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The Future of OpenSolaris Revealed
ywlke writes "A few hours ago, an internal Oracle memo was leaked to the osol-discuss mailing list at opensolaris.org. It details Oracle's plans for Solaris and OpenSolaris; namely that OpenSolaris, the distribution, is dead. Solaris Express has come back from the grave, and source code will still be CDDL, but won't be released to the public until some time after it is incorporated into a binary release. What happens to the community now is anybody's guess."
The full text of the memo is available on the mailing list, as well as apparent confirmation from an Oracle employee. That said, no official announcement has yet been made.
Never mind.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
So much for that ultimatum:
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/07/14/1448209/OpenSolaris-Governing-Board-Closing-Shop
Oh Oracle, what do you have up your sleeve next? Maybe you'll want to change the spelling of "MySQL" to "MY! SQL"?
They could have gone so may directions with an opensolaris platform, but now they are kicking it the curb because it does not generate revenue, or rather they don't see any real way to monetize it.
What does Netcraft say?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
We will distribute updates to approved CDDL or other open source- licensed code following full releases of our enterprise Solaris operating system.
Would be hard to chastise them though as they should have released the code before any actions could be taken. Though it bothers me that the intent is to delay source release for a market edge.
I am a figment of my own imagination.
A non-FUSE implementation of ZFS that isn't on BSD?
He didn't have a chance. The Oracle Beast disrupted him down to the cellular level.
There certainly wasn't a "community" for it. The vast majority were Sun employees doing their job. Linux trounced Solaris because everyone could play, Sun took way too long to realize this. No one is surprised Oracle is doing this, they make money from being an expensive closed shop. It'll be interesting to see what happens with InnoDB and MySQL in the coming months/years. Oracle are suing Google over JAVA, making people in that environment rather nervous too.
And don't tell me that they're different situations - that'll only stay true until Oracle sees an opportunity to 1) crush a perceived competitor in the marketplace, or 2) take huge sums of money from anybody using their technologies who isn't already paying huge sums of money for the privilege.
I can't wait until they get around to killing MySQL.
ZFS seemed pretty interesting. Btrfs might catch up eventually, but for now it's a loss.
That said, I don't think ZFS was going anywhere anyways. It's incompatible license meant it wasn't ever going to get going in Linux, and Linux has far too much momentum for OpenSolaris to have dethroned it as the open source world's golden boy.
In short the good features of OpenSolaris aren't going to have to be reimplemented, but since we were going to have to do that anyways then it's less disheartening.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
From the memo:
That's wrong in so many ways it makes my brain hurt.
Maybe there's a secret footnote showing that 40% of the enterprise customers which are not currently running Solaris are willing to try it -- that'd work out nicely to 60% growth.
But somehow I doubt it.
I was just reading on wikipedia last night that OpenOffice.org is a "limited" version of the office suite, and that most Linux installs (like Ubuntu) actually come with Go O-O instead because it offers full *.docx functionality that OpenOffice.org does not. Is that true?
If so I've been recommending the wrong office suite to friends, coworkers.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
correct. zfs was the only thing I cared about (for home use) on solaris.
its 'ok' on freebsd but not all that fast (in my experience, compared to linux md-raid, which I do realize is not at all the same exact thing).
but solaris was THE de-facto reference implementation of zfs.
kind of sorry to lose that. the rest: meh, no great loss to non-enterprise computing. and enterprise computing will still be buying solaris when they need this level of features and support (mostly the support side).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Yes
Solaris actually is a very good OS. The lack of comunity really let it down but the code it's self and the OS is really good.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with InnoDB and MySQL in the coming months/years.
IMHO? MySQL is in for a long, slow, drawn out slide into obscurity. Oracle isn't going to do much with it at the risk of making a free competitor to their flagship product even better.
It has been forked already, and I'm sure more will sprout up. MAYBE one of those will take off, but my guess is that without the brand recognition of MySQL to go behind them, PostgreSQL will slurp up a lot of those users.
That said, for better or for worse (worse IMHO, but that's just my opinion) "no-SQL" databases like CouchDB and MongoDB seem to be gaining a lot of traction. They won't likely take over completely as there are some things that just work better in a traditional relational database, but my guess is that a lot of smaller projects that once would have used MySQL will be looking at those instead.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
OpenSolaris distributions were a joke. They would have been fine back in the 90s when it was acceptable for a free UNIX to feel unpolished, incomplete and buggy because even the commercial ones were that way.
Now with other free (as in cost) clones feeling polished and professional, and OSX being user friendly and pretty, theres absolutely no execuse for a company to allow someething like OpenSolaris to exist.
All OpenSolaris ever did was make me feel like Solaris was going backwards rather than forwards, I'm pretty sure I never had an install that 'worked' properly, there was ALWAYS something wrong. Same hardware runs Linux and FreeBSD fine, so its not the hardwares fault. My fault ... maybe, but considering I used to admin solaris boxes a few years back its not like I was completely clueless.
If Solaris Express feels like it used to feel in relation to everything it had around it, then it'll be a great improvement.
The only reasons I would use Solaris at this point are:
I want to use high end Sun hardware, meh, probably unlikely at this point.
I want a UNIX that doesn't feel like it was thrown together by a bunch of people on the Internet, a coherent experience.
I would run Solaris for the same reason I run Mac OSX, I want a professional feeling polished OS. I want to get things done, not play UNIX admin to accomplish what should be trivial tasks. The only time I should see a commandline is when I need to do something completely out of the ordinary.
Sadly, it seems that Linux's popularity killed Solaris, not because one was better or worse than the other, but because Solaris tried to act like it was Linux and just failed completely because Linux's real advantage is the surprising number of people that treat it like a god, they are a useful resource as we all know. No one will probably ever feel that way about Solaris so its just never going to get the support Linux gets from people without it having SOMETHING Linux doesn't have.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I don't think that much has been lost at all. The situation could have been worse. Thanks to the Illumos project we will hopefully have a living OpenSolars project once again, however without any help from Oracle. I would day that we are still in a very early stage and it's hard to make any conclusions at this point. It will interesting to see what happens within the next year before, it will probably take at least that much time before we can say anything with good confidence.
There are some excellent technologies in OpenSolaris, and it appears The Illumos Project is going to be the place to find them.
I'm not sure this is a bad thing. Oracle's played its hand, and as opposed to Sun's years of "oh, gosh, we don't know if we want to be open or not - how about almost-open?" Oracle said, "screw you guys, we're going to make money off this thing." I frankly don't care about them not releasing an OpenSolaris binary build - Linus doesn't post binary builds - but keeping the source changes secret until after the commercial release just doesn't deal with the realities of Internet Time.
But, because of Oracle's decisiveness, the ON stack, the libc, etc. are all being done right now. I've tried once or twice to contribute to Nexenta and got stuck in the complexity of rebuilding a kernel, despite having done so in linux forever (to be fair the Nexenta guys were awesomely responsive so I didn't really have to do the build myself). This should be fixed.
It might give the OpenSolaris^W Illumos community a chance to succeed, being actually open.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
yes.
