Slashdot Mirror

They contribute to a few projects but not a lot, mainly kernel work take a look at http://oss.oracle.com/

http://www.oracle.com/technologies/linux/linux-tech-leadership-contributions.html

I wonder how long it will take Oracle to pretty much give the middle finger to HP and Dell hardware partnerships in favor of the soon-to-be-released OracleFire "product-in-the-box" line...

It already exists... In partnership with HP :)

Oracle Exadata

I imagine that'll soon go the way of the dodo, and get replaced with some Sun kit.

Java is far from safe. The language will continue to exist, but the platform will most likely stop developing. Oracle has never shown commitment to Open Source.

BerkeleyDB?

Not the whole site...

See: http://www.oracle.com/sun/index.html

They already have one. It's called Oracle Express Edition., so I don't think MySQL is too important to them, other than removing a competitor.

What would be interesting is the hardware and OS angle. When you control the hardware and O/S, it becomes a lot easier to support (ask Apple), and offers customers a single vendor to call when something breaks.

General inquiries
+1.800.ORACLE1

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/contact/index.html

*ducks*

I once wrote a shareware app. The shareware version just had a nag screen when you started the program and some minor functionality disabled. If you registered my program, you got a registration code which you entered along with your name. All the code was a simple hash of the name that resulted in about 5 or 6 digits (no 42 digit hex numbers here). When registering, the program would store the name and checksum in its .INI file.

I didn't care how many computers you installed on, or even how many people were using it concurrently. In fact, you could just copy the .INI file to another computer and it would work just fine. I think my help file even had instructions for doing just this.

All of this was trivially hackable, and there was nothing preventing someone from distributing the program with an already registered .INI file. The trick was, the name and checksum "branded" your copy. All of the window titles included your name in them, so if you redistributed it, the "registered" copies would also have your name in them.

This actually worked pretty well. I got plenty of registrations, even though the registration process was only check or money order and snail-mail (before the internet thingie was invented by Al Gore)

It still works. The best selling game of all time, Doom2, was released with no DRM. JP Software has been selling replacement Windows shells for 15 years using the same branding method. And you can download the latest enterprise edition of Oracle for any platform without any restrictions whatsoever. And Oracle isn't cheap.

Whenever I recommend software to clients, any crappy licensing DRM scheme that I might have to deal with later results in automatic disqualification.

Good DBAs aren't cheap and MySQL is needs more developer time to work around its limitations than any other database (in my humble opinions).

I like Oracle a lot, but I'm not sure I buy your argument that there is a cost savings realized by using it.

Here is a TCO analysis that we must obviously take with several heaping grains of salt considering its source, but it puts the numbers to my thoughts on the subject.

Oracle RAC is monumentously expensive, so if you can get away with MySQL cluster, I think it's advisable in many circumstances.

The TCO comparison from MySQL doesn't even address DBA time, which as you thoughtfully pointed out, is not cheap. But have you ever been to an Oracle shop that lacked a small army of expensive Oracle DBAs?

For what it's worth, most of my clients (i.e. the ones who can afford me) use Oracle, and feel compelled to point out that I've sure seen my share of hacks needed to make Oracle behave, too. ;)

I can't believe there hasn't been any mention of Berkeley DB yet. Guess what, folks: sometimes you just don't need the features of a full relational database. Sometimes all you need is fast, robust, reliable storage of indexed key/value pairs.

I can attest that Berkeley DB does exactly that, and does it really, really well. We use Berkeley DB for all of the data storage in the Citadel system, including the mailboxes themselves. Some sites have tens of gigabytes or even hundreds of gigabytes of data, and Berkeley DB just keeps chugging along, happily and reliably doing its thing. Our biggest problem? People who point at it and say "storing email in a database is unreliable" because they know it constantly explodes when Exchange does it. Well guess what, folks: Berkeley DB ain't the Exchange database (actually, maybe Exchange wouldn't be so unreliable if they switched to Berkeley DB).

Eschewing the full set of RDBMS features isn't slacking. It's choosing the right tool for the job.

A database management system is nothing but a fancy filesystem with structured files

And some databases come with their own built-in filesystem drivers!
http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/performance/pdf/TWP_Oracle_HP_files.pdf

One here and another here. Both are for older versions (3&4) of RHEL but the same principles apply.

As someone who works with Oracle RAC and RHEL regularly, I'd recommend skipping the shared physical disk completely and using NFS instead. You could (and we do in testing) run the NFS server virtualised as well.

