On The Margins

Friday April 25, 2008

[ Technology ] Tolven Health PostgreSQL Benchmark

Tolven Health has published a benchmarking study with PostgreSQL on Solaris. The purpose of the study was to "to assess the scalability and performance characteristics of the Tolven open source healthcare information technology solution and to provide guidance for customers with regards to hardware requirements for enterprise, state, regional, and country wide deployments."

2008-04-25 16:38:35.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Tuesday April 08, 2008

[ Business ] Open Source Databases on the Rise

Christopher Lawton of The Wall Street Journal reports on the rise of the open source databases: The potential benefits in cost and flexibility have not been lost on customers. The market for open-source databases is expected to grow 35% to $270 million this year from $200 million in 2007, according to Gartner Inc. Among the earliest adopters are midsized companies, which don't always need the high-end features of conventional databases, says Carl Olofson, analyst with IDC, a market-research firm. For example, Sun Microsystems Inc. provides supported offerings of MySQL, PostgreSQL and Java DB (Apache / Derby) to its customers. If you're interested in discussion and community around open source database technologies for Solaris, see here.

2008-04-08 19:15:34.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Thursday March 20, 2008

[ Sun Microsystems Inc. ] OSDB Events

The best way to learn about major open source databases (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.) is to attend developer and user conferences. Sun Microsystems sponsors many of these conferences and events. (This April, you can catch Sun folks attending the MySQL conference in Santa Clara, and in May, you can catch them at PGCon in Ottawa.) Finally, if you're interested in Sun technologies and databases, you should become a member of the OpenSolaris Databases Community and start contributing.

2008-03-20 01:06:17.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Tuesday February 05, 2008

[ Technology ] PostgreSQL 8.3 is Released

Josh Berkus has just announced the release of PostgreSQL 8.3. Bjorn Munch has posted a note on the release of the Solaris binaries for PostgreSQL 8.3 on the OpenSolaris database community discussion forum. Munch also has a wiki entry that describes how to build PostgreSQL for youself. (Important note: As should be expected, Sun provides support only for PostgreSQL versions that it itself ships with Solaris. While this should be kept in mind, we also like developers to know how to build and develop PostgreSQL on Solaris. Hence the wiki entry!) This, I believe, is the first time official Solaris binaries of a GA release of PostgreSQL become available also through PostgreSQL.org. About this release, there has been a lot of commentary in the press and in blogsphere. These were forwarded by a colleague. I selected some of the news and blog items below, giving the relevant links:

• PostreSQL 8.3 ups performance, XML support -- Computerworld AU, 2/5

• PostgreSQL 8.3: UUID, XML, ENUMs… -- Orangeis My Favorite Color, 2/4

• PostgreSQL 8.3 Released -- AjaxLine (also appeared on Massimiliano Dessì's blog), 2/4

• PostgreSQL 8.3 Released -- UNIX System Administration, 2/4

• Postgresql 8.3 released -- Profoss News, 2/4

If interested, you should also consult the official PostgreSQL 8.3 release announcement.

Finally, I would also recommend checking out Sun PostgreSQL web site and the OpenSolaris database community for discussion and other topics related to PostgreSQL and databases in general!

Addenda:

"Open Source PostgreSQL 8.3 Better Suited For Web Applications: New features include a full text search tool, improved overall throughput, and ANSI standard SQL/XML support ," InformationWeek, 2/7

2008-02-05 18:13:20.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Wednesday January 30, 2008

[ Technology ] Data History

I took this picture in 2006 near the Sun MPK Cafeteria. I find it historically interesting!

2008-01-30 15:59:07.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Thursday January 24, 2008

[ Technology ] The Friendly Elephant and the Rising Elephine

Amol Chiplunkar describes his experience migrating an application to PostgreSQL. Here's how he describes the server requirements met by PostgreSQL.

Courtesy of Petr Zahradnik

The product has a central server layer that collects data from tens or sometimes hundreds of systems periodically. The collected data needs to be processed and stored in the database for generating reports and graphs. The data retainment policy is to keep on rolling it up so that the data stays over a long duration at a gradually reducing granularity level with time. Which means the freshly collected data should be the most granular while the older data should be summarized over a period of time and purged out as and when required.

In the meantime, Bjorn Munch describes how to build PostgreSQL for Open Solaris ... and Zdenek Kotala presents the "rising elephine" ...

2008-01-24 14:22:44.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Monday December 03, 2007

[ Technology ] Basics of PostgreSQL on Solaris

Josh Berkus covers the basics of PostgreSQL on Solaris in his Sun Tech Days, Milan, presentation.