And asking that question basically pegs you as a jerk.
...was anything of value lost?
I'm not sure which angle you are trolling from, but I'll bite.
If you were referring to OpenSolaris, then yes, something of value was clearly lost.
But if you're referring to Oracle taking part in OpenSolaris, then you have a point. However, even though few really expected Oracle to do anything useful or significant with OS, think of all the expertise and potential person hours from former sun employees that is very unlikely to come back to opensolaris work. Even tho Oracle hadn't been contributing of late, it was remotely possible that they were holding their source for some other reason or would again some day. The fact that they never will is a major kick in the seat for the OpenSolaris ecosystem and, to a lesser extent, for the free software community as a whole.
That said, I don't think ZFS was going anywhere anyways. It's incompatible license meant it wasn't ever going to get going in Linux, and Linux has far too much momentum for OpenSolaris to have dethroned it as the open source world's golden boy.
Actually the ZFS storage layer was recently ported to Linux. You can use it with Lustre today, perhaps some databases. The POSIX layer is being worked on.
Due to the licensing conflict, distribution is an open problem. Probably end-users will need to install this themselves.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
but patch and package management are part of the OS, and on Solaris they stink.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
First OpenSolaris.
I hope they dont do anything like this with java.....oh wait
Yup, sure seems like MySQL is in real safe hands now.
I dont read
To be honesty, I was just looking for a quick summary of why OpenSolaris was still relevant, not trolling. I personally never used it, so I'm not sure of its strengths and weaknesses. Course, the "anything of value" phrase carries some pretty negative connotations, so I'm not surprised I came off as a troll.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
And in the same vein, Btrfs isn't going anywhere, either. Its incompatible license means that it won't ever appear in any Open Source BSD or commercial operating system. Until we get a comparable filesystem under a BSD-style license, no new filesystem is can truly take off. That's the only license that everyone can accept without reservation.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's very good, on an UltraSparc. On an x86, it's a mixed bag depending on your hardware. On anything else, forget it.
Maybe, maybe not. Given their proprietary nature, that Oracle was not going to put a huge amount of resources behind OpenSolaris was pretty much a given as soon as they bought Sun, I think. What we'll probably see next is an exodus of some of the Solaris people from Oracle to other *NIX organisations and elsewhere, which could turn out to be a very good thing depending on who walks. Since "other *NIX shops" includes Linux and the *BSDs, we might see a lot more activity going into work on the ports of the cooler parts of Solaris into Linux and BSD distros.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I'd had high hopes for Sun's stuff back in '85. But even before being eaten by Oracle they always seemed to be roadblocking any attempt to work with the guts of their system, even for internal use only. Meanwhile, Linux made good on the GNU promise and the freeing of BSD provided an additional open alternative OS (at least three of 'em if you count the project splits as distinct).
I abandoned Solaris on the last of my own machines for Y2K, rather than shell out for upgrades. (Only Linux machines at home at the moment - except for one firewalled-off Windows machine for my wife to run student-Autocad and certain true Windows applications for classwork.)
Some Open Solaris fans tried to claim things were more open than I perceived them to be. But this development underscores the correctness of my choice.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And thus the CDDL serves its purpose.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
FreeBSD, OTOH, is plenty competitive with Linux, and has good ZFS support.
Not to mention that, while ZFS may not become a universal file system, it could well dominate in NAS appliances, and other proprietary closed-box products running OpenSolaris.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Opensolaris survived only because of Sun's benevolence. Once the source drops stop, that's the end of Illumos project: its either stuck permanently at whatever the last drop was (especially in light of the binary-only internationalization stuff) or becomes incompatible and then its no longer solaris.
Stick a fork in it.
So what does that mean for the OpenSolaris connumity? Will Illumos wait for the delayed source code updates and try to stay a "spork"? Or will they decide to go it on their own (fork) and try keep as much compatibility as they can? It is definitely not a good situation for the OpenSolaris community.
"commercial operating system" - you mean proprietary. There's a lot of "commerce" in the Linux/Free Software/Open Source world, you may have noticed it.
Open Source Curious Newbie: "I wish to make a complaint"
OpenSolaris Developer/Community Fanboi in the Forum: "Sorry, we're closing for lunch"
Newbie: "Never mind that, my man. I wish to complain about this OpenSolaris Distro, what I downloaded not half an hour ago from this very user's group website."
Fanboi : Oh yes, the, ah, the 2009.06... What's, ah... W-what's wrong with it?
Newbie: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my man. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it.
Fanboi: "No, no, it's ah... it's in code freeze"
Newbie : Look, matey, I know a dead OS distro when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Fanboi : No no, it-it's not dead, it's frozen!
Newb : Frozen?
Fanboi : Y-yeah, 'in freeze' Remarkable OS, the 2009.06, isn't it, eh? Beautiful features for the future!
Newb : The future features don't enter into it. It's stone dead!
Fanboi : Nononono, no, no! it's source tree commit is just turned off temporarily!
IMHO? MySQL is in for a long, slow, drawn out slide into obscurity. Oracle isn't going to do much with it at the risk of making a free competitor to their flagship product even better.
It has been forked already, and I'm sure more will sprout up. MAYBE one of those will take off, but my guess is that without the brand recognition of MySQL to go behind them, PostgreSQL will slurp up a lot of those users.
I really do hope that MySQL is successfully forked. Postgre is ok, but it is too different from MySQL and that scares a lot of companies who may adopt it.
I am glad to see that Postgre now pays a bit more attention to replication as this is they key feature I will need in order to adopt it. I am very glad my predecessor where I work insisted on us using PDO as database abstraction layer as this will make my migration away from MySQL slightly easier.
I dont read
As long as it remains CDDL it will go no where.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Augh! Posts like this make my BRAIN HURT!!
MySQL is in for a long, slow, drawn out slide into obscurity.
I agree, but not for the reasons you state. Brand recognition? Seriously? You think 30 seconds with a google search isn't going to turn up the forks?
It has been forked already, and I'm sure more will sprout up.
Except that *all* these forks have a consistent problem: there is no commercial license available. The owners of MySQL could dual-license their works, and people are free to fork the MySQL GPL edition, but they can't then turn around and offer commercial licenses to those who need them. The GPL is a bit "too free" (or too restrictive, depending on your definition of free) to be palatable.
In a strange sort of way, if Oracle doesn't develop MySQL enough, more projects will start with PostgreSQL and will never even consider Oracle. The fact that MySQL sucks as bad as it does works for Oracle, and if they actually kill it, they risk losing revenue!
That said, for better or for worse (worse IMHO, but that's just my opinion) "no-SQL" databases like CouchDB and MongoDB seem to be gaining a lot of traction.
No-SQL is not a database, it's a file store. Calling them a database is an insult to databasses the world over. Yes, there are times when a "no-sql" solution is better than SQL, and the vector is pretty much that point where you realize that storing files in databases makes sense like hauling bales of hay in sports cars does.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Btrfs might catch up eventually
Btrfs is a product of Oracle. Oracle now owns ZFS outright and controls the fate of Btrfs in terms of developer resources. One guess as to whether Oracle will remain motivated to complete Btrfs.
