Sun hardware has great margins. Sun makes money selling hardware and support. SPARC especially is a very profitable business that actually has nice growing revenue with their new CMT stuff. x86 is x86. The company hasn't been profitable recently because the management hasn't been willing to make cuts in other parts of the company. The big 6000 person layoff they announced last year is only now being completed. The company has some ~40k people. I'd bet the amount of people working on hardware projects is less than 5k.
Why are you trying to undermine the Anti-Sun FUD with reasonable statements? Didn't you get the memo?
In addition to stored procedures, I think you should also look into triggers, which are more powerful in postgresql.
A lot of people these days seem to be using the database as just a data store, and not using a lot of the power in the DB. That makes the application development a little harder.
If you put DB specific things in the DB it's also easier to separate tasks, so the app developers aren't doing all the work except schema generation.
While I like PostgreSQL more than MySQL, I think all this paranoia over Sun buying MySQL and then Oracle buying Sun is overblown. Sun's acquisition of MYSQL hasn't seemed to hurt it. In fact, the slope seems to be bigger after Sun bought it. There was a dip af ew months ago but that's a seasonal thing that's happened in the past as well.
I really don't understand what it is that people think Sun has done to hurt MySQL. The only public controversy was when the old MySQL AB guys announced they were releasing some stuff in the closed source version only, but then Sun was the one that came in and assured everyone it would be open. The way it played out in the press though was that it was Sun's decision to keep the new stuff closed, but that wasn't the case.
If someone could point to ways that Sun has hurt MySQL I would be genuinely interested in hearing them. From what I can see, MySQL has been growing in deployments and revenues (after a dip post sale) and it looks good for MySQL. Might not be good for the founders of MySQL (except for the bankrolls) but that usually happens in these cases where the top dogs in their own yard feel uncomfortable being part of a larger pack.
Oracle has a large amount of middleware that is Java based. They also have their Java app servers (oracle app server as well as BEA Weblogic) and related tools.
Oracle is heavily invested in Java.
Oracle didn't get into Java to compete with MS.NET. Microsoft created.NET to compete with Java.
On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:23:33AM -0500, James Bottomley wrote: > DTrace is more a piece of sun marketing coolaid which they use to beat > us up at every opportunity. > > We actually have a reasonably functional equivalent piece of technology > called systemtap.
Actually we don't, and while there's a large amount of coolaid around dtrace there are also various very useful bits around it.
Without going on the implementation level the obvious benefit of dtrace is that it just works. It comes with solaris, there is an enormous amount of existing static trace points in the kernel, and writing additional traces is rather easy. Also what's actually most important for most dtrace users I've seen is the ability to trace through userspace programs, and not actually kernel code which is something systemtap currently doesn't do at all, and something which to work should not require an out of tree metacompiler to generate kernel modules.
An additional advantage for dtrace is that they actually have modified lots and lots of userspace to support their userspace tracepoints, like the postgres example Matthew mentioned or the X server or Java. Duplicating all the this would be outright stupid, so we'd better have an API-level compatible implementation, even if our underlying implementation is different.
I don't know. I think OpenOffice.org could be important to Oracle.
Many people are surprised to hear that Oracle is the second largest software company. With OpenOffice.org adding 3 million users a week, it's a good place to put Oracle's logo.
Oracle will not likely make MySQL more like Oracle or make an easy migration path up to Oracle from MySQL since doing so will also create a migration path down from Oracle.
As for the MSAD/MSSQL, Sun just announced expanded interoperability between MySQL and Sun Identity Management Suite which I believe works well with MS Active Directory.
I don't know much about it but your comment brought to mind the article I saw earlier today.
Btrfs came from oracle and I think they're still the largest contributor.
Now Oracle will hve ZFS on an operating system they have a large financial interest in (most oracle deployments are still on solaris/sparc according to ellison) and now they own it.
I'ts going to be interesting to see what Oracle does. They could possibly use ZFS to get btrfs further along, but it's beneficial to their bottom line to keep some goodies all to Solaris.
The day the sale was announced Sun/Oracle had a conference call where Larry Ellison said two of the main reasons they were buying Sun were Solaris and Java. Solaris was the best Unix technology out there he said.
