Oracle's third quarter fiscal year 2010 results will be released on Thursday, March 25th, after the close of the market. Oracle plans on hosting a conference call and live web broadcast at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time to discuss the financial results. The live web broadcast will be available from the Oracle Investor Relations Web site.

The Oracle Certification page has posted FAQs on Sun certification. Paul Sorensen offers answers to some of the most pressing inquiries, such as whether Sun certification will continue to be valid; does one need to be recertified since Oracle has acquired Sun; can someone still become Sun certified, along with many others. In a separate entry, Sorensen also provides information on Oracle Database 11g certification.

An OpenSolaris Information Resources article describes what its author determined were the most important differences between OpenSolaris and Linux to assist new users interested in transitioning to OpenSolaris. The article covers the user interface, sudo command, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), top command, prstat command, and file systems. This article offers a brief overview of differences and does contain resource links on the topic for more indepth information.

An assessment of the Oracle-Sun acquisition in terms of the future for the open source database MySQL is presented by Steve Evans of CBR in the article "What now for MySQL?" He reviews the hard fight Oracle eventually won to become owner of MySQL, and offers why the EU's decision should assuage some of the worries of the open source community.

The Oracle-Sun downloads page offers the latest downloads along with a list of the top software visitors have downloaded. The page also offers its featured downloads, such as Java, NetBeans, GlassFish, JavaFX, OpenOffice.org, VirtualBox, and more. This article lists the most recent and top downloads, and links to access them.

The lineup for the next three shows of Oracle Technology Network's TechCast are as follows:

• March 16: Roberto Chinnici, principal engineer, Java EE, will discuss Java EE 6.
• March 30: Wim Coekaerts, VP Linux and VM Development, will discuss Oracle VM and VirtualBox integration. A demonstration is expected to be presented.
• April 13: Steve Wilson, VP, Systems Management, will discuss Ops Center.

Tune in to The TechCast Show hosted by OTN Senior Director Justin Kestelyn at 10 a.m. Pacific Time on the dates listed above, and listen in live. Questions can also be posed via Twitter, Facebook, or the native chat offered.

For the most part, the Oracle Sun Fire X4170 found favor with the reviewer for V3.co.uk, Alan Stevens, who pronounced the server " ... A good choice for companies looking for maximum performance from a 1U package," and a prime candidate for virtualization service. The X4170 compares quite favorably with its chief competition, the HP ProLiant DL360 G6 and the Dell PowerEdge R610. Stevens gives the Oracle Sun product such high marks in part because " ... it's a dual-processor server capable of accommodating the same range of dual-core and quad-core Xeon 5500 Nehalem chips."

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 145 Issue 1, the top 10 articles were:

• Oracle-Sun and Hitachi Data Systems End Reseller Agreement
• The Keys to Combining Two Very Different Organizations
• Oracle Clarifies No End of Life Set for OpenSolaris
• IBM POWER7 SPECfp_rate2006 Scaling Results Scrutinized
• Virtual Machine Migration
• Pondering the Dedup Process: Synchronous or Asynchronous
• Gartner and IDC Release Worldwide Server Market Reports
• Installing Sun Cluster Running Oracle RAC/CRS and Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems
• Oracle GlassFish Server 3
• Oracle Leads in Predictive Analytics and Data Mining, Forrester Reports

The longer version of this article has list of top ten articles for the last 8 weeks.

With its acquisition of Sun, Oracle is now the world's largest purveyor of open source software. However, as Ken Hess notes on the DaniWeb Forum Index, Oracle's support didn't start with its purchase of InnoDB, MySQL or Sun. The company has a history of supporting free and open source software and has done much for the FOSS community.

The browser-based applications that present the kinds of engrossing user interfaces (UIs) and content previously found only in desktop applications -- otherwise known as Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) -- are becoming increasingly popular with developers, writes Sun Developer Network staffer Ed Ort, in part because of the ubiquity of the Internet and also because of the improved uniformity in the way different browsers handle RIAs.

Results of the PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.0 benchmark on Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 and X6270 blade servers are available. This benchmarking report is particularly significant, writes Giri Mandalika in his Scratchpad blog, because the workload has both online transactions and batch processes and, furthermore, it is the first time Sun has published a PeopleSoft benchmark on x64 hardware running Oracle Enterprise Linux.

As certain Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) systems do not scale as well as others, users frequently need to migrate to more capacious solutions in order to meet their storage needs. In his blog post, Israel Pacheco "The Challenge -- Migrate HSM Systems" offers some suggestions for migrating large volumes of data from old to new HSM systems in a timely fashion.

There have been many questions raised recently about which of Sun's products will have a life after Oracle. Some of these questions are answered in the post "The Oracle VM Product Line Welcomes Sun!" by Adam Hawley, who writes, "We are tremendously excited to combine our portfolios and work side-by-side with our extremely talented Sun brethren to advance the state-of-the art in virtualization."

Learn how to deploy a secure application with protected methods on Oracle-Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server Version 3. Nithya Subramanian shows how to provide authentication credentials to the embedded server - a key new feature offered by this version of GlassFish - before invoking the protected methods in a recent blog entry.

In this Oracle Technology Network's TechCast, Nandini Ramani, director of Java Development at Oracle, brings news about innovation, evangelism, and adoption in the JavaFX area. The video runs 25:40. Watch it now.

Oracle's SOA Governance solution strives to ease the transition of an organization to service-oriented architecture (SOA). The solution automates essential SOA governance processes, regardless of the status or progress of an SOA transformation. The most recent release is Oracle SOA Governance 11g, which Oracle states is the "most complete, unified approach for governing service oriented architecture and application integration projects."