Oracle controls the fate of the best open source advanced file systems.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
WIPL = Want It? Pay Larry
Of course, Oracle controls btrfs as well, and its future doesn't exactly look so great at this point, either
Why exactly does Oracle need btrfs now, anyway? ZFS is more mature, and the CDDL is more restrictive than the GPL, so it seems like that would be Oracle's product of choice. I guess Oracle can still sue btrfs users for patent infringement, even though the code itself is under the GPL, but why bother at all? Making Linux a more attractive competitor to their own Solaris doesn't seem like it makes much sense.
Yeah, I'm done with anything Oracle related. They're a fucking massive mess that takes forever to make any meaningful decisions, which usually end in abandonment or screwing people over anyway.
To hell with Oracle. I hope Google kicks their ass on the Java front and then I don't have to hear about them anymore.
Well are OSs on x86 is a mixed bad depending on your hardware.
Well except for Windows but even that can run into unsupported hardware.
I don't think OpenSolaris was intended to run on ARM , PPC, Power, Mips, or a toaster.
That is why we have NetBSD and Linux.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I don't think "too different from MySQL" is necessarily a minus. There's very little worthwhile about MySQL, all it had was good marketing and a earlier move to being cross-platform (which is very very important, but as a difference it's gone).
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Ahh, the databass, such a noble fish.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
FreeBSD, OTOH, is plenty competitive with Linux, and has good ZFS support.
While I don't think FreeBSD is bad at all on technical merits, and it certainly has enough support that it can't be delcared dead (No matter what Netcraft says), it's still no comparison to Linux as a whole. Sure, it's on better footing in the server arena than on desktops, but when taken overall, Linux is still far more popular than any of the BSDs. Without some serious oddities happening, I don't see that changing. The Unix-variants are all just too close to each other for one to pull ahead at this point. If any open source OS takes the top spot away from Linux (which I don't think will happen, but if it did) I'd wager it will be a non-Unix system. HaikuOS, Syllable, AROS, or ReactOS. Not that I think any of them has a snowball's chance in hell of doing so, just saying that they're different enough that if the OSS world becomes disillusioned with *nix then they're different enough that they might could gain traction at that point.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Watch Derby. Small footprint, backed by IBM, some very nice features indeed (efficient backups and table compression can be called while running) and, although it is actually 100% java you do not need java to run it. It is a very nice way to run small, simple databases (like MySQL 3.2x was designed for), but with features like efficient complex joins and easy window selects. Oh yes, and there's a commercial version (Cloudscape). Oracle faffing with MySQL is a gift to IBM.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Btrfs might catch up eventually, but for now it's a loss.
It's working quite nice here in my desktop. I miss the extra RAID modes (which have been available as patches for ages but for some reason haven't been merged), the ability to reconfigure chunks on fly, the possibility of setting different compression/size limits to each volume, the rewrite-corrupted-blocks feature and the fix for the hard link limit with backrefs enabled, but since I don't need them for everyday usage I can live without them.
But OpenSolaris only supports a miniscule amount of the x86 hardware that Linux does, not even talking about laptops where things just get abysmal
to be fair, there was OpenSolaris for PowerPC project in the works
FreeBSD, OTOH, is plenty competitive with Linux, and has good ZFS support.
Tell that to my laptop. FreeBSD's suspend/resume support is, amazingly, even worse than Linux's...
Knowing Oracle it was obvious from the day the acquisition was announced that:
1) Oracle will cripple, keep on life support or close-source all open source projects. Larry believes anything users want to use is worth making them pay for. Any open source projects that survive will be strategically useful (like letting a 'free' MySQL contaminate Microsoft's low-midrange database business revenue)
2) Java is what Oracle really wanted in Sun acquisition (see announcement today of lawsuit against Google re Android Java use) and Solaris is useful only insofar as it is part of the value prop for selling Sun, now Oracle, hardware. Solaris will only be pushed by Oracle on non-Oracle hardware if they can make a good license business out of it. Expect that all use of Java in open source implementations will dry up and any commercial implementations will be expected to start pushing license dollars back to Oracle (Which is why somebody at IBM should have been shot for blowing the Sun acquisition over the few measly millions they were fighting over before Oracle pulled the rug out form under IBM -it could have been Oracle kneeling in front of IBM instead of IBM watching the underlying architecture of Websphere and everything else Java based owned by their biggest competitor)
3) Open Solaris was a way to enable a user community (not really a dev community like Linux has) but since it can't be licensed (for money) and there's no really support/services business and it certainly doesn't help sell any Sun/Oracle hardware (which generally always runs the commercial Solaris) it has no place in an Oracle world.
I'm amazed that anybody is surprised.
Sure, it's on better footing in the server arena than on desktops, but when taken overall, Linux is still far more popular than any of the BSDs.
Not quite - keep in mind OS X is also a FreeBSD derivative.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
its 'ok' on freebsd but not all that fast
That's an understatement. Some of the performance metrics on FreeBSD 8.1 ZFS are so poor that they're not even comparable to OSol. A 10th the performance, maybe?
Nevermind the FreeBSD implementation is shoddy, at best in terms of stability and hardware utilization in other areas: high CPU, high memory use, a couple versions behind 'official' ZFS, inexplicable instability (particularly when the filesystem is nearing capacity, but I had my test fbsd zfs system reboot itself - twice - during bonnie++ tests), and a handful of other matters.
And no, don't tell me "it'll be fixed in the next version via higher pool version support". Fix what you did before implementing something new.
Each new major version of FreeBSD since 6 seems to have taken a couple steps back where there shouldn't have been change until it worked (USB, I'm looking at you). FreeBSD is awesome for network devices and code projects, but it's kinda a wretched nightmare as a general purpose or storage OS.
ZFS in OpenSolaris is a huge loss. I just hope it's continued onward - albeit a little bit behind "official" solaris - in Nexenta and the other derivative projects. Is that even possible, legally speaking?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
http://www.illumos.org/ seems to be the closest thing to a community still left for the future of OpenSolaris.
New things are always on the horizon
Portability has never been critical to the success of a filesystem.
But OpenSolaris only supports a miniscule amount of the x86 hardware that Linux does [...]
It has excellent hardware support where it matters - brand-name x86 servers (largely because they're all using the same components anyway).
OpenSolaris was a Solaris kernel with a modern (gnome?) desktop and a relatively-frequently updated package repository. It was actually quite nice to work with, since you could use old Solaris drivers for some hardware, but still get a "modern" system.
More data, damnit!
FreeBSD has ZFS support, but I wouldn't say it's good ZFS support; it's nowhere near as stable or fast as on OpenSolaris, anyway.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There are a lot more developers working on btrfs then just the Oracle developer(s), that is the big difference. I think the one or few btrfs developers working at Oracle might even leave Oracle if they stop with supporting btrfs.
New things are always on the horizon
Don't have to hear about them anymore? Look into where Oracle came from. There is a metric shit-ton of power behind that company which is why they don't need to blitz people like us with moronic add campaigns to prosper.
