This week carries a new episode in the Sun/Oracle/EU saga: The EU Comission has issued a statement of objections on the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.

Since I am a Sun employee, I will just provide the basic links, no matter how tempting it might be to go beyond that... • (Nov 9th) EU issues SoO - I've only found indirect references to the SoO, like Sun's K-8 Filing. • (later that same day...) Oracle reacted with a PR Statement. • (a bit later...) The DOJ issued their own comment on the EU SoO. • (next morming, Nov 10th) And the EU comments on the DOJ comment (Reuters) • (and, on Nov 11th) According to eWeek Europe, the next step is a hearing on Nov 25th.

The material would make for good pulp fiction. It's very sad to see the impact on people, but today I was talking with a friend that was affected and he was being very good at keeping things in perspective, so I thought of using the front cover of a true pulp fiction: Doc Savage - which I first encountered in an old Spanish translation in a storage room in my grandfather's flat in Barcelona (together with copies of The Shadow and El Coyote).

Perhaps also time to watch again the movie? Blu-ray, pretty please?

Oracle has updated their page on Oracle and Sun and it now includes a PDF entitled "Oracle and Sun Overview and FAQ".  Check it out for comments on many topics covering Sun's Hardware (SPARC, Storage, x86) and Software offerings, including NetBeans, OpenOffice, MySQL, xVM OpsCenter, OpenSource, VirtualBox and GlassFish.

Amazon has just announced the availability of a new service: the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), based on MySQL 5.1 (AWS Blog, RDS@AWS).  They support both InnoDB and MyISAM but not replication.  See notes from: Mark Callahan@Facebook, Robert Treat@OmniTI, CannelWeb... RDS's pricing depends on the size of the DB instance, ranging from 1.7 GB, 1 ECU to 68 GB of memory, 26 ECUs. Also note that EC2 has lowered its prices.

Quoting from the RDS site, this is how Amazon is presenting the value prop:

Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period. You also benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database instance via a single API call. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.

More AWS info at Products, FAQs and elsewhere at AWS. Overall, this is a good move from Amazon, and the whole space is going to continue to change rapidly in the near future, see for example AWS@Oracle and Oracle@AWS.

Kai's em novo blog como um funcionário da Sun é agora o The TAO of AMP e os posts mais recentes estão começando a refletir o estilo dele: • Impulsione seu site AMP utilizando mod_rewrite • O Guia de Manga de DataBases Ainda da tempo para adicionar The TAO of AMP à sua lista de leitura diária.

MySQL opens its labs to the community. Users who want to test the early builds, before they are released for general availability can get them from MySQL Labs.

There is a detailed announcement that warns against using these binaries in production, but encourages everyone to test them. A companion tutorial explains how to use the snapshots to test the InnoDB plugin, which was released recently, and it is included in the latest MySQL 5.1 binaries.

Joyent and Sun have announced a highly tuned MySQL Accelerator that claims 2x-4x better performance than EC2 (but see comments). Joyent focuses on "Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing", with offerings on Public Cloud and the Private Cloud, plus a new Smart Platform in beta (tutorial). Joyent's Cloud is Based on OpenSolaris and they are the largest OpenSolaris installation in the world.

Joyent and Sun have a long collaboration on Software and Hardware ([1], [2], [3]). One of the containers supported in Joyent's Accelerators is GlassFish; see [4], [5], [6], and the MySQL Appliance, plus the Zeus Accelerator (built using ZXTM's Extensible Traffic Manager) and GlassFish make a very good Java Stack. We had covered Joyent's hosting in earlier posts (@TA, @MtR).

BTW, while checking on this piece, I see that Joyent has Sold Strongspace and BingoDisk to ExpandDrive so they can "... focus on Joyent Accelerators and Joyent Smart".

Ken Jacobs (Dr. DBA) has Announced Plugin 1.0.4. This release has significant performance improvements, including a number of key 3rd Party Contributions. Reactions from the community so far seem very positive ([1], [2]). Hopefully this is good news for everybody out there reading tea-leaves on how Oracle will treat its not-yet-there new projects.

