I used to work at Sun, and it's a company with a slow-moving internal culture. Pretty much any organisation that contains 30,000 people will necessarily not be zippy.
The lack of speed says nothing about their intentions, though. For example, I've been talking to a number of Sun people over the past several months as they've been choosing a revision control system for OpenSolaris to use, and they've been keenly aware of the benefits of both doing things in an open manner and doing them carefully.
They ended up choosing a wonderful revision control tool called Mercurial, but first they spent a few months evaluating the alternatives and, even better, writing up their evaluations and posting them in public. This is a very useful service to the open source community, as few people have time to evaluate tools in such depth, much less write in detail about why they did or not choose any of half a dozen alternatives.
As people who have been following the development of JDK 1.2 for Linux will know, the Sun/Inprise and Blackdown porting efforts have been taking place in parallel for the past while, and each group has produced a different port.
My experience has been that Blackdown's port was faster and more stable than Sun's. Now that Sun's port has been officially blessed, I imagine it will have the stability edge for a little while, but I will continue to use the Blackdown port for its superior performance.
Cormac's post is a little misleading. Oracle writes straight to disk, and doesn't go through the filesystem at all, so fsck never gets involved. However, fsck is necessary for PostgreSQL.
Unfortunately, there are not any journalling options available for Linux yet. Stephen Tweedie's ext3fs stuff is only barely in alpha, and SGI hasn't gotten very far through porting XFS. For now, if you're using a database that goes through the filesystem, you're stuck with fsck.
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I used to work at Sun, and it's a company with a slow-moving internal culture. Pretty much any organisation that contains 30,000 people will necessarily not be zippy. The lack of speed says nothing about their intentions, though. For example, I've been talking to a number of Sun people over the past several months as they've been choosing a revision control system for OpenSolaris to use, and they've been keenly aware of the benefits of both doing things in an open manner and doing them carefully. They ended up choosing a wonderful revision control tool called Mercurial, but first they spent a few months evaluating the alternatives and, even better, writing up their evaluations and posting them in public. This is a very useful service to the open source community, as few people have time to evaluate tools in such depth, much less write in detail about why they did or not choose any of half a dozen alternatives.
My experience has been that Blackdown's port was faster and more stable than Sun's. Now that Sun's port has been officially blessed, I imagine it will have the stability edge for a little while, but I will continue to use the Blackdown port for its superior performance.
Unfortunately, there are not any journalling options available for Linux yet. Stephen Tweedie's ext3fs stuff is only barely in alpha, and SGI hasn't gotten very far through porting XFS. For now, if you're using a database that goes through the filesystem, you're stuck with fsck.