I wouldn't be surprised if their entire plan for the popular Sun properties is to hit people with them so the public will develop an aversion to even thinking about Oracle.
Those guys are going to be the last ones that need to change to survive, so all they need to do is be progressive a couple times a decade and they stay ahead of the curve.
dtrace is also da bomb.
Knowing Oracle it was obvious from the day the acquisition was announced that: 1) Oracle will cripple, keep on life support or close-source all open source projects.
I am a constant user of VirtualBox, which belonged to Sun and now Oracle. While it may not be open source, it was free. Should I be worried?
Recent Ubuntu's ship with an OpenOffice from go-oo - why do you think otherwise (perhaps there's a source I've overlooked)? If you dig into the Ubuntu Lucid source for OpenOffice.org you will see it claims the upstream is go-oo and contains many patches (SVG support, write support for DOCX etc) from go-oo. A quick web search shows the Ubuntu OpenOffice maintainer says Ubuntu's OOo is based off go-oo. This has probably been the case since at least Ubuntu 8.10 (possibly earlier).
Since we're trading anecdotes, on my ThinkPad, suspend and resume work, and the power button and lit switch both trigger ACPI events that can be configured to do various things under FreeBSD. Linux? Well, it can do the suspend part of suspend/resume...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Oracle controls the fate of the best open source advanced file systems.
If they control the fate, you can't really call them open can you?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Alas, poor Solaris!
I knew it, McNealy, an o/s of infinite capability, of most excellent fancy.
It hath bore my applications on its back a thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is!
My gorge rises at it.
Postgre is ok
I beg to differ. Postgres is not just "ok" - have you looked at its features and their completeness; standards compliance; scalability (clustering); RBAC; programming flexibility; reliability? If you are a developer - how about size and quality of code, optimizer, query execution flow? Postgres probably has one of the best maintained codebase for a complex piece of software you'll ever see.
In none of the categories above can you even start placing MySQL in the same ballpark as Postgres. It's not even the same league, it's not even the same sport. So, the other part of your sentence is right in a way - it's completely different in these and many other regards from MySQL.
ZFS is already available on Linux as a user-space filesystem (http://zfs-fuse.net/) - not fast but quite functional.
FreeBSD 8.1 has the best ZFS implementation outside the Solaris kernel at present - not as recent as the Solaris ZFS but it appears to work pretty well. People who want a really point and click install for evaluation or use at home should try PC-BSD 8.1, which is a repackaged version of FreeBSD with GUI installer and simpler package installation, and is still FreeBSD under the covers - see http://www.pcbsd.org/
However, no matter how great ZFS is, you still need full backups of your ZFS storage, because there are occasions where it refuses to open the storage (zpool) and it has no fsck, by design. I like the design and features, particularly the per-block checksums, media scrubbing and solving the RAID5 write hole (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_5_disk_failure_rate), and low cost snapshots - but the 'no data loss by design' ignores the inevitable bugs that do occasionally cause data loss.
Which ThinkPad rev? I have a T61, and FBSD failed horribly on suspend/resume... and I *really* wanted to like it, too. I then tried NetBSD, but alas, accelerated video is basically a no-go (among other things), and thus ended my BSD experiment...
You're right, and the Linux community as a whole has certainly embraced btrfs. If Oracle were to just pull the plug on it, the project would continue in some form (which is more than one could say for opensolaris and ZFS).
The problem as I see it is that Oracle has already shown a willingness to submarine competitors with patents they hold on GPL'd projects. A worst case scenario isn't that btrfs dies; a worst case scenario is that it gets used by Oracle's competitors, and then Oracle decides to go and sue them for patent infringement.
Oracle: Hey, Red Hat... nice filesystem you got there. Shame if something were to... happen to it...
It's also not open source (Darwin doesn't count, as that's not really the full OS, and in it's basic Darwin form it sees little use), which negates it from any relevance in this discussion.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
the databass nose everything!
I don't think "too different from MySQL" is necessarily a minus
Generally I would agree with you, but if I was looking at migrating an existing project using MySQL with minimum effort (and I think that's going to be a very common case) I might think twice.
I really hope that Debian/kFreeBSD pulls through. I love ZFS. I honestly couldn't imagine going to another file system, ever, for my server needs.
I run Xen, all of my Xen disks are just zvols. I accidentally screwed one up, just rolled it back to the last version. Because of the deduplication, I only 'used' the data that had changed.
Since it's a server, I guess I'll be one of the last to turn the lights out when something finally comes along to replace it. Xen was cake to get running (compared to Linux). It runs a Debian machine and an XP machine. Seemed adequately fast.
Btrfs is GPL licensed. Who started it is irrelevant. If Oracle drops it then others will pick it up. ZFS's demise will come from it's inability to be integrated into the kernel. If it had been GPL licensed originally then we'd have taken it and ran with it Oracle or no.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
In other words, Solaris is everything !Linux.
Hmm... upsides and downsides.
Stable driver ABI.
Extremely scalable.
No open source community infighting.
Doesn't work on a mobile devices.
Has a file system worth using.
Slow moving development speed.
Predictable deployment environment.
Dtrace.
There is now no reason for anyone to install Solaris anywhere. Bye bye Solaris, Don't call us, we'll call you!
zfs can't run on cheap hardware. not competitively.
I run a dual setup (2 identical setups) of linux md-raid and freebsd 8.current zfs.
when I do simple things like a dvd rip across the LAN to my nfs/samba servers (bsd and linux are setup to do both, so I can compare) the bsd box *always* lags behind. it feels slow. look at the network switch and the lights *pause* a lot more. yes, to the naked eye, you can see it being slower. you can see progress meters being smooth and fluid on linux/mdraid but not on freebsd/zfs.
both systems are stronger than most nas's (cel-420 and 2gb of ram with 4 sata drives on intel ICH7 (I think) hubs). also note I'm using intel eepro1000 nics so I'm using MUCH better hardware than most nas's will.
still, linux wipes freebsd's butt on keeping up with just a simple single-task of a dvd rip across the network. its not like bsd loses packets or data but it takes longer and visually looks slower, just seeing the pauses while the disk farm syncs (and seems to block net i/o until its done!).
zfs needs 4gb of ram (really) and multi-core cpus. you don't find that on cheap home nas boxes that we are seeing. you find that the onboard cpu often can't even keep up with a gig-e pipe. there isn't enough cpu on those embedded systems to 'do zfs right'.
sad but true. I wanted to love zfs. I still have it installed. but it underperforms on the same hardware vs linux/md.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Well, it would be pretty handy if I could format an external drive in something other than FAT32 or NTFS for support on different systems...
Except that *all* these forks have a consistent problem: there is no commercial license available. [...] The GPL is a bit "too free" (or too restrictive, depending on your definition of free) to be palatable.
Is that you, Monty?
The fact that MySQL sucks as bad as it does...
Ok, I guess not :)
Exactly what was expected now that Oracle is in charge: A slow painful death.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
yes you can.
analogy time.