Selling the hardware business to HP was part of a different deal in the bast where Oracle and HP were going to buy different parts of Sun but IBM blocked it according to the article.
Nothing in the recent sale, other than some bloggers speculation, indicates they will be selling off the hardware units.
I think that's the direction sun want's to go with their private cloud stuff. It was called N1 but I'm not sure what's it's called now.
As a large public company, you may not be able to put everything in the cloud like you said, but some stuff you could.
Imagine your public website gets a predictable amount of traffic but every other press release brings a huge spike in traffic, so you have built out your system to handle the peak times so your hardware mostly sits idle.
You could have your own cloud provision spares, but since it's not sensitive data, you can provision computing power from public clouds, like amazon ec2 and just pay for what you need.
OK, maybe not the best scenario but I wanted an excuse to post this link to this Sun HPC software demo that shows Grid Engine sending jobs to private servers, then going to private spares, then pulling in Amazon EC2 instances to handle the load.
I think the work they are doing with ZFS on Fuse is commendable and I don't mean to belittle the efforts of any of the developers in my attempt at a funny dig above...
but, you wouldn't run a 0.5.0 beta version of a filesystem in production.
Phillips said MySQL has reach in "incremental markets" such as start-ups that Oracle can't get to on its own.
Basically, there is a customer out there that won't buy your product because it's too expensive for example. Instead of losing them to a competitor, you get them to use another product of yours, for free or hopefully with a service contract. Either way, they haven't gone to a competitor.
Your not making the money you would have made had you sold your flagship product, but you weren't going to make that anyway. Might as well get something, with the potential for more later, than turn them away.
Screven made it pretty clear the Sun vision of cloud computing does not fit with Oracle's; Oracle sees itself as a provider of infrastructure like virtualization to make clouds, not a provider of hosted services.
Uhm... That's one of the things Sun is doing with cloud computing that I don't think others are.
All the cloud stuff is, is virtualization and infrastructure. Jonathan Schwartz himself has said that if you're not comfortable putting your stuff on a public cloud they'll bring the cloud to you.
They've been doing cool stuff with their virtualization and provisioning systems.
I was getting bad activity from a server with ServerBeach. I used their abuse email to send them my logs of the activity and they were very responsive and took the server offline. They kept me informed, without giving me personal information about who was running the server. Others seem to have had similar experieces with them.
Other places, like ThePlanet, I don't even bother reporting stuff anymore. Nothing happens. I just check ARIN to see if they added any more ip address blocks that I might need to block.
Sources said Internet Protocol addresses of computers attempting to breach the NYPD's files have been tracked to China, the Netherlands and the Ukraine.
They should do what I, and others do. Just block all traffic from certain countries.
With most of my sites, I'm not interested in international traffic and all I get is spammers and content scrapers. I cam across this tip on blocking spammers and scrapers using IPFilter on Solaris and just update my ipf.conf file from time to time if I notice anything strange coming in, which I check from time to time. I also grab lists of ip ranges to add as well.
While it bothers me a bit to limit access to sites in principle, I really don't get any benefit from international traffic that outweighs the nuisance of the few that ruin it for everyone else.
When you build on top of something, you are dependent on that as your foundation. When you use it on the backend, it is an external piece of the application that can be replaced with relative ease.
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That's exactly what they said in the conference call too.
They want to develop a complete solution they can deliver from "application to disk", and with the acquisition of Sun they can do just that.
Oracle seems more interested in Solaris/SPARC but I really hope they pick-up development of Solaris/x86 for Oracle.
Sun's storage business, including their Open Storage initiative should also be attractive to Oracle.
In the past, if you were planning a big Oracle deployment, you'd likely have Sun and EMC come in, in addition to Oracle. Now it will just be Oracle.
They say they'll be able to make things more affordable too by having everything under one roof.
Sun hardware has great margins. Sun makes money selling hardware and support. SPARC especially is a very profitable business that actually has nice growing revenue with their new CMT stuff. x86 is x86. The company hasn't been profitable recently because the management hasn't been willing to make cuts in other parts of the company. The big 6000 person layoff they announced last year is only now being completed. The company has some ~40k people. I'd bet the amount of people working on hardware projects is less than 5k.
Why are you trying to undermine the Anti-Sun FUD with reasonable statements? Didn't you get the memo?
