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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)

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)

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)

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)

WTF? My team uses Fortify to analyze our Java webapps (compiled on the Sun JDK and running on their JRE), which is then deployed to Linux servers running RHEL 5. HTTP connectivity for the apps is provided by Jetty; the apps themselves connect to Oracle databases (using C3P0 for connection pooling).

With Fortify 4.0, I griped that it provided no value that we didn't already get with FindBugs (for free). The 5.0 release (along with the workbench, which provides better information than the HTML report), however, did catch a few bugs which weren't caught by FindBugs. We now run both tools in our automated Hudson builds.

Where, exactly, are the Microsoft products in the above list?

Stuff like that is why, as much as I love Postgres, it isn't replacing Oracle any time soon. Not when things like partitioning are called for.

There are a number features in Oracle Spatial I'd love to have, such as support for topology, and geographic raster image data

However, I can't afford Oracle (and Oracle Spatial). Where I to lash my business to the Good Ship Oracle, I'd be signing up for years of heavy licensing fees as our requirements grow.

PostgreSQL (and PostGIS) seem like a worthwhile investment. They're improving at a rapid pace -- but not sacrificing correctness for features. The features they lack we're still able to work-around, with the anticipation that the up-front cost of missing features constitutes an investment in the product that will be paid off as the features are added, for considerably less than the cost of licensing Oracle Spatial. (That, and contributing what we can to the projects)

Of course, your mileage may vary -- For the problems we're trying to solve, I see PostgreSQL as a good investment at most scales.

Stuff like that is why, as much as I love Postgres, it isn't replacing Oracle any time soon. Not when things like partitioning are called for.

There are a number features in Oracle Spatial I'd love to have, such as support for topology, and geographic raster image data

However, I can't afford Oracle (and Oracle Spatial). Where I to lash my business to the Good Ship Oracle, I'd be signing up for years of heavy licensing fees as our requirements grow.

PostgreSQL (and PostGIS) seem like a worthwhile investment. They're improving at a rapid pace -- but not sacrificing correctness for features. The features they lack we're still able to work-around, with the anticipation that the up-front cost of missing features constitutes an investment in the product that will be paid off as the features are added, for considerably less than the cost of licensing Oracle Spatial. (That, and contributing what we can to the projects)

Of course, your mileage may vary -- For the problems we're trying to solve, I see PostgreSQL as a good investment at most scales.

Stuff like that is why, as much as I love Postgres, it isn't replacing Oracle any time soon. Not when things like partitioning are called for.

There are a number features in Oracle Spatial I'd love to have, such as support for topology, and geographic raster image data

However, I can't afford Oracle (and Oracle Spatial). Where I to lash my business to the Good Ship Oracle, I'd be signing up for years of heavy licensing fees as our requirements grow.

PostgreSQL (and PostGIS) seem like a worthwhile investment. They're improving at a rapid pace -- but not sacrificing correctness for features. The features they lack we're still able to work-around, with the anticipation that the up-front cost of missing features constitutes an investment in the product that will be paid off as the features are added, for considerably less than the cost of licensing Oracle Spatial. (That, and contributing what we can to the projects)

Of course, your mileage may vary -- For the problems we're trying to solve, I see PostgreSQL as a good investment at most scales.

Except that the first pass into HR doesn't even involve people any more. A ton of companies have put their hiring process at the mercy of automatic matching systems. Check this:

By leveraging SmartHire, organizations can deploy job or location-specific hiring templates across the enterprise, allowing rapid, flexible hiring from non-traditional locations while helping to reduce administrative costs and eliminate the need for customization. Additionally, with enhancements to the person model functionality customers may more effectively manage the non-traditional workforce, while an embedded online I-9 processing tool will help to ensure compliance and increase operational efficiency.

I dunno about you, but just the idea of going to work for a company that uses "person model functionality" to "ensure compliance and increase operational efficiency" in hiring sucks a little bit of my soul into my stomach and makes me throw up into my mouth.

As an aside, Oracle also has OCFS2 which is intended for clustering. Still needs some work, but is really pretty robust.

See Oracle Database Security Guide, http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/network.102/b14266/toc.htm If you have MetaLink access, see:
Note 67977.1 Oracle Fine Grained Access Control - Working Examples
Note 99250.1 Understanding Fine-Grained Access Control
if that does not help, open a service request and select "SECURITY" as component and get some assistance.