So a farmer has an apple orchard with a very exclusive hybrid apple being grown. the farmer sells the apples and will not prosecute anyone for planting the seeds contained within those sold apples... but you can still safely assume that this farmer "controls the fate" of the new hybrid apple
end analogy
Critical, no, but highly desirable. That's what made ZFS so interesting---the promise of broad availability. Sadly, it isn't working out that way, due almost entirely to Oracle's inept handling of it at every turn, but on the other hand, I can't imagine that anybody actually expected Oracle to be a good citizen of the open source community.... ZFS was doomed the moment they announced their acquisition plans. That's why a BSD license is such a good thing. It means that the technology can't be held hostage by any one company or group.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
sadly no, that's not how GNU/Linux got into the mainstream datacenter and that's not how OpenSolaris would have. Some IT staff would need to be able to try it out on pulled old server, old desktop, white box, home PC.....
Not true. The GPL includes a patent license. By releasing the code under it, Oracle gave everyone the right to use their patents freely.
Of all major operating systems, UNIX is the only one originally meant for gaming.
Alas, we see the end of the mighty Solaris.
First, Oracle, removes all Sun logos from the Sun website. That was a sure sign of things to come.
Now, we are told no more OpenSolaris. Oh Well. We knew this was coming.
I predict that Solaris will slip further and further down the ladder until 5 years from now it exists no longer (or is almost extinct).
Sun brought this on themselves. In the late 90's they were selling pizza box SPARC 20's for 20K++
The world bypassed them and moved to Linux.
I made a hell of a lot of money as a Solaris SA.
Thank you and so long dear Friend.
I'm running ZFS with Solaris 10 on a SAN, and while I really like ZFS, I'm anxiously awaiting btrfs and will migrate to Linux the moment btrfs hits stable in RHEL 6. ZFS is good, but that doesn't mean that other file systems like btrfs don't have the potential to be better and cheaper.
Wasnt the btrfs development also financed by Oracle, or am I wrong here?
Full disclosure, I am not a 10gen employee, but I've contributed some improvements to windows support in MongoDB.
Mongo is not a relational database. However, its a "real database" and different from the filesystem. They do got that GridFS thing for storing BLOBs that I've not tried. The DB is schemaless, but there are indexes, and you can even do some primitive GeoLocation.
I've used RDBMS, I've used Mongo, I've used the file system, and I've LDAP. I've even toyed enough with xml documents and XSD schemas to call that a special data store (both filesystem backed adn stored in SQL server). Each has theor own purpose, and I use them all for different things.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Hey it is Solaris. You don't have to try it on some old server or white box to see if it will really work.
And how hard is it to find an vanilla intel box? One with an Intel chipset? Once you do your good to go.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
What about HAMMER?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAMMER
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/
Old stuff:
http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2007-10/msg00006.html
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/hammer.pdf
The fact that MySQL sucks as bad as it does works for Oracle, and if they actually kill it, they risk losing revenue!
IMOHO, the problem with MySQL+Oracle is that it doesn't make sense for anyone but Oracle. The skillset gap between MySQL and Oracle is MASSIVE! So when a project out grows MySQL, its not an automatic Oracle upgrade. Really, what's the incentive other than some very loose association via branding?
On the other hand, PostgreSQL completely encompasses MySQL (required skill sets and capability) and has a huge overlap with Oracle. To get your feet wet with PostgreSQL, the required skill set is only slightly larger than MySQL. And on the other end, the required knowledge is still less than is required for Oracle; despite PostgreSQL frequently providing superior performance. This means you can stick with PostgreSQL from entry to fairly high end. And, once you actually outgrow PostgreSQL, if you ever do, you have commercial offerings like EnterpriseDB. Which means, your PostgreSQL knowledge is fully protected.
Anyone not considering PostgreSQL must have money, time, and skills to burn.
Don't. I don't want Oracle to get offspring.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
No-SQL is not a database, it's a file store. Calling them a database is an insult to databasses the world over.
SQL is not the be all and end all of database query languages. It is possible to write a real (MVCC, transactional, robust) database that doesn't use it. The Versant Object Database is a very good example of a robust non-SQL object oriented database, for example. No doubt there are others. And for some applications an object oriented database will run circles around anything any existing relational database can do.
A) We were talking about servers...
B) Windows has a lot of features Linux is lacking as well. I guess Linux isn't competitive.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The fastest database I've ever seen(as far as queries, returning results, performance under load, etc) is a non-sql database. That would be Pick, a hash-file driven multivalue database(ENGLISH query language). Been around since the 60s and still going strong. The only reason it isn't more popular is because the database is it's own operating system as well, so it's emulated on *nix. Databases with 30 years of complex financial data running on Digital Unix with an Alpha processor outperform the latest and greatest hardware configurations I've seen running similar data in a (SQL) relational database(which I see often working with Sybase all day).
about the future of MySQL and Java? I think OpenSolaris is just the start. Now with Oracle sueing google over Java I think Oracle is going to one at a time kill off any "free" anything they snatch up. OpenSolaris is first and I think Java will be next by their actions against goolge. They may hold off on MySQL as they need it I think as a low cost alternative on windows to SQL Server (which is a piece of cr@p IMHO - I use it daily with Java and hate it).
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Never used it, never cared. I had (and still have) solaris 8,9 and 10 64 bit on sun hardware at work and by the time used sun equipment
was cheap enough for home, linux was pretty much better.
I was jonesing for a solaris box for home through the '90s. There were probably thousands of Sun desktops and
servers at the company I worked for. The best I could do was a black and white 21 inch X monitor I used through my dial-up
modem.
I'm not too sure there's any point in *Solaris at all anymore. Oracle seems determined to drive the HW/SW
systems from Sun into the ground. (or even deeper into the ground) either through attrition or pricing.
Yes, there are times when a "no-sql" solution is better than SQL, and the vector is pretty much that point where you realize that storing files in databases makes sense like hauling bales of hay in sports cars does.
It's more than that: it's also for every case where the lookup logic is NOT handled by the database. Consider when queries are fielded by a separate service, such as a dedicated search engine (e.g. Solr/Lucene), leaving the database is relegated to just primary key lookup for full records/documents. At that time the benefits and tradeoffs offered by the various NoSQL solutions suddenly become a LOT more interesting, because that's what these tools specialize in.
Btrfs is a product of Oracle. Oracle now owns ZFS outright and controls the fate of Btrfs in terms of developer resources. One guess as to whether Oracle will remain motivated to complete Btrfs.
If Oracle for whatever reason decides to stop investing in BTRFS, the likely outcome AFAICS is not that BTRFS dies, but rather that Chris Mason and his team jump shop to Red Hat, Novell, Google, IBM or some other Linux contributor with an interest in seeing BTRFS succeed. That's one of the advantages of a collaborative project like Linux which isn't subject to the whims of any single corporation in complete control.
To the extent that there might be a threat against BTRFS, depends on how the ZFS-WAFL lawsuit plays out. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if Oracle settles with Netapp, covering only official Solaris releases, leaving other ZFS versions (Illumos, Nexenta, FreeBSD, etc.) out in the cold, and perhaps BTRFS as well, depending on to which extent the WAFL patents apply to BTRFS.