Can you clarify your statement. I hear these types of things frequently, but with no details.
I posted more thoughts on a previous comment.
In addition to stored procedures, I think you should also look into triggers, which are more powerful in postgresql.
A lot of people these days seem to be using the database as just a data store, and not using a lot of the power in the DB. That makes the application development a little harder.
If you put DB specific things in the DB it's also easier to separate tasks, so the app developers aren't doing all the work except schema generation.
While I like PostgreSQL more than MySQL, I think all this paranoia over Sun buying MySQL and then Oracle buying Sun is overblown. Sun's acquisition of MYSQL hasn't seemed to hurt it. In fact, the slope seems to be bigger after Sun bought it. There was a dip af ew months ago but that's a seasonal thing that's happened in the past as well.
I really don't understand what it is that people think Sun has done to hurt MySQL. The only public controversy was when the old MySQL AB guys announced they were releasing some stuff in the closed source version only, but then Sun was the one that came in and assured everyone it would be open. The way it played out in the press though was that it was Sun's decision to keep the new stuff closed, but that wasn't the case.
If someone could point to ways that Sun has hurt MySQL I would be genuinely interested in hearing them. From what I can see, MySQL has been growing in deployments and revenues (after a dip post sale) and it looks good for MySQL. Might not be good for the founders of MySQL (except for the bankrolls) but that usually happens in these cases where the top dogs in their own yard feel uncomfortable being part of a larger pack.
Oracle has a large amount of middleware that is Java based. They also have their Java app servers (oracle app server as well as BEA Weblogic) and related tools.
Oracle is heavily invested in Java.
Oracle didn't get into Java to compete with MS .NET. Microsoft created .NET to compete with Java.
How about this more recent quote from the Kernel Summit mailing list regarding dtrace and systemtap
On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:23:33AM -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
> DTrace is more a piece of sun marketing coolaid which they use to beat
> us up at every opportunity.
>
> We actually have a reasonably functional equivalent piece of technology
> called systemtap.
Actually we don't, and while there's a large amount of coolaid around
dtrace there are also various very useful bits around it.
Without going on the implementation level the obvious benefit of dtrace
is that it just works. It comes with solaris, there is an enormous
amount of existing static trace points in the kernel, and writing
additional traces is rather easy. Also what's actually most important
for most dtrace users I've seen is the ability to trace through
userspace programs, and not actually kernel code which is something
systemtap currently doesn't do at all, and something which to work
should not require an out of tree metacompiler to generate kernel
modules.
An additional advantage for dtrace is that they actually have modified
lots and lots of userspace to support their userspace tracepoints, like
the postgres example Matthew mentioned or the X server or Java.
Duplicating all the this would be outright stupid, so we'd better have
an API-level compatible implementation, even if our underlying
implementation is different.
I don't know. I think OpenOffice.org could be important to Oracle.
Many people are surprised to hear that Oracle is the second largest software company. With OpenOffice.org adding 3 million users a week, it's a good place to put Oracle's logo.
Oracle will not likely make MySQL more like Oracle or make an easy migration path up to Oracle from MySQL since doing so will also create a migration path down from Oracle.
As for the MSAD/MSSQL, Sun just announced expanded interoperability between MySQL and Sun Identity Management Suite which I believe works well with MS Active Directory.
I don't know much about it but your comment brought to mind the article I saw earlier today.
ZFS on Fuse is not production ready.
Btrfs came from oracle and I think they're still the largest contributor.
Now Oracle will hve ZFS on an operating system they have a large financial interest in (most oracle deployments are still on solaris/sparc according to ellison) and now they own it.
I'ts going to be interesting to see what Oracle does. They could possibly use ZFS to get btrfs further along, but it's beneficial to their bottom line to keep some goodies all to Solaris.
The day the sale was announced Sun/Oracle had a conference call where Larry Ellison said two of the main reasons they were buying Sun were Solaris and Java. Solaris was the best Unix technology out there he said.
Selling the hardware business to HP was part of a different deal in the bast where Oracle and HP were going to buy different parts of Sun but IBM blocked it according to the article.
Nothing in the recent sale, other than some bloggers speculation, indicates they will be selling off the hardware units.
I think that's the direction sun want's to go with their private cloud stuff. It was called N1 but I'm not sure what's it's called now.