2007-12-03 16:16:46.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Wednesday November 21, 2007

[ Technology ] Blogging from Berkeley

Blogging from Berkeley, David Van Couvering, a database technologist at Sun Microsystems, has recently written some pieces examining PostgreSQL on Solaris. (I certainly look forward to even more such pieces, or maybe some pieces on migration from Oracle or MySQL. I think there are some interesting topics to explore in those areas when it comes to tooling.)

For example, take a look at his posts on "NetBeans, Ruby on Rails, and PostgreSQL on Solaris"and on "Starting PostgreSQL as a service in Solaris Express ."
 

2007-11-21 12:43:20.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Wednesday October 17, 2007

[ Technology ] Switching from MySQL to PostgreSQL

Scott Fehrman has a new feature article up on BigAdmin. It explains how to switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL, with a whole section on PostgreSQL improvements in Solaris 10 8/07!
 

2007-10-17 23:53:54.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Tuesday October 02, 2007

[ Sun Microsystems Inc. ] PostgreSQL @ Sun

With revamped product web pages, you can more readily find information about PostgreSQL on Solaris, and if you're already a user of PostgreSQL on Solaris, you can buy PostgreSQL support from Sun.

2007-10-02 08:31:42.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Tuesday September 25, 2007

[ Sun Microsystems Inc. ] Live Webcast on Intel and Sun

If you catch this before 12:30 PM, PST, on Tuesday September 25, you can still watch a live web cast announcing "Sun Fire systems based on the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor."

2007-09-25 10:07:51.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Wednesday August 08, 2007

[ Sun Microsystems Inc. ] UltraSPARC T2

Find out more about UltraSPARC T2, announced on August 7!

(In the second chapter of the videocast, professor Dave Patterson of UC Berkeley speaks about limitations of spec benchmarks.)

2007-08-08 19:36:28.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Friday August 03, 2007

[ Sun Microsystems Inc. ] Cooler than this?

MPK (Menlo Park) ... First Friday of August ... What can be cooler than taking a walk around the internal block of the Solaris building? I never knew where offices of all the people I was meeting in meetings were ... I still don't but did meet some as I walked "around the block" ... Friday ... buzzing with buzz of machines, conversation, plans and celebrations! ... What can be cooler in a hot August day?

2007-08-03 10:35:30.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Tuesday July 10, 2007

[ Technology ] Database Price-Performance on Sun All Open-Source Platform

More good PostgreSQL and open-source news! 

In the first week of July 2007, Sun announced a very attractive SpecJ2004 result for an all open-source Sun stack, including PostgreSQL on Solaris on Niagara.

Josh Berkus and Jignesh Shah have already written about the recent SpecJ benchmark results. 

The highlights are already given by Josh and Jignesh's blogs: Josh notes the importance of the results in proving the suitability of the Niagara architecture for DB applications and the importance of this result as a proof of SMP scalability. He also notes the significant price difference between Sun and the competition and looks forward to even better SMP performance by PostgreSQL database on Solaris. Jignesh gives some details regarding the DB tuning strategy used. If you want more of the tuning strategy details, you should probably leave him a comment.

Here's a summary of other highlights based on other sources:

• This is the second all open source SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark result and Sun is the only vendor to publish all open source results.
• It demonstrates Sun's commitment to use open source software at all levels of the stack -- including open source databases -- and to bring these price/performance benefits to users.
• An all-Sun, all open source stack comprised of PostgreSQL on Solaris (built off OpenSolaris) on T2000s (with OpenSPARC) with Glassfish gave 89% the performance at 34% the cost of a comparable HP benchmark with proprietary database, application server, and hardware. (Tom Daly provides further details regarding price-performance results.)
  

If you do not know about SpecJ 2004, refer to spec.org. In summary, SPECjAppServer2004 heavily exercises all parts of the underlying infrastructure that make up the application environment, including hardware, JVM software, database software, JDBC drivers, and the system network. The primary metric of the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark is jAppServer Operations Per Second ("SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS") in either @Standard or @Distributed mode.

Look, also, at Tom Daly's blog for more information on these performance benchmarks and more.

Disclosure Statement:
Sun Fire X4200 (6 chips, 12 cores) 778.14 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.
HP rx2660 (2 chips, 4 cores) 874.61 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.
SPEC, SPECjAppServer reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.
Results from www.spec.org as of 7/10/07.

2007-07-10 00:12:06.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Sunday June 10, 2007

[ Technology ] PostgreSQL and Ruby Rock in the East

Read Jim Grisanzio's blog to see how PostgreSQL and Ruby rock in the East! ... There, you'll find pictures of Josh Berkus' PostgreSQL presentation, which may motivate you to learn more about the special features Solaris brings to its PostgreSQL distribution, and you may look, even further, into the new version of SXDE that's coming out with PostgreSQL 8.2.4 ... DTrace, Kerberos 5 and SMF enabled! ... For more on DTrace and PosgreSQL, see Robert Lor's weblog.