Oracle already has a number of guides to building a cheap Oracle RAC setup. One of the more interesting ones used a firewire device that could support multiple logins. Thus creating a cheap and fast shared storage device to use for ASM and OCFS. The article is here: http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/hunter_rac10gr2.html. The setup here was only a 2 node system. I'm not sure if these cheap firewire drives can handle 3 logins. There is another guide for doing iSCSI, although I would think the firewire setup would be cheaper and faster.

Reading 'cayenne8', I can't help but imagine a V8 Porsche, and because I'm a car guy, for good or bad, this shifts the focus of my comment toward resources, specifically what is available, versus what is acceptable or tolerable.

Let's say you're a one-man Lab, incorporating all the SA, Developer, and Midware functions into your 'play' with this environment. How much time will each environment spend heavily plowing into loads?

If your intent is to deploy RAC in a multitude of scenarios, in short order, with a minimum of intervention, you may be able to get away with $1500 to $2500 worth of NewEgg parts (think high throughput - RAID, Max. RAM, Short access times, etc.) and the virtualization technology of your choice. Personally, I find VirtualBox capable of everything I need as far as virtualization and deployment goes, however, you need to be able to leverage 'fencing', with likely puts you into VMWare territory.
Fortunately, VMWare Server is 'free', and CentOS and OpenSuSE support some of the more advanced features of HA on Linux. Then again, if we're looking at resources as a major factor, then Redhat and Novell might be worth looking at, as they both offer 60 to 90-day evaluation licenses for their Enterprise Linux products, which may offer a prettier and more 'honest' (per the documentation and common expectations) implementation of their respective HA features than the freely-available, and in some cases, in-flux versions of the same software.

As far as RAC goes, take a look at the requirements for RAC, per Oracle's installation guidelines,, and size/spec from there. I believe you can get away with 16GB - total, if you have the capability to size the VM's memory access, or otherwise configure the amount of addressable memory, or put uo with or hack Oracle's RAC installation pre-flight. There is also valuable documentation available on your chosen OS vendor's sit, which may even be Oracle, who knows..

You may be hell-bent on performance, however, and you may be looking for the ultimate grasp of technological perfection, as it exists at Sun Mar 22 17:29:59 EDT 2009. In this case, you may want to look at Xen, which is available on Solaris as their 'xVM' technology, as well as on various Linuxes and BSDs.
On the other hand, you may be a Mac guy, with a decked-out Octo-core Xeon Mac Pro, where you have the option of Parallels and Virtual PC and something else, in addition to Sun's VirtualBox mentioned above.

Ultimately, things to keep in mind may be shared disk requirements, fencing options, and VM disk and memory access.
YMMV

You can find lots of used servers on eBay that you can mess around with. Sun's v20z servers are pretty cheap and have a decent amount of power.

A lot of the stuff I've run across is rack mounted and keep in mind that rack mounted servers are loud in most cases. So it may not be the best thing to play around with in your home or office.

You don't really need any special CPU to mess around with virtualization, you won't get "full" virtualization but I don't think that will stop you. For more info check out, this page.

I'm currently running a number vm's in my desktop using Sun'x VirtualBox (xVM) whatever they're calling it now. Even within some of the solaris VM's I'm running solaris containers so I'm doing virtualization upon virtualization and my processor doesn't have Virtualization technology support.

If you want to do full virtualization look for server class CPUs. Xeons and Opterons. Using Newegg's power search there is an option to filter by CPU's that support virtualization technology.

If you're primary focus is Oracle RAC, you may want to look at Oracle VM which is Xen based.

IBM does understand what it means to deliver a fault tolerant system with hot standby spread over different sites.

Never heard of Oracle Data Guard then?

Tried Oracle Linux a few years ago. Now, I am a customer of Oracle, what might I perhaps want to use it for? Perhaps to run an Oracle database?

Apparently not to Oracle. Getting the installer to work involved wading through various technotes, installing obscure RPMs, dependency hell, etc. Installing it on Ubuntu was actually a lot easier, and it isn't even supported.

And don't get me started about support. Oracle Metalink now requires flash to work at all. I mean, it is sort of like using GIMP to edit text files.

Nice - Thought you might have!

Btw - Thanks for sharing the config, VM parameter tuning is still a black art. (A fun little black art.)

Have you tried the JRockit realtime JRE? It is REALLY nice, it makes Eclipse feel snappier than most C++ programs on my box. It's a free download too. It's worth it if you can toss 100-200 extra MB at the IDE. Link: http://blogs.oracle.com/hirt/2008/08/running_eclipseworkshop_on_jro.html

If it does lock up you have to kill all the processes, resulting in lost data.