Well, in every real-world benchmark I've done when evaluating which DMBS to chose MySQL was faster - that's gotta count for something.
+5, sad.
Reiserfs died after Hans Reiser was jailed. What's to say the same thing won't happen to btrfs?
The reason MyISAM (not the whole MySQL) is "fast" is because there is no proper abstraction level between what executes the query and the actual file writes. This is true for simple inserts, simple selects, simple updates. This is also why when MySQL crashes, quite frequently MyISAM tables become corrupt - you can try to repair them, but hopefully you were replicating.
Besides, you use MyISAM for "speed" and you lose basic functionality like transactions, MVCC, ACID compliance (hmm, did you even have it in the first place?), row/page locks, etc. You can perform direct file writes even faster than that, I guess it counts for something, but that doesn't do you any good either.
On the other hand, what kind of "real-world" benchmarks did you do? No such "real world" I know of consists of simple inserts and selects. How about cases for:
- optimized subqueries
- using index merges
- reusing indexes in same query
- partial indexes
- indexes on expressions
- transactions with savepoints
- etc., etc.
MySQL doesn't do any of the above. Welcome to the "real world."
Seeing Open Solaris killed off was fairly obvious. However combine the fact that they sued Google over Java issues raises interesting thoughts.
These moves and inevitably others are already having consequences. Java as a platform for consumer products is now no longer a given. The assent of Android as the" platform of choice of hardware and software vendors puts Nokia, RIM / HP back in the picture. When just days ago they were an after thought in developers eyes.
I've seen it before. People put business distant between them selves and anything with a lawsuit potential. So is the law suit over Java going to cause a massive migration away from Java?
What is Solaris's future. I think it's rather short less than 10 years left. Price per grunt the upstart Linux is kicking it's butt despite all the very nice features of Sparc and Solaris
Is this the first sign of another shift in IT futures?
Replication isn't as good with PostgreSQL. And that matters.
A commercial OS, at least by my definition, is an OS principally developed and backed by a company.
Not Redhat then? Nor Canonical? Nor SuSE?
Seriously, Open Source can be (and is!) commercial. Your post said "Open Source BSD or commercial operating system" - that implies there is a difference. Largely, there is not.
+1. BTRFS is just around the corner, ZFS is loaded with licensing and patent issues to the point that it's practically proprietary software. Forgive me for not crying over ZFS.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Replication isn't as good with PostgreSQL. And that matters.
Take a look at PostgreSQL 9 (or ChronicDB)
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
zfs needs 4gb of ram (really) and multi-core cpus.
That's the price you pay for better data integrity and more features. Considering one could build a multicore/4GB RAM box for a few hundred dollars, the price doesn't seem that high.
The differences? Much more development work has gone into it making it a more mature file system and nobody is pretending that it is perfect. There are a lot of people developing and using it - even Nokia is involved with btrfs now for the Meego platform.
The whole Linux user community is clamoring for btrfs, while reiserfs was little more than a historical footnote when Hans Reiser was jailed?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
the "trying" has to do with getting comfortable with it, and remember even for experienced Solaris admins there were new and different things added to the first release of OpenSolaris
A "plain vanilla intel box" can very well have a hard disk controller or network card or usb device that isn't supported by OpenSolaris. Speaking as a very long time SunOS/Solaris admin who has tried OpenSolaris on a few boxes and under vmware (which for awhile also had issues) I can tell you it was a very mixed bag of success and failure.
Ah well, it was too little too late by Sun, they should have done something back in 1995 or so.....
you're joking, right? Check out how small the OpenSOlaris HCL is sometime. The disk controller list only has 75 entries! Plenty of Adaptec controllers won't work, plenty of fiber channel HBA won't work, plenty of HP and Compaq smart array won't work, etc. etc. etc.
I can't say I care for MySQL at all, but as long as there is *any* market share for it I expect Oracle to keep it around. I expected them to kill RDB when they bought it from DEC back in 1994 (thank you Bob Palmer for ruining a great company by selling it off, piecemeal), but it is still going strong: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/rdb/overview/index.html
Nope. RedHat, Canonical, and SuSE all basically bundle open source software together. Sure, they have developers on staff, but they produce a single or maybe very low double digit percentage of the work that goes into the product. They create packaging tools, installers, custom skins, custom admin tools, etc., and they contribute patches for other things back upstream, but the fundamental core of the OS was created by others, and is largely maintained by others.
Compare that with a true commercial OS developer like Sun/Oracle, Apple, IBM, etc. and the difference is blindingly obvious. Those companies have developers that create most of the code that goes into their products. Sure, the commercial vendors use Open Source as add-ons in some cases (e.g. Apple bundling Apache), but those companies are almost solely responsible for the bulk of the core code in Solaris, Mac OS X, and AIX, respectively. It's not at all the same development model, and the difference has nothing to do with whether the end result is shipped as open source or as proprietary code. The key difference is whether most of their code is developed in-house, and thus on how much of their own IP they have in the code.
To give a more graphical illustration, the Linux vendors are content to stand on the shoulders of giants. The commercial UNIX vendors prefer to kill the giants, grind up their bones to make mortar, and use that to build a stone and giant-mortar dais to stand on outside their stone and giant-mortar castle. The Linux vendors usually stand to lose little if a particular GPLed work proved to be toxic. The commercial UNIX vendors stand to lose a great deal more.
Sure, there is. OpenSolaris isn't BSD-based. It's AT&T UNIX based. AIX, same. Heck, even Mac OS X basically conforms to AT&T at this point. There basically aren't any commercial BSDs (except maybe in the embedded space) because you can't call yourself UNIX if you conform to the BSD conventions, and all the commercial UNIX vendors want to be able to call themselves UNIX.
There are open source BSD OSes, there are commercial OSes, and there are Linux-based OSes. These are three fundamentally different camps in terms of development methodology that sometimes overlap and sometimes have common interests. Never fool yourself into believing that any two of the camps are the same.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Several things, but first things first. Net IO always, always, always take precedence over disk io in FreeBSD and has always always always been that way. In terms of disk IO, reads are heavily prioritized over writes on UFS, unsure what happens on ZFS but I think it's a more even distrobution.
It is quite likely you have a experienced a buggy network driver, is that NIC recognized as an em device? That one and a couple of other intel nic drivers have gotten some recent love as you weren't the only one who experienced stalling. The stall had zero to do with the filesystem behavior and quite frankly it's disconcerting you related the two. A recent 8-STABLE should preform better with your NIC.
ZFS doesn't really need 4 GB RAM to preform well, 2 does fine on a moderately loaded system. The key is to be using an amd64 build since i386 has limited kernel memory space. It can work on i386, and it does fine with some tuning but anyone using that combo should be prepared to do the tuning themselves.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Chris Mason didn't kill his ex.
I've used RDBMS, I've used Mongo, I've used the file system, and I've LDAP. ... Each has their own purpose, and I use them all for different things.
Out of curiosity, is there any project that actually requires almost all of these technologies? If so, how many libraries do this project have to import, to make these technologies work?
No, I'm not a Java or .NET programmer, so I don't know if these languages already have built-in support for these technologies.
