Oracle has listed 10 promises on its Website in regards to maintaining MySQL when it acquires Sun. Oracle states that it has engaged in constructive discussions with the European Commission regarding the Oracle/Sun transaction, and in particular the maintenance of MySQL as a competitive force in the database market. It published this list of commitments in order to further reassure the Commission, customers, developers and users of its plans for MySQL.
Oracle's results for its fiscal second quarter showed profits jumped 13 percent. New software licenses rose 2 percent in the three months ending Nov. 30, which is better than the company's earlier prediction and comes after four straight quarters of declines, reported AP. Speaking during a conference call held Dec. 17 on the earnings report, Oracle executives also declared victory in their quest to acquire Sun.
Sun has won intellectual property cases in both the United States and Britain, reflecting strong efforts by Sun to protect its IP rights and market integrity, the company said. In the U.S. case, Sun obtained a federal court judgment against Sun Valley Technical Repair, describing it as a major counterfeiter of its products. The U.K. High Court of Justice also ruled in Sun's favor stating that British firm M-Tech Data infringed upon Sun's registered trademarks by importing Sun product into Europe without authorization.
Seventy-two percent of MySQL ISV / OEM customers responding to a 2009 survey use Windows for development and 59% use Windows as their application's deployment platform. With these statistics in mind, a guide has been written pointing out the reasons MySQL on Windows is more popular than Microsoft databases along with tips and links to various resources on how to develop and optimize MySQL applications on Windows.
Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition (DSEE) 7.0 improves performance by more than three times when compared to its predecessor, Sun reports, and improves authentication and modification performance by 60 percent, allowing customers to accelerate their applications without changing one line of code. See a comprehensive list of DSEE 7.0's features and benefits for more information on this release.
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A new quad-core 8 thread SPARC64 VII processor operating at 2.88GHz are now available on all M8000/M9000 servers and offered as field-install X-options and upgrades. It includes 6MB L2 cache. The 2.88GHz SPARC64 VII quad-core options can be mixed and matched in the SPARC Enterprise M8000 and M9000 servers with the current SPARC64 VI (2.28 or 2.4GHz) and SPARC64 VII (2.52GHz) options.
A database study comparing the performance of storage architectures using Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array and storage architecture based only on traditional hard disks was recently conducted, and its results presented by Chang Shu. Both atomic queries such as sorts / joins, and advanced queries containing complex business logic were tested in order to observe the performance gains in using F5100 Flash Array.
The advantages and risks of open storage, especially from the CIO's perspective, is the subject of Sun CIO Bob Worrall's discussion with Distinguished Engineer Art Licht of Sun Global Sales and Services. The talk begins with a definition of open storage, which is, "... a new way to build a storage product by using open, industry-standard components ... that offers a simpler, less-expensive way to manage data," in Licht's words.
We track how frequently each article is viewed on the web site to determine which the readers consider the most important. For last week, Vol 142 Issue 2, the top 10 articles were:
Sun announced the availability of a new, fine-grained entitlement enforcement engine as part of OpenSSO Express 9, and a next-generation directory proxy server as part of Sun OpenDS Standard Edition 2.2. The entitlement enforcement engine supports enterprise deployments and provides mass-scale extranet deployments with a complete off-the-shelf, standards-based solution that can externalize authorization for more than 100 million users. The new directory proxy server proactively maintains up-time as activity increases with a "global index" to help easily distribute and balance loads - based on factors such as any identity attribute or based on a traffic distribution algorithms.
Community Tech Tip: Converting MilaX Live CD for SPARC to a WANBOOT Image
MilaX, a small distribution that runs completely off a CD, can be a good tool for troubleshooting. In this BigAdmin community tech tip, Bernd Schemmer describes how to
convert the MilaX Live CD for SPARC platforms to a WANBOOT image, so it can be used on a
WANBOOT server to troubleshoot non-booting SPARC machines that run the Solaris OS.
Updated: Analyzing a patchadd or patchrm Failure in the Solaris OS
Sun engineer Enda O'Connor has updated the script for this BigAdmin article on patching. The updated script runs a pkgchk on both global zone and non-global zone binaries, and it searches for left-over lock files.
The authors of "DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study", Bianca Schroeder of the University of Toronto and Eduardo Pinheiro and Wolf-Dietrich Weber, both of Google, report on their analysis of measurements of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) errors in a large fleet of commodity servers over a period of 2.5 years. The collected data covers multiple vendors, DRAM capacities and technologies, and comprises many millions of DIMM days. The goal of the research was to answer questions such as the following: How common are memory errors in practice? What are their statistical properties? How are they affected by external factors, such as temperature and utilization, and by chip-specific factors, such as chip density, memory technology and DIMM age?
Sun Ops Center 2.5 offers enhanced support for virtualization solutions such as Solaris Zones. Owen Allen briefly highlights what users can do with Zones in the latest release of this comprehensive management software for physical and virtual systems. This includes managing, monitoring and working with both global and local Zones.
Sun Developer Network (SDN) staff writer Ed Ort has written a three-part article series introducing the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 6 platform. Released this December, Java EE 6 adds significant new technologies and extends the usability improvements made in previous Java EE releases. Ort's review of the platform highlights some of these enhancements.
A new beta release of Sun's Java Store is available with some new features including account creation in the client, the ability for developers outside of the US to preview applications using the Java Store view, improved integration with PayPal and more. Java Warehouse also is now available to six new countries: Israel, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Taiwan and South Korea.
Christoph Schuba in Solaris Security hosts a brief presentation on protecting Oracle applications with built-in Solaris Security features. Recorded during the Oracle Open World 2009 event, Schuba states that he along with Glenn Faden created a system that takes advantage of the security features available in Solaris.
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