That doesn't sound right. You should complain to the network administers. NFS is supposed to be robust against server overloads and even reboots. (I recall one story about how a client machine dutifully waited six months for a damaged server to be shut down and shipped across the country and back for repairs.)

That said, nfs4 works well for us. POHMELFS and CRFS look even more promising.

Furthermore... they seem to be trying to patent what TopLink was already doing prior to 1996.

For those who care, TopLink has now been opensourced as EclipseLink

re needing Oracle EE + Dataguard to get a standby database - you can still get a standby database with SE - DataGuard is just the framework that that makes managing a configuration easier, but with SE you can still set everything up manually ie configure remote log_archive_dest, and manually manage the standby ("recover managed standby database disconnect from session;") and failover.

Also, with 11g, RAC is now included with SE, but an option on EE (go figure).

see http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/oracle11g/pdf/database-11g-product-family-technical-whitepaper.pdf

Coherence gives you all the magic you would want to have were you starting to put together high powered hashmap. Does key/value pairs, across multiple machines, with cache invalidation, etc. It also lets you perform interesting queries on the cache. It also can front end hibernate or other databases and act as a cache there too. It also works better than then most http session stores. It also.... Gah. This is one of my favorite JARs in my toolkit.

Which is why fusion-io is different from normal SSDs. The devices have 20% or more spare capacity and use a log-based FS with block mapping, so your writes don't go through the read/erase/rewrite cycle.

Obviously there is a little slowdown once the 20% has been used up and it goes into garbace-collection mode, but there are plenty of white papers around about steady-state usage (ie once it has started GC) and you can opt to use even less of the physical capacity in order to get more performance. See http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/performance/pdf/OracleFlash15.pdf for example.

IBM and Apache effectively in control of Java in the server space.

Define control? Tomcat is the defacto standard servlet container but anyone (including Sun employees) is free to contribute to it.
Big Blue historically had the edge is terms of Java EE containers for buying from a single vendor. That aside I'd rate Oracle and Red Hat ahead of them.
Last I checked Spring and Hibernate weren't Apache projects either...

Pick any of:

http://www.kdevelop.org/
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/index.html
http://www.eclipse.org/
Borland's

etc...

I'll try to answer your question without the key info needed: "What is the data your modeling?"

You're on the right track...

Either way, from experience i'd say you're answer is "this just one of those situations where customization has to fill a gap"

Be warned though, out of the box solutions do exactly what's on the box. Anything else is going to be modeled by you, or customized (usually at a high rate), by the vendor.

That being said, I've used oracles' solution http://www.oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/index.html for financial data (10TB data), and used my own solution to my music recommendation database http://www.egusta.com/ (43gb Data).

At the end of the day, I like using my own custom solution. And by the fact that you're familiar with Ruby (I checked out your site), I'd say you're on the right track already.

EMC IRM (Formerly Authentica (yes, there is a typo in the summary))

Oracle IRM (Formerly SealedMedia)

Liquid Machines

Adobe LifeCycle Rights Management

As does Oracle

Oracle Information Rights Management

As does EMC, and a few others... Do shop around, as there are several products out there that can 'tether' assets - not just Microsoft Office documents too.

...it no wonder MySQL sucks if he can admit on the one hand it's bugridden (not in those words, sure) and then say at the same time, it's ready for general production usage.

I think that just brings it up to the major leagues. I mean Oracle managed to ship production versions of its DB with developer's home directory hardcoded into startup script which without modifications would not allow you to start DB. How does something like THAT pass QA?

-Em

I have never encountered any *gaping* holes in the to_char/to_date documentation.

Granted, overlooking some obscure detail in the quite ramble-on-y Format Model specification linked from all the conversion functions ( which would go on over 19 pages if printed out ) is quite possible.

At least there you can still threaten your boss with "If you do $THING, then I will set the standard number format to Roman, and the standard Date format to Japanese Imperial" ;-P

sorry, but either you're doing it wrong, or you didn't notice the part where i said it's not an out-of-box solution. it requires actual thought, planning, direction, testing, etc. i'll assume you were trying Oracle in a virtual environment in order to run multiple OS instances on one machine? in most of the successful implementations that i've heard of, this is not how it's done. you use the virtual environment for its scalability, it's HA features (think vmotion, etc), and so on. it's not so you can squeeze that 10% load fileserver in as a VM.....

take the following with a grain of salt: http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2007/11/ten-reasons-why.html

i seriously have to wonder if your response is just a case of poor implementation, or if you're a default-answer-is-no person, or if you're on the "DBs suxor in VMs, d00d" bandwagon, like many are on the "i hate M$" bandwagon....(or maybe you work on Oracle VM?)

anyway, the success stories that i'm aware of all included DB architects, SAN architects, VMware gurus, linux and windows gurus, and a formal plan, with the correct hardware implementation (including fiber, new multi-cpu multicore servers, many hundreds of gigs of RAM, and so on... i guess better luck next time?

