Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA), one of the key requirements for any Oracle Fusion Middleware enterprise deployment, is the Oracle best practices blueprint for implementing Oracle high availability technologies.

The Oracle white paper "Maximum Availability Architecture: Oracle Best Practices for High Availability" provides the Oracle Fusion Middleware Disaster Recovery architecture and strategy for deployments on Oracle Exalogic with Oracle Exadata Database Machine along with detailed deployment and configuration steps for the Oracle Fusion Middleware Disaster Recovery solution on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata Database Machine, which also applies to non-Exadata based database deployments as well. Covered as well are best practices for the Oracle Fusion Middleware Disaster Recovery solution with Exalogic and Exadata.

Introduction to the Oracle Solaris ZFS File System is a hands-on tutorial on the basics of Oracle Solaris ZFS that describes how devices are used in storage pools and considers performance and availability. The tutorial also looks at the various types of Oracle Solaris ZFS datasets that can be created and when to use each type. Participants will learn about file system snapshots, cloning data, allocation limits and recovering from common errors. Advanced concepts such as hybrid storage pools will be demonstrated. The included exercises involve creating some zpools and exploring different types of virtual devices (vdevs). Participants will also create two different types of ZFS datasets, file systems and volumes, customizing some properties, snapshotting and cloning them, and finally performing some upgrades. The tutorial's advanced section deals with how some of the other Oracle Solaris services, like NFS (Network File System) and FMA (Fault Management Architecture) are tied into ZFS. Time to completion is estimated at 50 minutes.

The May 2011 MySQL newsletter is now available. Highlights include a DevZone article on the MySQL 5.5 Pluggable Authentication API, a seminar on Scalability and High Availability, and webinars on Securing MySQL and Scaling Web Databases with Auto-Partitioning and SQL/NoSQL.

There are links to New Product Release, white papers, blogs and on-demand webinars.

The Sun SPOT Hardware Developers Kit Rev8, now available in the Oracle Store contains all the essential components for implementations of Small Programmable Object Technology. A Sun SPOT device is a small, wireless, battery powered experimental platform that is programmed in Java, allowing programmers to create projects that once required specialized embedded system development skills. The hardware platform includes a range of built-in sensors as well as the ability to easily interface to external devices. Clearly, Sun SPOT devices are much more than just an embedded microprocessor that runs Java. Each Sun SPOT Java Development Kit contains two free-range Sun SPOT devices (with processor, radio, sensor board and battery) and one base station Sun SPOT device (with processor and radio). Also included in the kit are software development tools and a USB cable allowing you to start developing applications for your Sun SPOT devices.

Demand for high-end non-x86 servers during the first quarter helped HP and IBM to retain their position as first and second in server revenue, respectively, as determined by an IDC survey and reported by Jeffrey Burt writing in eWeek. Burt writes that, for Unix servers, Q1 was the first in the past 11 quarters to show year-on-year revenue growth, which increased 12.5 percent over the same period last year. IBM, HP and Oracle all showed improvement in their Unix server revenue numbers. Worldwide Unix revenues grew to $2.6 billion, which represented 21.8 percent of all quarterly server revenue, Burt reports. He notes also that revenue for IBM’s System z servers running z/OS grew for the third consecutive quarter, increasing 41.1 percent over the first quarter in 2010, to $1 billion, which represents 8.8 percent of overall server revenue.

We track how frequently each article is viewed on the web site to determine which the readers consider the most important. For last week, the top 10 articles were:

• [Just About] Everything there Is to Know about Solaris 11 OS
• Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.0.8 Released
• On ZFS Dedup Internals
• Oracle Database Machine and Exadata Storage Server Information Center
• TIOBE Software Survey Identifies Top Programming Language
• Oracle's Exadata Banking and Financial Services Customers Numbers Continue to Increase
• Oracle Secure Global Desktop 4.61 Released
• OTN Live - Chris Baker Describes Oracle Solaris Optimizations for x86
• Oracle Solaris: Behind The Scenes With Product Management
• Oracle Tuxedo 11.1.1.2 Delivers a New Way to Run PHP Applications

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

Oracle has announced superior performance in a recently completed benchmark test of Oracle Insurance Policy Administration for Life and Annuity Version 9.3 running on Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 and Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 application servers.

The benchmark included 100 million policies and more than 2,000 concurrent users. According to the Oracle press release, the findings show that the technology combination can enable even the largest Tier One insurers to achieve the scalability, system availability and performance needed to meet increasingly rigorous requirements for better customer service and reduced risk.

The benchmark performance test included a data set containing five years of financial history, totaling nearly 30 terabytes of data.

The Oracle white paper "Best Practices for Deploying Oracle RAC inside Oacle Solaris Containers" contends that the best choice for consolidating various Oracle RAC databases with different versions or patch levels is Oracle Solaris Containers, which can even be hosted on the same operating system kernel. The white paper explains that, with the recent certification and support for Oracle RAC on Solaris Containers, enterprises can realize the benefit of deploying RAC cluster on same nodes as their applications or multiple RAC clusters on consolidated hardware for various lines of businesses while leveraging common hardware or quickly procure and deploy RAC nodes as demand picks up.

If you are on the fence between Oracle Virtualization and VMware, before you commit, have a look at "Discover Why Oracle Delivers More Value than VMware" where you will find ten compelling reasons to come down on the Oracle side of things. Oracle Virtualization is: :

• Application-aware
• Lower cost
• Offers integrated management
• Offers accelerated application deployment
• Features high availability
• Architected for efficiency
• Comes with integrated support
• Is optimized for Java
• Has virtualization built in to the system
• Features comprehensive platform support

Still undecided? Take a closer look.

Many skeptics bid their fond goodbyes to Java as a programming language when Oracle acquired Sun, the belief being that open source was not of interest to the hard fisted profit making company Oracle had proven itself to be. The reports of Java's death, it turns out, were premature, or so Sudhir Chowdhary writes in The Financial Express, where he observes that " ... Java [is] one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies." With Oracle Fusion Middleware -- which is built on top of Java language and software -- one of Oracle’s fastest growing business, " ... Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community,” according to Harshad Oak, founder of IndicThreads & Rightrix Solutions and the author of several articles on Java technology, as reported by Chowdhary. With 1.4 billion Java cards manufactured each year and growing at 1.7 billion devices per year, Oracle's Java clearly has a lock on the set-top box, printer, Web camera, gaming, car navigation system, lottery terminal, medical device, parking payment station markets and more. And with Oracle's clear intent to modernize the Java mobile platform by delivering Java with Web support to consumer devices, that market lock is all but ensured.

Oracle has posted a tabular list of Supported Virtualization and Partitioning Technologies for Oracle Database and RAC Product Releases that identifies those virtualization/partitioning technologies already supported and reaffirms the policies that each new OS and its complementary virtualization/partitioning technology, must be certified by Oracle and, further, that each new OS plus its virtualization/partitioning solution must be guaranteed by the appropriate hardware vendor to be backward compatible to the version listed in the tables cited in the above link.