As a large public company, you may not be able to put everything in the cloud like you said, but some stuff you could.
Imagine your public website gets a predictable amount of traffic but every other press release brings a huge spike in traffic, so you have built out your system to handle the peak times so your hardware mostly sits idle.
You could have your own cloud provision spares, but since it's not sensitive data, you can provision computing power from public clouds, like amazon ec2 and just pay for what you need.
OK, maybe not the best scenario but I wanted an excuse to post this link to this Sun HPC software demo that shows Grid Engine sending jobs to private servers, then going to private spares, then pulling in Amazon EC2 instances to handle the load.
Have you looked into Nexenta. Solaris Kernel with a userland more familiar to Linux users. I've heard people refer to it as the Ubuntu of Solaris.
OpenSolaris Nevada (the distro from Sun) led by Ian Murdock (the Ian in Debian), is supposed to be more gnu-y too.
I think the work they are doing with ZFS on Fuse is commendable and I don't mean to belittle the efforts of any of the developers in my attempt at a funny dig above...
but, you wouldn't run a 0.5.0 beta version of a filesystem in production.
Phillips said MySQL has reach in "incremental markets" such as start-ups that Oracle can't get to on its own.
Basically, there is a customer out there that won't buy your product because it's too expensive for example. Instead of losing them to a competitor, you get them to use another product of yours, for free or hopefully with a service contract. Either way, they haven't gone to a competitor.
Your not making the money you would have made had you sold your flagship product, but you weren't going to make that anyway. Might as well get something, with the potential for more later, than turn them away.
Linux doesn't need Solaris to be GPL'd. All the cool new stuff that Solaris came out with years ago should be in Linux any day now.
Any day now...
Screven made it pretty clear the Sun vision of cloud computing does not fit with Oracle's; Oracle sees itself as a provider of infrastructure like virtualization to make clouds, not a provider of hosted services.
Uhm... That's one of the things Sun is doing with cloud computing that I don't think others are.
All the cloud stuff is, is virtualization and infrastructure. Jonathan Schwartz himself has said that if you're not comfortable putting your stuff on a public cloud they'll bring the cloud to you.
They've been doing cool stuff with their virtualization and provisioning systems.
as Microsoft just announced Doctor's Office 2009.
Yeah, but it won't be released until the second half of 2010.
make the same movie twice,
Put a superstar and other known actors in one, and a bunch of guys people would say "hey isn't that the guy from that thing?" in the other
then see which version the public loves.
I was getting bad activity from a server with ServerBeach. I used their abuse email to send them my logs of the activity and they were very responsive and took the server offline. They kept me informed, without giving me personal information about who was running the server. Others seem to have had similar experieces with them.
Other places, like ThePlanet, I don't even bother reporting stuff anymore. Nothing happens. I just check ARIN to see if they added any more ip address blocks that I might need to block.
From the article
Sources said Internet Protocol addresses of computers attempting to breach the NYPD's files have been tracked to China, the Netherlands and the Ukraine.
You really have an outdated, stereotypical view of the NYPD.
They are very helpful and compassionate and willing to share with the community.
Go up to any officer and just ask. "I'm jonesing for some fresh donuts, I hear you guys know all the best spots all over the city."
He (or she) will probably be kind enough to invite you to the station house to share some of their private stash.
Did you notice that this story was posted in the "Developers" section?
They should do what I, and others do. Just block all traffic from certain countries.
With most of my sites, I'm not interested in international traffic and all I get is spammers and content scrapers. I cam across this tip on blocking spammers and scrapers using IPFilter on Solaris and just update my ipf.conf file from time to time if I notice anything strange coming in, which I check from time to time. I also grab lists of ip ranges to add as well.
While it bothers me a bit to limit access to sites in principle, I really don't get any benefit from international traffic that outweighs the nuisance of the few that ruin it for everyone else.
Actually that's false. There is an Affero clause for GPLv2 which you would have noticed had you read my link.
Oh yeah? Where?
Section 2(d) is not in GPLv2.
AGPLv1 is also incompatible with GPLv2 because of 2(d).
Maybe you should reread your link.
What's the difference?
When you build on top of something, you are dependent on that as your foundation. When you use it on the backend, it is an external piece of the application that can be replaced with relative ease.