The best non-FOSS documentation I have used lately is Oracles.

Example for the 10G starting directory

Aside from the actual WORKING search functionality (which gives you a list in of "books" in which the search term occured with numbers of hits first, so that you can go to the relevant "book" when the search term is something ambiguous like "format" instead a long list of maybe or maybe not relevant links).

I never found the right thing on MSDN unless I stumble upon it via a Google search, Oracle usually gives the Description of a feature, some overview where it is uses and some examples with each feature. So once you are on the HTML page of the particular feature you are interested in you basically can get all the Information from that single page. Take for example a direct comparison between the commands to format a number into a string.

to_char (Oracle) found in about 20 seconds on the web page itself either by browsing by function or searching.

After two minutes I managed to get here in MSDN trying to find the command to format numbers in SQL Server, but haven't found the exact command yet, only an overview about "string functions" but the right one doesn't seem to be in this category.

I even know the command is "format".. something, but I cant browse there directly, since I don't know in what CATEGORY in those open/closable subdirectories they put it in.

The quickly scrollable and searchable HTML indexes of Oracle's online help are much easier to manage.

The best non-FOSS documentation I have used lately is Oracles.

Example for the 10G starting directory

Aside from the actual WORKING search functionality (which gives you a list in of "books" in which the search term occured with numbers of hits first, so that you can go to the relevant "book" when the search term is something ambiguous like "format" instead a long list of maybe or maybe not relevant links).

I never found the right thing on MSDN unless I stumble upon it via a Google search, Oracle usually gives the Description of a feature, some overview where it is uses and some examples with each feature. So once you are on the HTML page of the particular feature you are interested in you basically can get all the Information from that single page. Take for example a direct comparison between the commands to format a number into a string.

to_char (Oracle) found in about 20 seconds on the web page itself either by browsing by function or searching.

After two minutes I managed to get here in MSDN trying to find the command to format numbers in SQL Server, but haven't found the exact command yet, only an overview about "string functions" but the right one doesn't seem to be in this category.

I even know the command is "format".. something, but I cant browse there directly, since I don't know in what CATEGORY in those open/closable subdirectories they put it in.

The quickly scrollable and searchable HTML indexes of Oracle's online help are much easier to manage.

Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that's free to develop, deploy, and distribute; fast to download; and simple to administer.
...
Oracle Database XE can be installed on any size host machine with any number of CPUs (one database per machine), but XE will store up to 4GB of user data, use up to 1GB of memory, and use one CPU on the host machine.

Oracle also has eval versions of most other software at OTN, but there's no activation or any of that crap. Licensing is controlled by legal means, not technical measures. When Oracle buys other proprietary software vendors, the first thing the company does after change-in-control is give away unlimited-use licenses (aka disable licensing as much as can easily be done). The second thing the company does is rip out licensing entirely in the next version of the product.

And yes, I'm an Oracle employee, posting AC because I'm not authorized to speak for the company.

Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that's free to develop, deploy, and distribute; fast to download; and simple to administer.
...
Oracle Database XE can be installed on any size host machine with any number of CPUs (one database per machine), but XE will store up to 4GB of user data, use up to 1GB of memory, and use one CPU on the host machine.

Oracle also has eval versions of most other software at OTN, but there's no activation or any of that crap. Licensing is controlled by legal means, not technical measures. When Oracle buys other proprietary software vendors, the first thing the company does after change-in-control is give away unlimited-use licenses (aka disable licensing as much as can easily be done). The second thing the company does is rip out licensing entirely in the next version of the product.

And yes, I'm an Oracle employee, posting AC because I'm not authorized to speak for the company.

Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that's free to develop, deploy, and distribute; fast to download; and simple to administer.
...
Oracle Database XE can be installed on any size host machine with any number of CPUs (one database per machine), but XE will store up to 4GB of user data, use up to 1GB of memory, and use one CPU on the host machine.