You don't really have to set a separate reporting database. Just set up some materialized views and give them read-only access to those views. You can control what you want them to have access to, by way of your select statements in those views, refresh the views on your decided schedules, and since they won;t be hitting the live tables, the performance impact will be lessened.

You will have to worry about Oracle client licensing for their connection, if you haven't already bought and paid for that.

Coming from an ex-Oracle DBA/Administrator background myself, I recommend setting up something like the Oracle Application Server for external users to access the database in a read-only format. That way, through the web interface, you can limit what tables can be reviewed. You could even go as far as creating certain types of search SQL statements that could be run from the portal as well (i.e. via drop downs, buttons, etc). Depending on your Oracle release, you might also want to look into the Oracle Reports server environment as well.

Oracle Application Server Overview: http://www.oracle.com/appserver/appserver_family.html
Oracle Reports Server Overview: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/reports/index.html

-- Michael

Coming from an ex-Oracle DBA/Administrator background myself, I recommend setting up something like the Oracle Application Server for external users to access the database in a read-only format. That way, through the web interface, you can limit what tables can be reviewed. You could even go as far as creating certain types of search SQL statements that could be run from the portal as well (i.e. via drop downs, buttons, etc). Depending on your Oracle release, you might also want to look into the Oracle Reports server environment as well.

Oracle Application Server Overview: http://www.oracle.com/appserver/appserver_family.html
Oracle Reports Server Overview: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/reports/index.html

-- Michael

...who are on the lookout for a new fs to entrust with keeping their precious data: make sure to check out btrfs ( http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/ ). It's a really neatly spec'd filesystem (with all the zfsish stuff like data checksumming and so on), developed by Oracle employees under GPLv2, which will feature a converter application for ext3's on-disk-format - so you can migrate from ext3 to the much more feature-packed and modern btrfs without having to mkfs anew.

On a related sidenode: I'm very happy with SGI's xfs right now. ext\d isn't the only player in the field, so please, go out and boldly evaluate available alternatives. You won't be disappointed, I promise.

I'd enjoy seeing Sun sue Linux developers or, even better, Linux users. I recall another company tried that recently and it didn't work out all that well for them.

Anyway, the point is moot as btrfs is already well on its way.

BTRFS will come and save us.

I think most people would be okay with ZFS if the license were amenable to inclusion in the Linux kernel, but right now the fact of the matter is that it's not. FUSE isn't acceptable for core functionality, so basically that means Linux doesn't have the option of using ZFS as a successor to any of the major 4 filesystems. If Sun were to change their minds about the license that would quickly change, but Sun picked the license with the specific intent of remaining incompatible with Linux so I would regard that as pretty unlikely.

But, even with Reiser gone I'm not sure the impact on reiserfs3 will be immediate. His company abandoned maintenance on it long ago, I think it's handled by someone in Suse now. It's in a precarious situation anyway, and Reiser would not address that.

Honestly though, I'm not sure the maintenance situation for XFS or JFS is so much better that they solve the problem. If you want an assurance of very good support long term, ext3 is basically your only choice.

BTRFS is the one bright spot on the horizon that I can see. It offers many of the same features as ZFS. It's likely going to be years before it's production ready, but if/when that happens it'll be enough better than the existing Linux filesystems to be the clear successor, and I think it'll be close enough to ZFS that most Linux users will stop pining for ZFS support.

Kudos to Oracle for backing the project.

Jobs is a better example of vendor lockin - he wants everything as a disposable appliance.

It's almost impossible to find a large software company with multiple products that doesn't have some open source offerings, however, even if their main products are primarily closed source. Some examples are Apple, Microsoft [also see Codeplex], Adobe and Oracle.

Probably the best example I can think of for closed source is game companies like EA, Vivendi (Blizzard), etc. Carmack and Id are the exception, not the rule in that industry.

I'm an Oracle DBA and from what I've seen sometimes people don't even know they're breaking the law. The worst case of data theft without people knowing is when they take an export of production data to development for testing. You're not allowed to do that! I've seen organisations not even know what data they have or that it should be audited. And when it was audited the level of auditing was totally insufficient. Mainly because some clown set it up and didn't understand the requirements from management, or management let some clown set it up and didn't understand the requirements themselves but were glad to hear "it has auditing enabled".

I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way but since alot of companies have been outsourcing their systems to India data theft has increased (google for 'inda data theft'). for example - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/05/india_exposed/

Heh, I saw someone on the Oracle forums post a question, "how do I take an export of Production to import to my home PC" and judging by the name... and he even mentioned he's allowed?!
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=2289794&#2289794

You can do all those things in Orace -

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14223/dimen.htm#i1006266

Distributed filesystem - Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) fits the bill.