More good news around the WebStack team: Kai 'Oswald' Seidler, of Apache Friends and XAMPP fame, has joined the team - see Kai's post (German, mock-english). XAMPP is one of the (the?) most popular WAMP Distros (see Google Trend), and Kai will now be able to work full-time on it. I talked with Kai a few months ago and enjoyed our phone chat a lot but, unfortunately, I was away when he visited Santa Clara recently (photo gallery). One of the topics during the trip was how to leverage the WebStack and the XAMPP efforts; stay tuned for news on that.

Welcome to the team, Kai!

I see that Kaj mentioned the (GlassFish) WebStack when telling the story of the MySQL.Com Outage. One of the main benefits of the WebStack is that all the pieces work very well together, so that was one less thing to worry about; the electrical woes were stressful enough...

If you missed Kaj's announcement in the splashing news commotion at the latest MySQL Conference, then you may be interested to get this information again. There was a piece of news that should be extremely important for all the users. MySQL server binaries used to be split between Enterprise and Community, and they were released with separate schedules. Not anymore. Starting from April 2009, the MySQL Community and Enterprise editions are built from the same code, and they are released with the same frequency.

There were rumors about the two editions being treated differently. Since we are talking about it, let me assure you that this is not the case. Both editions go through the same tests, and even more so now, since they come from the same tree. Until version 5.0.81, there was a separate tree for Community (with extra features), but now there is only one.

For every bug fix release, both editions are released on the same day.

Another difference that has disappeared is the version number. Previously, even numbers were for Enterprise, odd ones for Community. Now, every version number identifies both the Community and Enterprise edition.

Enjoy the best bits from MySQL. download at will!

Wikis and Blogs have been critical to the success of GlassFish. I'm always interested in other tools that leverage self-publishing and social networks and our MySQL relatives just announced the MySQL Librarian, a tool very similar to Slynkr but with additional refinements... and strongly tied to the MySQL community - a tie that I think that is what is missing in SDN Share.

Check it out in Giuseppe's Intro, the Technical Article, or just go play with the Actual Website.

What do you think? We had been playing with using conventions and templates on Wikis to do things like this for the GlassFish Community but we may want to just clone the librarian - after waiting a bit to see how it plays for MySQL.

Two more RDBMS/GlassFish/Software combinations to add... ADempiere is traditionally backed by PostgreSQL (Compiere usually goes with Oracle Server or EnterpriseDB). Using MySQL has been discussed on and off for a while, and Praneet reports on more progress on this direction on ADempiere on MySQL (on GlassFish Server). And, on the MEP front, report on using SQL Server with MEP (... on GlassFish Server).

I just found out but Sang has been teaching a series of 1-day free training sessions on JavaFX, MySQL and GlassFish. The full list is at his JavaPassion Site but by now there are only 3 days left, so check it out and signup if you are interested and available. • June 24th, Atlanta, GA • June 25th, Raleigh, NC • June 26th, Cleveland, OH

Release models make a huge difference in the properties of the software delivered. I believe there is no single "ideal" model; what to choose depends on the code base, the group/community creating the code, the users/customers, the technology available (languages, CI tools, others)... What works for Hudson does not work for GlassFish nor for Solaris.

MySQL is changing its release model to improve agility, quality, predictability and facilitate contributions. Giuseppe just posted an Overview; in a nutshell, the trunk tree is always in beta quality, new features are first developed in stage branches, then integrated into the trunk, which is then brought to RC quality and another cycle starts (see Diagram). Full details at the MySQL Forge and in Tomas's Presentation at MySQL University (slides; recording is NYA).

The basic model seems feasible; now we need a few release cycles to adjust the model and we will see how it works in real-life. As Don Quijote said... the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

I recently noticed several new books based on GlassFish Server, like Yuli's book on Java EE and DBs, Using MySQL and GlassFish and Antonio's book on Java EE 6 with GF v3. Looking a bit more I also found that David also has a new book on NetBeans 6 and Java EE 5 (w/ GF) and Adam has one on the Netbeans 6 RCP that also uses GlassFish in many places.

Below is a quick table of the books I know (in random order); please (continue to) send me omissions and I will update it.

Added - Masoud's GlassFish in Action is in Early Access Edition.