Oracle also has eval versions of most other software at OTN, but there's no activation or any of that crap. Licensing is controlled by legal means, not technical measures. When Oracle buys other proprietary software vendors, the first thing the company does after change-in-control is give away unlimited-use licenses (aka disable licensing as much as can easily be done). The second thing the company does is rip out licensing entirely in the next version of the product.

And yes, I'm an Oracle employee, posting AC because I'm not authorized to speak for the company.

It's a big-a$$ data warehousing appliance, apparently good for OLTP also, if you need an OLTP app that big.

More details here: http://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/2008/09/24/oracle-exadata-storage-server-software-part-i/
and here: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/017553_EN.doc

Target market seems to be big companies that don't want the usual hassle of configuring storage+hardware+RAC+consultants to make it all work together.

Which means a lot of low-end 1U servers. Not exactly a lot of computer power.

You could have gone one step further and actually read the specs before deriding them...

8-HP Proliant DL360 G5 database servers, with
2 quad-core Intel Xeon Processor E5430 (2.66GHz)
32GB memory
1-HP InfiniBand Dual Port HCA
4-146GB SAS 10K hard disk drives
4-24-port InfiniBand switches

14-HP Exadata Storage Server Hardware--each is an HP ProLiant DL180 G5, with
2 quad-core Intel Xeon Processor E5430 (2.66GHz)
8GB memory
1-HP InfiniBand Dual Port HCA
12-300GB SAS or 12-1TB SATA disk drives

Now I won't argue that Sun doesn't put out more robust hardware (for that matter HP does, the DL line is far from their top end), but this is not exactly 'low end' computing power here...

It would be nice if submitters took a moment to find some actual information, instead of just submitting the first (usually content free) blurb that they see. A tiny amount of Googling would have turned up this Oracle product page with full technical specs.

It's worth mentioning that this product is not a computer. It's a 42U rack stuffed 8 dbms servers, 14 storage servers, and 4 switches. Which means a lot of low-end 1U servers. Not exactly a lot of computer power. One or two 4U dbms servers and 3 or 4 4U storage servers (like Sun's X4600 and X4500 boxes) would seem more to the point.

I've never seen a relevant test, but I would expect that a contract that attempts to stifle the freedom of speech of one its parties would be very difficult to enforce, except in very specific circumstances. Such circumstances would probably include stuff like near-equality of bargaining power between the parties, which isn't the case here (where there's a producer/consumer relationship). Contracts that cannot be simply terminated without leaving behind residual obligations are harder to form, too.

FWIW, contracts that purport to restrict one party's freedom of speech (unilaterally, even in click-through licenses) are very common. In particular, prohibiting the publication of any timing or benchmark results is a common license clause (see, e.g., http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/popup-license/instant_client_lic.html (6) or most big database and a lot of other software packages).

Mysql has manuals online, as does postgresql and Oracle.

You just need to add the right repo's (to get oracle xe)

deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free

to /etc/apt/sources.list and then:

# wget http://oss.oracle.com/el4/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle -O- | sudo apt-key add -
# apt-get update
# apt-get install oracle-xe

You just need to add the right repo's (to get oracle xe)

deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free

to /etc/apt/sources.list and then:

# wget http://oss.oracle.com/el4/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle -O- | sudo apt-key add -
# apt-get update
# apt-get install oracle-xe

if i read the oracle express license correctly

" License Rights
We grant you a nonexclusive, nontransferable limited license to use the programs for: (a) purposes of developing, prototyping and running your applications for your own internal data processing operations; "

Note: Limited, Maybe even a time limit? Not sure.
Note: Internal, that more or less excludes running it you web shop.

Free as in beer, but very limited.

Astroturf warning: I'm an Oracle employee, but I don't work in the group that develops Oracle VM.

Astroturf warning: I'm an Oracle employee, but I don't work in the group that develops Oracle VM.

But it actually does run Linux.

Here's the first link I got after a quick search:
http://www.oracle.com/global/eu/rd/fs/cern-lhc-and-rac.html

1) Download and Install JDeveloper

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/jdev/index.html

2) Think of a project to code. For instance, write a program to snag web pages and store them in a database.

3)Code

4) Read "Thinking in Java"

For christ's sake. At least link to the fucking Oracle page.

If I wanted to read ZDNet, I'd just go to fucking ZDNet.

Why isn't this sort of audit logging (changing, data changing, etc.) built in to the database engine automatically, with a few configuration options available?

It is in Oracle:

• Overview of Database Auditing
• Configuring and Administering Auditing
• Database Auditing: Security Considerations
• Auditing Table Changes Using Flashback Transaction Query
• DBMS_FGA

(you might need to create a free login to view these)