We have a huge business mission-critical application that runs on Oracle Application Server and uses the JInitiator browser java plugin. According to Oracle, there will never be any Vista support for this, EVAR! . Basically we invested a huge effort, all for naught, and it went all down the drain. We're stuck with Windows XP to even keep this application working, at all, period. It's all going to have to be re-written completely, using a completely different database middleware platform, because at the sudden stroke of a pen, without warning, both our platform suppliers (MS and Oracle) f*cked us over at the same time with regards to continued viability of the very platform we based this system on.

Of course, if I even think of trying to remind our upper management that if we had instead chosen to develop all our stuff in-house on Open Source platforms like PostgreSQL and Apache with PHP, Perl, etc, that we'd not only NOT be in this predicament, we'd have saved tons of money wasted on expensive database licenses and be able to run everything cross platform with impunity including Linux, Apple, Windows XP, Vista and all the browsers Firefox, IE6 and IE7, Opera, Konquerer, whatever, it would all work. But all that bringing up the subject with them would do would be to get my head chopped off since management always has, and still does, summarily discount Open Source stuff as a bunch of "college kid's toy nonsense software that's not supportable in a commercial environment".

Grrrrrrrrrr.

Why would anyone develop commercial software (let alone shrinkwraped retail boxes) for Linux, given that nobody is using it on the desktop who would also buy retail software?

This is simply not true. Ever heard of these guys?

Desktop software will come, especially for gaming. It already exists, in fact, for the HL and UT engines. Penny Arcade's new game is going to be tri-platform when released.

So, really... what are you talking about?

And how is it that I get by just fine on my MBP while having purchased precisely *two* pieces of non-game commercial software -- Keynote and VMWare? NeoOffice, MacPorts, OOMMF and a host of other perfectly Mac-compatible free and Free software take care of all my needs.

Your guys can check this http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/ and this http://www.zumastor.org/

Yes, it is a safe bet that M$ bought the NASDAQ fanboys.

Other stock exchanges using and/or moving to linux? ;-) My pleasure:

New Zealand stock exchange moves from Windoze back end to Red Hat:
http://www.oracle.com/customers/snapshots/nz_exchange.pdf

Tokyo (number 2 in the world) moving to linux:
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=775707

Chicago Mercantile Exchange moved years ago...;-):
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;101366230;fp;16;fpid;0

Et cetera, et cetera! (Google is your friend!)

You could use something like Oracle Audit Vault. Yes, it's not open source and has an additional license cost over and above that for the database itself.

You'll also need someone who's not the DBA on the monitored system to run and monitor it.

But for the diversified stock-owner you dont want each and every one of your stocks weighted down by the dead fat they're trying to protect. You want lean companies generating high profits in a single area. If you wanted diverse, you'd _buy_ diverse. And then _sell_ it when a niche looked about to tank.

That's a pretty good point, but I think we can take it further.

If you're an investor, you have two ways to diversify your investments:

1. You can buy into the stocks of a wider, more diverse set of companies.
2. You can convince the companies you have shares in to diversify their business.

The former will always be easier to do--you just buy more stocks (or just go ahead and buy everything--and everything else, too.

The latter is the only option available to people who are hyper-concentrated in one company's stock and can't trade out--i.e., people who control companies that are really big.

This is not to say that diversifying a company's business makes no sense--there's no reason in principle why it can't work, and in fact, bringing many things under one roof can achieve efficiencies that separate companies can't. But the point is that there is a definite potential for a conflict of interest between majority and minority shareholders.

Diversification [within a single company] is for those with a sentimental attachment to an organization.

And here, as you can guess, I think you're wrong. If you control a company, and that company forms the bulk of your net worth, there is nothing sentimental behind your desire to diversify your business. The only way you can retain all that wealth is by holding on to your stock, and diversifying the business can protect its value.

For example, Oracle will only provide support if its installed on the RHEL version of Linux.

Yes, I am an Oracle employee, but not in the Linux division.

Hah, you're wrong. The PHB's will hear about Ubuntu's offering from their Dell sales rep and even though your app might not be supported on Ubuntu, they WILL buy it because Dell promoted it.

Remember, PHB's don't consider anything nor do they investigate. They just listen to whatever salesmen story sounds best and accept that. If Dell said that their servers that come with a turd (or a 6-ft tall Ewok) perform better than the ones without, they would also believe that even though the turd (or the Ewok) doesn't have anything to do with a computer.

