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Sun Announces Support for PostgreSQL

jadavis writes "Sun announces 24x7 support for PostgreSQL on Solaris 10. From the article: 'Today Sun announced that it will be integrating the Postgres open source data base into the Solaris 10 OS and providing world-wide 24x7 support for customers who wish to develop and deploy open source database solutions into their enterprise environments. Sun is working with the PostgresSQL community to take advantage of the advanced technologies in the Solaris 10 OS, such as Predictive Self-Healing, Solaris Containers and Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace).'"

8 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Progressive... by pedestrian+crossing · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What's next, will solaris understand cursor keys? Ship with BASH? What's the world comming to?

    Solaris has shipped with bash for quite a while now...

    --
    A house divided against itself cannot stand.
  2. An honest question. by jez9999 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Who uses Solaris 10?

  3. Re:Progressive... by mabinogi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    hmm...they must've (must have - that bothers me too ;) ) changed their pricing. Part of the reason we switched to Dell years ago, was that for the price of the support on our Sun machine, we could buy a whole new Dell machine every year....

    Besides - With Sun we were paying all that money and never had to make use of it - with Dell, you regularly get to feel like you're getting something for your support money ;)

    --
    Advanced users are users too!
  4. Re:Progressive... by WindBourne · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Sun's PHBs move in mysterious ways.

    Actually, they don't. What is going on, is a inside fight.

    There is a group there that fears MS (rightly so). They think that dealing with MS is dealing with the devil. They really want to crush them at all costs. This group pushes Sun towards the OSS path. The group is also responsible for the approach with OpenOffice as well as Java. Problem is, that MS won the desktop sometime ago, and is entrenched. Taking it back is a very difficult thing to do. As to server space, They do not see MS is taking from them (probably right). That group is helping linux.

    The other group sees Linux taking from them (rightly so). Linux has been eating up server space. They are taking away from Solaris. This group did open solaris as a way of winning very lucrative support contracts and hopefully to sell hardware. One of the keys here is to try and make Solaris more like Linux. So they are trying to adopt a number of OSS and claim that they deserve the OSS worlds support. What is interesting is that they are starting to support BSD (I am not sure if they are looking to take it over or as support against Linux; more like a long-term trojan horse).

    So what does it mean? That Sun is like any other large firm. There are multiple fractions playing games in house and McNeally lets it go.

    --
    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
  5. Re:Sun opening up? by Kunta+Kinte · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Interesting. Could this be an indication of things to come?

    Opening up? Things to come?

    Sun has been one of the biggest commercial open source supporters for years now. Probably only surpassed by IBM and the Linux companies ( RedHat and Suse, Linux is their core business after all ).

    Millions to buy StarOffice, millions to setup and run OO.org and OpenDocument development, marketing, promoting OpenDocument. Releasing packages like GridEngine, etc. http://www.sunsource.net/. Years of shipping and support opensource applications to companies that would never have used it otherwise.

    Back when I was a network admin, we got a whole lot of GNU software in the system by first showing superiors that Sun endorsed those packages and actually provided solaris binaries.

    Sun's main issue is PR, I suspect. When IBM does something good, it makes sure everyone knows. But that doesn't seem to be McNealy's style...

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    Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
  6. It's too bad you got modded "flamebait" by IANAAC · · Score: 3, Insightful
    It IS an honest question.

    Our shop is mostly Solaris (8) and RHEL with Oracle 9i. We're currently looking at upgrading our Solaris boxes to Solaris 10.

    The problem? Oracle 9i is not supported on Solaris 10. It's supported on RHEL and earlier versions of Solaris.

    So at the moment, it's not doable for us. But from the tinkering I've done with Solaris 10, it's actually pretty cool. I've got it running on an Ultra 10 under my desk and have been evaluating ot for a couple of months now. I'll tell you it's much lighter than previous Solaris versions (well, 7 on. 2.6 was pretty zippy in comparison later versions).

  7. Re:sun will need to make BIG changes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    - ditch the forte crap and vendor lockin scheme

    Done. Sun released Studio 11 (http://www.sun.com/software/products/studio/index .xml) on Tuesday. It's completely free to use unless you want support. They also ship lots of GNU tools included in Solaris (under /usr/sfw) in case you would rather use them.

    - ultrasparc performance is terrible. Address it.

    Done. The UltraSPARC-IV+ chip (http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-IVplus/) is up to five times faster than UltraSPARC-III and up to twice as fast as the initial UltraSPARC-IV. And the UltraSPARC T1 chip (code-name Niagara http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T1/index. xml) delivers incredible throughput (in my testing, often faster than a V40z with four Opteron 850 CPUs) while consuming much less power and generating much less heat than any other chip delivering anything close to the same performance and throughput.

    - get the X11 libraries and headers fixed - completely

    Done. Solaris 10 (at least on X86) uses the Xorg implementation. The previous Xsun implementation is also available if you need it, though.

    - Get ldap working without so many support applications

    I can't say that I understand this one. Sun's Directory Server is the best performing and most scalable server available. It's very in-line with the standards so any LDAPv3-compliant application should work with it just fine. It is the preferred directory for use with most commercial LDAP-enabled applications.

    - make your platform work better with OSS software (eg: gcc)

    What else needs to be done in this area? Solaris 10 ships with a lot of OSS software, including GCC, and Sun makes a lot of additional OSS software available on the Companion CD (http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/). If that's not enough, you can use the SunFreeware (http://www.sunfreeware.com/) or Blastwave (http://www.blastwave.org/) collections to get what you need.

  8. Re:Why MySQL and not PostgreSQL? by @madeus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Actually there is completely no point whatsoever in setting up MySQL as multiuser in a simple web hosting environment. You may as well just tell everyone to use "root" and no password.

    Yes, you think that's insecure, but the truth of the matter is that giving individual users their own MySQL username and password does not make it any less insecure. I am of the opinion that it's better not to lull people into a false sense of security: if they can see how sharp the blade is, they will be more careful when using a powerful tool.


    That's a really bad idea IMO.

    Fact: it's trivial for any user with an account on a box to read any other user's files, even in their cgi-bin, since they must necessarily all be visible to the Apache daemon user {www-data on Debian systems}.

    That's not a fact, but it is the sign the server hasn't been configured very well.

    The only way around this is for every user to run their own instance of the Apache server as themself, on a different non-privileged port; and to have a transparent proxy on port 80 that redirects requests to the appropriate port based on the host name.

    Shared web hosting platforms should really be using some implementation of per-customer compartmentalisation at the OS level if the users are allowed SSH access, or to run CGI's. Solaris 10 supports this natively, there are at least two separate native implementations of something very similar for Linux, Windows 2003 even supports this to some degree I gather (though not to quite the same extent) and then there are tools like VMWare.

    Of course, running your MySQL server on an entirely separate hardware from your web server is also a Good Thing(TM), especially when someone manages to (most likely inadvertently) DoS your SQL server.

    However, failing that, any web server used by multiple customers to run CGI's should at the very least be configured to use something like suexec, which has been a standard feature of Apache for about 8 years or so.

    Using suexec (or gsexec, or cgwrap, or similar tool as appropriate for whatever web server your using) is precisely intended to prevent CGI's running as one user from accessing or modifying files (including other CGI's) that belong to another user.