How does this differ than what Google does with the Android OS? Or Apple with WebKit?
For me the biggest reason for OpenSolaris is binary compatibility.
Whenever I update my Ubuntu I fear something will break. Quite often something (outside the distro) does break, especially when the kernel changes.
Sure those who are happy to use only those programs and hardware directly supported by Canonical may be happy, but I am not one of those.
Yes, it is legal. Goto http://www.illumos.org/.
Minor version updates are simple, just update the software.
Major version updates require a dump/restore, which is slightly annoying but easy for what is a major update. Major versions as old as 2003 are still supported.
If you can't stomach a backup and restore as part of a major software change, postgresql might not be for you.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
ZFS in OpenSolaris is a huge loss. I just hope it's continued onward - albeit a little bit behind "official" solaris - in Nexenta and the other derivative projects. Is that even possible, legally speaking?
Yes, as long as Oracle continues to make code releases. If they quit, support will become very difficult.
With OpenSolaris, it wasn't using the GPL everywhere.
With Google/Java/Oracle, the code Google was mostly using wasn't based on what Oracle is using so it isn't covered by the same GPL.
New things are always on the horizon
O = Obtuse
R = Ram
A = Abusing
C = Corrupt
L = Lousy
E = Executable
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Not really. If enough people want those filesystems to cough up the money and resources to hire those developers, I can imagine that things will still work out somewhat...
Don't quote me on this.
Because while ReiserFS was interesting, it was little more than an incremental improvement over far more mature FS projects? And that it had only a relatively small rate of take up?
And because it was egotistically self named by an unpleasant convicted murderer?
Btrfs is already in Linux, an OS that is relevant and will stay relevant. The BSDs don't matter.
The GPL only apply to somebody if this somebody modify the source code of the software _and_ re-distribute the modified software. Are there examples where somebody would take, for example MariaDB, modify it and re-distribute the modified package to it's customers? The GPL doesn't concern you at all if you, for example, take MariaDB, modify it to run 500% faster and use it on your servers for the next big internet thing. It's also not a big deal if you take MariaDB, modify it for your application and make the modifications available under the GPL again. Because the modifications are special to your application, nobody would benefit.
The only example where the GPL would concern you, if you are going to embed MariaDB in your software. In that case your software would have to be GPLed, too. But MariaDB is not really a database which you want to embed in your software. You rather going to use something like JDBC or ODBC, in which case the GPL doesn't concern you.
The only commercial thing you want from MariaDB is a service contract and here is the GPL a big advantage, because now you can go to any company that offers a service for it.
So in which case the GPL concern you? In which case would you want to embed something like MariaDB in your software and not using JDBC or ODBC?
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
If it had been GPL licensed originally then we'd have taken it and ran
or just not. Depends on the patents that the original owner holds. And on the version of GPL.
(I am a GPL-person)
FWIW, btrfs is mainly sponsored by Oracle...
Not sure what they plan with Linux, but if the _really_ cared, they would simply release ZFS under the GPL instead of blubbering about their IP and CDDL.
As of late, most news relating to btrfs seems to point out problems, but maybe that is simply the sign of maturing. Having been bitten by OCFS2 a _lot_, I will step slowly with Oracle-based FS.
Not. ZFS never made the promise of broad availability. At least not, after it was CDDL-ed. So "Oracle's inept handling ...": didn't you, btw., made a typo? Wasn't it more of "SUN's inept handling ..." that made ZFS not much of a good OSSitizen?
Secondly, a BSD license is such a good thing. No flamewars, but it doesn't include any non-patent-clause. And suddenly, you stand in your briefs (or even with less), if you have a company and you are sued.
Chris?
Critical, no, but highly desirable. That's what made ZFS so interesting---the promise of broad availability. Sadly, it isn't working out that way, due almost entirely to Oracle's inept handling
That is patent nonsense, pun intended. The license for ZFS was chosen by Sun specifically to prevent its inclusion in the Linux kernel, specifically to prevent its uptake on any platform other than Solaris. FreeBSD may be fantastic but it's not as well-supported as Linux and few corporate shops will take it on broadly. So if you get ZFS in the door with FreeBSD then you're leading up to buying a whole bunch of Sun (now Oracle) equipment. This is a terrible mistake no matter how you slice it; Oracle is abusive to customers, and so was Sun before them, ever since about the time they released Solaris 2. I don't know what else happened in the company at that time (I wasn't paying THAT close attention, I was young) but there must have been SOMETHING going on. I miss the Sun Microsystems that sold us a quality 4.4-BSD on quality hardware.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Oracle also owns BTRFS. Anyone that develops IP whilst an employee gives Oracle full ownership of the that IP.
Oracle could change the license of BTRFS from GPL to closed source tomorrow if they wanted to. Sure, folks could fork it but Oracle owns the current copyright to BTFS and thus have a large amount of control over what happens to it.
Pure FUD. They have all the control over what happens to their fork, which would be out of the kernel in a hot second.
Oracle should not be let near any open source projects.
Nonsense. They should only be let near projects using GPLv3 though, to help protect from submarine patent claims.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No-SQL is not a database, it's a file store. Calling them a database is an insult to databasses the world over.
This is a stupid thing to say because a filesystem (as we know it today) is a hierarchical database. Try not to use words you don't understand.
Yes, there are times when a "no-sql" solution is better than SQL, and the vector is pretty much that point where you realize that storing files in databases makes sense like hauling bales of hay in sports cars does.
Not sure what this has to do with the relative merits of MySQL.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Oracle should not be let near any open source projects.
I'm just speculating, but Oracle's approach to open source is better than Microsoft's. Lesser of two evils?
As long as BTRFS is perceived as desirable, and as long as the crowds cheer its progress, Oracle won't kill the golden goose. I won't give away any ideas (I agree: Oracle is bad news) but I'm sure they will come up with ways of generating recurring revenue. Good luck! ()
I beg to differ. I've never had the opportunity of working for Sun (been detached to Oracle back in 2000) but I've switched from Linux to OpenSolaris about a year ago and I will miss it dearly.
There is definitely an OpenSolaris community and those who want to continue building on OpenSolaris legacy will contribute (or, more modestly use) IllumOs.
I've been a Linux advocate myself for over 10 years. The truth is, OpenSolaris is much more of a professional OS.
Going on means going far, going far means returning. Tao te Ching
I run NetBSD-Current (amd64) on my T61p; basically everything works as expected (including the graphics, i.e. non-accelerated). That is not a problem for me, as I triple-boot it (the others are W7/64 and, of course, OpenSolaris build 134).
Actually the latter runs best. NVidia acceleration out from the CD, all the keys work, suspend-resume without any problem, Java, AcroRead, even RealPlayer if you wish... W7 is as good as one can expect, but took some time to get all the drivers and the rest; NetBSD lacks the 3D NVidia stuff. I stay mostly under W7 (the VPN client I have to use is only Windows, although I have a spare VirtualBox m/c under OpenSolaris for that), use Crossbow/VirtualBox for network simulations under OpenSolaris, mostly pkgsrc under NetBSD (plus tracking -current).