Oracle does run on Ubuntu: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/linux/install/xe-on-kubuntu.html

*bad* zealot, no biscuit!

Actually, if you think you want Sharepoint, then you will really want the service upon which Sharepoint is based: Expedio (formerly owned by IntraNetSolutions). Purchased by Oracle and rebranded as "Universal Content Management",
it has serveral modules from which to choose. It has converters to convert _all_ types of document types to pdfs, indexing, workflows, web publishing...

Overview - http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/content-management/ucm/ucm.pdf
Downloads - http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/content-management/index.html

Actually, if you think you want Sharepoint, then you will really want the service upon which Sharepoint is based: Expedio (formerly owned by IntraNetSolutions). Purchased by Oracle and rebranded as "Universal Content Management",
it has serveral modules from which to choose. It has converters to convert _all_ types of document types to pdfs, indexing, workflows, web publishing...

Overview - http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/content-management/ucm/ucm.pdf
Downloads - http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/content-management/index.html

Because linux users, as a general rule, have a strong aversion to paying for a commercial product.

I keep hearing this, and more and more, I suspect it's not true, especially as corps pick up Linux and want enterprise products on their servers. I know that anecdotes don't count for crap, but I have paid plenty of money for software (even closed source!) that runs on Linux. Granted, most of that has been for games, but it's still a valid point. Besides, we're talking about a physical product here that is sold (the in car GPS device) with no relation to being able to interface it to a computer; then the company tells us you can connect it to your computer to do neat things with it. Great! Where's the free Linux client that should be available beside the free Mac and Windows client? Where does not wanting to pay money factor into the free-software-to-support-a-product-I-already-paid-for business model?

On a related note, I only use Linux at home; it covers everything I need (accounting, gaming, programming, photo management, etc). The only reasons I have Mac and Windows boxes is for my users (as both a sysadmin with users who won't use anything else, and a programmer who develops for such users). If your company doesn't offer a Linux version or doesn't have hardware that works with Linux, great, that's one less choice I have to consider. And for those who think I am limiting my choices, saying that I'm ignoring "higher quality" choices that otherwise work on other platforms, I have generally found that it's the exact opposite: if they don't support Linux, their product is usually inferior to those who do.

If you have 1 or 2 CPUs (i.e. you typically run "Standard Edition One" Oracle which limits you to 2 CPU sockets anyway), you are only charged per CPU *socket*, regardless of the number of cores per CPU - here's the details from the horse's mouth.

So a quad core single CPU server will set you back about 3,000 pounds + VAT in the UK in Oracle licencing (note: you've infuriatingly got to add 22% annual updates/support onto the base price - this is a con...you can't just buy annual updates with no support any more [used to be only 6% of purchase price...]).

Oh and in the first year, you can go to an Oracle reseller, who will typically roughly discount the updates/support (about 20%) and that discount is carried through to later years [which slightly strangely are handled by Oracle, not the reseller...].

In 2000, Daniel Phillips started developing a new Linux filesystem that
would have many of the features netapps WAFL has, and ZFS has now.

This filesystem was called Tux2.

He was quite sure that the patents NetApp had on this weren't valid,
because of prior art, and because his algorithm was quite
different and quite a bit smarter:

http://uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0010.0/0 343.html

Yet somewhere in 2002, he gave up on Tux2, presumably due to pressure
from netapp: http://lkml.org/lkml/2002/8/26/138 .

I wonder what will happen to BTRFS in light of this new NetApp
legal action: http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/

Mike.

"What is high availability to you?" That is the question HP posed in a Service Guard class I was in once. It's a valid question though. I work with mission critical hospital systems in health care and deal with high availability on a medical hosting service. This means in my particular environment, we need 24/7 operation with minimum or no downtime (
Linux HA Project
IBM HACMP (High Availability Clustered Multi-processing)
HP Service Guard for Linux (also available on HPUX)
Oracle RAC (Real Applications Cluster)

Those are some ares to start with. If you are doing Oracle, you can create a GRID compute environment which will allow for true clustering and load balancing with Oracle in a shared environment with SAN. Once thing to keep in mind is that a SAN is required for most clustering. RedHat also offers the GFS filesystem which is a true proven clusted filesystem. There is another called GPFS which has been used cross platform as well, but required licensing.

