application level
5. Conclusions

If you’re interested in how these three databases measure up in terms of feature sets, take a look at part one in a two part series I wrote over at Database Journal.

I discuss stored procedures, views, materialized views or snapshots, triggers, and security. Stored procedures and functions are supported on all three databases, as are views and triggers. Although MySQL and Postgres aren’t there in terms of default snapshot support, there are ways to get that functionality in a somewhat roundabout way.

Security is always a tricky question, as all the bugs out there aren’t always publicized. It’s sort of a cat and mouse game. All three databases support user based authentication to login to the database, and various privilege levels to control access to objects and data. Oracle also supports FGA or fine grained access control for column level control.

That said I might tend to say that open-source products in general have better security, their source being an open book and all.