All open databases are equal in front of the developers community. This is the message launched by Baron Schwartz in his announcement of the first Open SQL Camp. After the last MySQL Users Conference, there were some talks of alternative conferences organized by the users for users. This is the first such event. It will be held in Charlottesville, VA, USA, November 14-16, 2008.

Users, in the context of databases, especially open ones, means developers. Do you feel like hacking some database project? If your database of choice is open (MySQL, PostgreSQL, JavaDB, SQLite, Firebird), you may give the OpenSQLCamp a try!

Developer.com awards a Product of the Year and this year several of our family, friends and relatives are winners: Metro, NetBeans, JSR 223, JavaSE 6 and PostgreSQL. Full details in the Developer.COM article: [1], [2].

When Eduardo highlighted the excellent SPECjAppServer 2004 results for GlassFish v1 and PostgreSQL, he speculated that "GlassFish v2 should enable a better number (or similar number on cheaper hardware)." Now, just two weeks later, we have a new SPECjAppServer 2004 result which does use GlassFish v2 (while keeping PostgreSQL 8.2.4 for the DB). Its 813.73 JOPS are about 4.5% better than the 778.14 JOPS obtained in the earlier run with GlassFish v1. And, as Jignesh describes, these new results were obtained using about 33% less hardware. So Eduardo's predication was right on both counts--a better number and cheaper hardware.

Disclaimers: SPEC and the benchmark name SPECjAppServer 2004 are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of 07/23/06. The comparison presented is based on GlassFish v2 run on Sun Fire X4200 (4 chips, 8 cores) - 813.73 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard and GlassFish v1 run on Sun Fire X4200 (6 chips, 12 cores) - 778.14 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. For the latest SPECjAppServer 2004 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/.

Picture by Bo Nash.

How can a large project like GlassFish make such brisk strides on performance (1, 2, 3)? Well, for one thing, it certainly doesn't hurt to have backing from a company that has created tools like DTrace.

In his latest blog entry, Paul shows how he used DTrace to identify hot spots in the PostgreSQL JDBC Driver when run on GlassFish. Of course, the same techniques could be applied to any area of GlassFish. So please, feel free to jump in and help with our endless push for top performance.

Added: Also check out this Video Interview of the Dtrace tream.

Josh reports another SPECjAppServer 2004 result: 778.14 JOPS@Standard based on GlassFish v1. Although the number is lower than the 883.66 JOPS@Standard we just reported, the submission is interesting in that it is all open source, software (GlassFish, PostgreSQL,...) and hardware (T2000). Playing the leapfrogging game, GlassFish v2 should enable a better number (or similar number on cheaper hardware). Check Josh's writeup for more details.

Disclaimers: SPEC and the benchmark name SPECjAppServer 2004 are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of 07/10/07. The comparison presented is based on GlassFish v1 run on Sun Fire X4200 (6 chips, 12 cores) - 778.14 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard and on GlassFish v2 run on Sun Fire T2000 (1 chips, 8 cores) 1.4ghz - 883.66 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. For the latest SPECjAppServer 2004 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/.