On The Margins

Thursday May 08, 2008

[ Sun Microsystems Inc. ] Who Dons the Java DB T-Shirt

Giuseppe Maxia took this picture at JavaOne, 2008, just a couple of days ago. It shows Marten Mickos (MySQL) donning the Java DB T-Shirt and giving a friendly hug to PostgreSQL evangelist Josh Berkus. That's how the story of the three open-source databases from Sun will keep unfolding. Many observers have noted that customers and developers will have great choices to work with: the premier open-source DB for web applications, the premier open-source DB for demanding enterprise and reporting applications, and the premier open-source DB for embedding in Java applications. All from the same company. Sun!

2008-05-08 23:41:34.0 -- Comments [0] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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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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Sunday April 13, 2008

[ Technology ] Community Dinner

Giuseppe Maxia blogs about the MySQL community dinner with some special guests in attendance.

2008-04-13 23:59:39.0 -- ; 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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Wednesday January 30, 2008

[ Technology ] Buying PostgreSQL support got easier

Buying support for PostgreSQL on Solaris has become much easier.

Just click "Buy Now" on the PostgreSQL support page and you'll be on your way.

2008-01-30 17:59:51.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
databases enterprise opensource postgresql server software sun support technology

[ 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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Friday January 18, 2008

[ Sun Microsystems Inc. ] James Gosling, Monty Widenius, David Axmark, and Brian Aker on Sun's Acquisition of MySQL

2008-01-18 13:57:54.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Wednesday January 16, 2008

[ Sun Microsystems Inc. ] Sun To Acquire MySQL

Sun has announced an agreement to acquire MySQL. (Reports can also be found at WSJ and Reuters.)  Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, discusses the acquisition on his blog. Kaj Arno, VP of community for MySQL, has also discussed the acquisition form MySQL perspective.

2008-01-16 07:06:08.0 -- ; 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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Sunday November 11, 2007

[ Networks ] Same Desktop Everywhere -- From the San Francisco Bay Area to Bangalore

I'm working on the same desktop I used last week in the Bay Area, now on a "SunRay 170" here in Sun's Bangalore drop-in center. (Later models of Sun Ray client are also available—a great tool for all global corporations.)

Now, I should wonder why I lugged my laptop across the globe?

2007-11-11 21:15:56.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Tuesday November 06, 2007

[ Technology ] Acting Talent

Observe that acting and dancing talent can spring up almost anywhere ...
 

2007-11-06 15:10:04.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Thursday October 18, 2007

[ Technology ] Where is this?

Where is this?

2007-10-18 09:58:14.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Monday October 08, 2007

[ Technology ] Shoal Beyond Glassfish V2

I've already written about the early days of what became Shoal, and you've probably already seen the good news of Shoal shipping with Glassfish V2 and about how it provides dynamic clustering and in-memory replication (see the Aquarium).

Here, I simply want to point to this great summary by Mohamed Abdelaziz of Shoal development activities one can eagerly anticipate and drive.

It is great to see Shoal move forward with such great force and verve.

2007-10-08 14:05:28.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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[ Sun Microsystems Inc. ] Another Mode

Check out Thorleif Wiik's blog for another mode of going!

2007-10-08 13:05:26.0 -- Comments [1] ; 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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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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Thursday August 02, 2007

[ Technology ] Underground Notes and Voices from OSCon and Ubuntu Live

Some say Sun is as cool as OSCon (if not cooler) because, among most companies that support OSCon, only Sun can produce truly underground notes on OSCon.

David Van Couvering reviews Mike Olson's comments about his keynote at OSCon and pontificates about whether the value of Open Source could be limited to the collaboration it fosters. David aptly notes that

Open source and an open community gives you the assurance that the technology you are depending on is not going to be discontinued or put into "maintenance mode," it won't be acquired by someone who you would rather not do business with, and it won't be used as leverage against you to extract money or modify your behavior.

By way of further review, David contrasts MySQL as an Open Source project to PostgreSQL as an Open Source project.

In a separate underground note from OSCon, Barton George has posted his interview with Free Software Foundation lawyer Eben Moglen.

Barton has also produced a series of interviews with some six dignitaries during Ubuntu Live: Mark Shuttleworth. Tim Gardner, Jane Silber, Daniel Holbach, Stephen O'Grady, Jono Bacon.

2007-08-02 10:42:13.0 -- Comments [1] ; 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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