2007-06-10 22:36:41.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Saturday March 03, 2007

[ Technology ] Open Solaris Starter Kit

Simon Phipps writes about Open Solaris Starter Kit.

2007-03-03 13:18:32.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Saturday February 03, 2007

[ Technology ] Ubuntu Laptop

Last year Ubuntu made some moves. This year, the Linux I run on my multi-OS Toshiba Tecra M5 laptop is Ubuntu. My first reaction to Ubuntu on the laptop was that it reminded my of my Mac OS-X machine at home. My second reaction was "let me try this some more" but how surprising can that be? Both have their foundation on Unix and its basic concepts, i.e. the bedrock of of operating systems such as Solaris.

2007-02-03 00:19:10.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Monday January 22, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Solaris Deskop + Sun-Intel

I don't know what the default Solaris ("Nevada," Solaris 11, build 55+) desktop is made of but whatever it is made of, it looks and works great. I've only begun exploring it, and it is proving very sticky, meaning that once you start working on it, it is hard to let go. In terms of look-and-feel and real-time user-level performance (not to mention other measures), it competes extraordinarily well with the very best Linux desktops I've ever used, including the ones I'm using now. In my environment, i.e. a 2003 two-CPU Gateway desktop located in building 17 of MPK, it is blazingly fast, and it is not even the latest Xeon. Little wonder: Check out the Sun-Intel announcement coming soon here. The WSJ report on the deal, based on analysts' predictions, can be found here. Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has just posted about the announcement.

2007-01-22 10:05:19.0 -- Comments [4] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Friday January 19, 2007

[ Technology ] Solaris on a 2-CPU x86 Machine

I have this very fast development Gateway desktop with Intel CPUs from three years ago.

For some time I have wanted to upgrade the system with a solid operating system. So, as I write this, Solaris "Nevada" is being downloaded and installed from the network. (Thanks go to James Liu, a fellow blogger on blogs.sun.com who provided me with the installation CDs!)

... Now, the installation is complete and it rocks ...

It gives me a root account and I can easily create user accounts, and the desktop is truly attractive ...

2007-01-19 12:21:45.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Tuesday January 09, 2007

[ Work ] Partitioning a Disk

Warning: This entry is the story of partitioning a disk.

I've recently moved offices within Sun and just got a new laptop. With a back-up work system, I figured it was a perfect time to go back to the Gateway desktop I've had in my office for some time and try to install Solaris on it.

As would be expected, we have weekly builds of Solaris here, and right across from my office, I can pick up the latest weekly build on a DVD. This seemed like a good place to start.

As a first step, I wondered if I should partition the hard disk on my Gateway machine which currently runs Windows. I didn't really need the Windows operating system any more. I don't use it for any application that would require it and all applications I run are either Java-based or available on Solaris, and I have used Open Office very successfully since 2003 to deal with MS Office based documents.

Nevertheless, I decided that the partitioning exercise was to be had not so much because I was interested in preserving my Windows files but because I wanted to see how easy it was to perform the task without paying for any software. James Liu had earlier mentioned QtParted tool available on Knoppix, which is a Linux OS possible to run from a CD. I had always wanted to use an open source partitioning facility, and this seemed like a good working choice. The alternative, of course, was just not to partition and install using the Solaris installation DVD.

When I was unable to produce my own working Knoppix CD, James kindly came to the rescue and gave me a working CD of Knoppix 5.1.1. James had burned this CD on Solaris. (The CD I had produced kept relegating me to a useless shell of Knoppix perhaps because I was producing it on a Windows XP system with a freeware CD image burner, probably not adequate for my purposes even at low burn speeds. There are commercial tools for burning CDs from CD images on Windows XP but I didn't want to use any of these.) 

The Knoppix OS on the CD works really well. I was now able to load the OS and then run QtParted to resize the existing partition and "create" new ones, and then run QtParted to "commit" these changes. I used suggestions from Richard Friedman which worked really well.

It turns out that the Ferrari laptop on which Richard installed Solaris Express has a similar size of disk to the Gateway machine in my office. The only difference is that QtParted performed the job of disk partitioning in less than 20 minutes on my Gateway machine which compares very well with the 2 hours in the Ferrari experience. As always, we shouldn't compare apples and oranges. The higher speed for partitioning has to do with the two CPUs and the large RAM available on the Gateway box in my office.

More later ...

2007-01-09 18:31:26.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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