When it comes to redundant hardware for HA, make sure you support the minimum requirements for heartbeat paths depending on what clustering solution you want. If you use HACMP or Service Guard, you will likely use a SAN HB and at least 1 redundant network path. Also when using a SAN, use multiple HBAs to provide reduncancy with a multi-path software such as dm-multipath (Linux), Securepath (UNIX), HDLM (Unix), MPIO (IBM UNIX), SDD (IBM UNIX). There are plenty of documents on how to do HA under various environments. I recommend looking at some of the IBM redbooks on HACMP and on Clustering. They also have redbooks for Oracle tuning on Linux with POWER, which will give you an idea about how to do Linux Oracle clusters. If you can create a Oracle Metalink account, you can find out some of the tuning and detailed info about Oracle clusters.

I am sure there are others I am missing, but that covers the base for most clusters. The only other thing is finding a persistent messaging platform (like IBM Websphere MQ - MQ Series) to handle message passing in applications. IPC is good under UNIX for programming, but not as good with clusters, security, or transaction guarantees.

The only other thing to remember is cost. HA environments do incur costs higher than small unreliable environments. Things like mirrored drives, redundant HBAs, redundant power supplies and power feeds, redundant NICs, etc. People worry about petty things like how likely drives will fail, etc. If you architect your environment properly and build your clusters, you build around that. RAID 5 on your SAN, redundant cards, fault tolerant hardware, better reporting mechanisms (HP and IBM integrate daemons on all their OS's to report potential hardware failures with mid-range to high end servers). Look at what your SLA is and what you have provide and then look for the best, most reliable hardware and software to fit in your budget to provide that. Not everyone can buy millions in hardware and software to run a true mission critical environment.

If you look at a sample configuration using EMC hardware, the main value they seem to be adding here are patches to work around some of the tricker parts of the integration job that goes into adding that class of storage array to a Linux server. For example, the "CFQ io scheduler" issue and the "e1000 flow control" problems they have workarounds for are the sort of thing you only see when running Linux on some pretty serious hardware, and they can be very tricky to resolve. Knowing that somebody has already done that work is very helpful in this sort of situation.

You should try to install Oracle XE http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database /xe/index.html

It's a ridiculously easy install and has most the features of standard 10g database. And It's free.

Carl

Well, I don't understand all and sundry writing off folks who have created history and are impacting our lifes to quite an extent .

No, Tim understands what he *wanted* the web to be. He's a very intelligent man, but he is by no means the difinitive word on what the web means. The people that use the web are. The web is a place defined by the people who view and put content on it. Those people have found uses for the web that Berners-Lee never imagined.

If you DID READ the actual article, he simply states that web is an infrastructure and people would always be come to use the system and provide solutions which nobody(of course including him) ever imagined. All he is saying now is the Web Infrastructure is moving in a certain direction, which he chose to call as "Semantic web". This new infrastructure would provide more expressiveness, real-world information modeling , easier information integration and increasing reasoning capabilities. And of course MORE OPPORTUNITIES..... Just a small proof of his claims, prime software vendors are already moving in this direction( http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/semantic_tec hnologies/index.html/) and have solutions in place to support what is being touted as "Semantic web" This is impacting the Systems integration business in a big way already and impacting industries such as Pharma, Oil & gas , and other information intensive businesses in a major way!!! Look around and ask the right people and you'd come to know

Well, I don't understand all and sundry writing off folks who have created history and are impacting our lifes to quite an extent .

No, Tim understands what he *wanted* the web to be. He's a very intelligent man, but he is by no means the difinitive word on what the web means. The people that use the web are. The web is a place defined by the people who view and put content on it. Those people have found uses for the web that Berners-Lee never imagined.

If you DID READ the actual article, he simply states that web is an infrastructure and people would always be come to use the system and provide solutions which nobody(of course including him) ever imagined. All he is saying now is the Web Infrastructure is moving in a certain direction, which he chose to call as "Semantic web". This new infrastructure would provide more expressiveness, real-world information modeling , easier information integration and increasing reasoning capabilities. And of course MORE OPPORTUNITIES..... Just a small proof of his claims, prime software vendors are already moving in this direction( http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/semantic_tec hnologies/index.html/) and have solutions in place to support what is being touted as "Semantic web" This is impacting the Systems integration business in a big way already and impacting industries such as Pharma, Oil & gas , and other information intensive businesses in a major way!!! Look around and ask the right people and you'd come to know...