It is the best laptop I've ever had, though. I wouldn't replace it even if it is almost three years old (especially with the maxed-out memory and a decent black scorpio disk).
The real world is most users of MySQL don't care a damn about any of those. They care about which is easiest and cheapest to implement. So called MySQL experts are a dime a dozen. When you search Google for database software, you see MySQL on the first page of results, not Postgre, not MSSQL/SQL Server, and not Oracle. Lastly, other than standards zealots, who demands ACID compliance? In the real world, quality is often an afterthought.
not quite, but very close actually.
I've used RDBMS, I've used Mongo, I've used the file system, and I've LDAP. ... Each has their own purpose, and I use them all for different things.
Out of curiosity, is there any project that actually requires almost all of these technologies? If so, how many libraries do this project have to import, to make these technologies work?
Well its certainly conceivable. I've built a .NET web service that talked to Microsoft SQL server, Active Directory (via LDAP) and OpenLDAP. This was before MongoDB.
.NET has built in support for SQL server and Microsoft Access. It also has LDAP support, but in my calse I used the Novell library. You need to use NoRM or mongodb-csharp. I'm sure I did some sort of filesystem access a well.
The number of libraries for such an app is probably not a problem. A large app will end up using several external libraries, or internally developed shared libraries.
Of course, if you are building an application big enough to need all these, it should use Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) So different modules that need to store data in different ways will be different services (separate programs).
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
One word: SCOracle
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I run PostgreSQL servers since 2002 and I never had big problem with upgrading from one major version to another. Just install it parallel and then you can test and see that everything works.
In place updates like MySQL would scare me.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
...Oracle's favorite word is one that is about not supporting...
Oracle also owns BTRFS. Anyone that develops IP whilst an employee gives Oracle full ownership of the that IP.
Oracle could change the license of BTRFS from GPL to closed source tomorrow if they wanted to.
Lots of people have contributed to btrfs. It's part of the Linus' tree, not a separate thing that Oracle controls. Oracle only holds the copyright on what its employees (like Chris Mason) have written. It couldn't release a closed-source version of the filesystem without getting licenses from all the non-Oracle people who contributed, or rewriting all their code. You only need to look over the commit history to see how many people that is. Most of the commits don't look like they come from Oracle employees, judging by the e-mail addresses.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
Of course, Oracle controls btrfs as well, and its future doesn't exactly look so great at this point, either
Oracle doesn't control btrfs. It's part of the Linux kernel. Oracle pays the one who's currently in charge of btrfs development, Chris Mason, but a) someone else could take over if he left (look at how many developers there are); and b) plenty of other companies would be willing to hire him if Oracle didn't want to pay him to work on btrfs anymore. Oracle has influence over btrfs, but not control.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
I don't think "too different from MySQL" is necessarily a minus. There's very little worthwhile about MySQL, all it had was good marketing and a earlier move to being cross-platform (which is very very important, but as a difference it's gone).
In my experience of hiring developers there are more out there who are comfortable using MySQL than there are using Postgre, that makes it cheaper to run since new hires are more likely to be able to come in with a fair knowledge you only have to build on rather than train them up in a completely new SQL syntax.
MySQL has a wider installed user base so unless Postgre is identical to use to this or T-SQL then deploying it will involve some retraining.
I dont read
If you just want to try it I can think of two solutions.
One is get an Intel ITX board. Extremtech built a OpenSolaris system using a year to two ago. They tend to be sub $100 boards.
Or use a VM. I suggest a free one like.. VirtualBox?
It is was owned by Sun and I am guessing does a good job at running OpenSolaris.http://dlc.sun.com/osol/docs/content/IPS/virtualbox.html
But the lack of hardware support can also be fixed by the community as long as it is OSS.
And when it comes to OSS OSs I vote for the more the better.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
My wish - Debian GNU/k* to include OSOL - and I don't mean Nexenta - I mean debian. I'm more of a FC guy myself, but I'm somehow doubtfull the Fedora team is going to include anything non-linux. Though I'm somewhat hopefull someone will wrap up a OSOL kernel with set up linux compat as a kenel package for multiple distros - that may actuall be a good way to save OSOL.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Actually, I'm kinda hoping somone will come up with a Prolog query engine. Declarative logical constraints seems the perfect fit fora any sort of data access paradigm.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Not to mention that filesystems are shifitng to database type functionality, with all those extensible metadata fields, powerful storage backends, replication and concurrent use capabilities.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Mostly true; if you are running a family blog, or an Intranet for 100 employees for a monthly newsletter who cares about index merges?
But grow your database to a point where you need to query not 100s, but millions of rows in a meaningful way, then get back to me about "easiest and cheapest."
other than standards zealots, who demands ACID compliance?
Anyone who cares about data, and where data is important.
needs "guest additions" to run under Virtualbox, like most things
I predict no one will be writing new device drivers for OpenSolaris, the parrot has shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain, gone joined the choir invisible....
it's dead, jim.
Non-relational databases -- which existed before relational databases -- remain databases. (No-SQL usually refers to non-relational databases, though it could also, I suppose, encompass relational databases that don't use SQL, like anything that uses a Tutorial or Industrial D.)
(Of course, using a query language called "SQL", even if it is almost a subset of standard SQL, doesn't mean a database adheres to the relational model -- and MySQL using MyISAM tables to maximize performance, while sacrificing some of the essential elements of the relational model, is certainly an example of that. So its not really surprising that so-called "No-SQL" non-relational DBs would displace MySQL in certain uses, and it certainly isn't an "insult" to databases to call them databases any more than it was an insult to databases to call MySQL one.)
Neither SQL nor the relational model is the be-all, end-all of databases.
Any Prolog implementation is a query engine, by definition. I suspect what you are really looking for is a Prolog implementation where the store of facts is persistent rather than transitory. I'm not sure that such a thing exists, though many rules engines are conceptually generally similar (though I think that the search strategy used in Rete-based engines is different than that used in Prolog.)
"Not to mention that, while ZFS may not become a universal file system, it could well dominate in NAS appliances, and other proprietary closed-box products running OpenSolaris."
I don't think so.
Not because any technical problem with ZFS but because that other beast called "patents".
And this is not an opinion but a fact: Coraid already tried to build up a NAS device based on ZFS but NetApp made them think it twice by patent violation threatening.
"Btrfs is GPL licensed. Who started it is irrelevant. If Oracle drops it then others will pick it up."
Correction: others *may* pick it up. ...or may not.
"If Oracle for whatever reason decides to stop investing in BTRFS, the likely outcome AFAICS is not that BTRFS dies, but rather that Chris Mason and his team jump shop to Red Hat, Novell, Google, IBM or some other Linux contributor"
Are you sure their contracts allow for even thinking to do that?
More specifically, I'm looking for something that can easily plug in major existing databases.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
And here is why we need specialized CPUs for channel controller type tasks - asynch DMA engines with checksum abilities, sliding window state tracker registers, a descent sized L3 off chip cache for storing TCP state, that sort of thing. THe whole system needs to be one big TOE, and not just some measily chip on the NIC.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.