The article was a good demonstration on how much crap can be in an article. He makes up statistics, links to himself as an authority, and generally ignores a decent academic style of thought and reference. Did I mention he generally just makes up shit? Jeez, it's worse than TV commercials, at least there you expect fluff. In an article, you expect better.

There have been discussions in the Oracle space about why there aren't any good Oracle blogs. Well, there are a few. They generally have useful examples of how to actually do stuff, rather than blowhard opinions. (google Jonathan Lewis blog for an example of how to do a technical blog right).

Personally, I think there are uses for usenet, BBS style fora, blogs, wikis, in-depth articles, and the traditional modes of communication. Stupidity ensues when people try to inappropriately enforce the rules for one communication medium in another. (And sometimes the converse, http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messag eID=1842567&#1842567 being a classic example).

Not necessarily; NTFS is both in the kernel AND in FUSE. However, the kernel version is less full-featured than the user-space version (ntfs-3G); because of lack of manpower and that author strict quality control - the old NTFS driver ate filesystems.

That said, I can't see ZFS ever being in the kernel - even licensing problems aside; its a HUGE layering violation. Some say they can do a ZFS without the layering problem; an ambitious project - btrfs exists to try do exactly that. Of course its nowhere near done (currently it'll oops if the filesystem gets full, among other things) - but its one to keep an eye on.

There's a Linux filesystem under development that might be able to compare favourably with ZFS if shown some love by developers:

* http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/
* http://kerneltrap.org/node/8376

Avoid the license squabbles and do what we do best: build it ourselves, only better.

Oracle is running it's products under Linux and it is all closed source.

In fact, development of new versions are done on Linux and then ported to other platforms. Here is a good starting page if you are interested in seeing how and what s done by Oracle on Linux, both closed and open source: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/linux/index. html

Imaging you have a huge medical database on several servers and are running out of disk space.

zpool add oraclefs mirror c1t1d0 c2t1d0

With Oracle you can use ASM to manage the raw devices while the database is running. Most real databases including Oracle and PostgreSQL allow you to manage tablespaces online.

Re the "very very very important question of where it comes from" and RDF, ...

See the RDF query spec, SPARQL, specifically the "FROM" clause in the query language.

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/#specDataset

Section "8.3.1 Accessing Graph Names" ...take a look at the example query there:

PREFIX foaf:

SELECT ?src ?bobNick
FROM NAMED
FROM NAMED
WHERE
    {
        GRAPH ?src
        { ?x foaf:mbox .
            ?x foaf:nick ?bobNick
        }
    }

The spec gives the resultset table, which basically says that according to http://example.org/foaf/aliceFoaf the nickname is "Bobby", and according to http://example.org/foaf/bobFoaf the nickname is "Robert".

It's a mistake (although understandable ... better tutorials and demos are needed) to assume that RDF and SemWeb ignore this problem space.

There's an online SPARQL demo at http://xmlarmyknife.org/api/rdf/sparql/query and another at http://librdf.org/query to get a feel for how some of this stuff works. There are also tools like SquirrelRDF and D2RQ that wrap existing (SQL, LDAP, ...) datasources and make them look like SPARQL too, so your apps can be couched in terms of globally-used schemas rather than per-datasource schemas. It's also worth keeping an eye on what Oracle have been up to ... http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/semantic_tec hnologies/index.html ... no SPARQL yet but some serious RDF support.

When I took my last Oracle class, the instructor told me they were finalizing a new set of Linux classes. I just hopped over to their web site and did a search on linux and it came up with a few classes they offer.

All the classes I have taken from them have been for the database, or Peoplesoft. They all were built around hands on labs with instruction. They are not cheap. My last RAC class cost $3700 for 5 days.

I can't recommend the Linux classes, as I have never taken them, but just thought I would mention that they are out there. I don't know about availability location wise either, but I would assume that eventually they will be available wherever Oracle training is available - which should mean choices in many countries.

Seems I tend to agree somewhat with one of the more offensive posters:

1. Whatever I read on /., the 'daily reboots' of Linux isn't exactly what I remember w.r.t. your 'lots of comments'.

2. If that chap asked a question, why cite what you (wrongly, as is) think that others were saying ? Instead of giving your own opinion and experience ?

3. Finally, it's well known that Linux is not yet ready to used be an 'enterprise' OS with heavy DB access.
Is there somehow anything that you know about databases, or are you back in the mere realms of assumption ? The largest databases ('enterprise') could be running DB2 or Oracle. Miraculously, both run on Linux:
http://www.oracle.com/technologies/linux/index.htm l
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/linux/