Database

Open source community reacts to Oracle-Sun deal

Yesterday’s news that Oracle had entered an agreement to buy Sun sent a bit of a shock wave through the open source community. After weeks of pondering what an IBM buyout of Sun would mean, the IT community now had an entirely different scenario unfolding.

The news was the first thing I noticed when I logged onto Twitter, and I saw that SearchDataCenter.com was working on the story. I “retweeted” Executive Editor Matt Stansberry’s play for feedback and heard back from Tom Howard, who said “IBM missed its chance. I want to know what Oracle’s commitment to Open Office and Solaris are, personally.”

But the bigger fear was from the MySQL folks. Satoshi Nagayasu, an open source database engineer from Tokyo, Japan, asked “Should we say goodbye to MySQL?” He then pointed to a blog from 2005 that was a reaction to Oracle’s purchase of Innobase, and said “Josh’s article gave me some insights why we use community-based open source [PostgreSQL].”

One of the more fun and mood-illustrating reactions was from tartansolutions: “Oracle now owns MySQL?! In related news, the Rebel Alliance has been acquired by Darth Vader for three wookies and a tantan :(“

John Engates, CTO at Rackspace, said “Seems like there’s a lot of concern about Oracle screwing up MySQL. People may look to PostgreSQL as a ‘safe’ open source DB.” He linked to a blog post by Om Malik, providing the GigaOM perspective on the purchase. Of the things Om said, the central point in the concern could be summarized by this paragraph:

At this price, it looks like Oracle found itself yet another bargain and in one fell swoop became a worthy competitor to IBM. It allows Oracle to become a player in the cloud computing business. More importantly, the company ends up acquiring MySQL, the upstart database that has been viewed as Oracle’s Achilles’ heel. In one fell swoop, it has taken out its No. 1 competitor.

Not all in the open source community was doom and gloom though. Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, in his blog post in reaction to the deal looked for a silver lining. Zemlin pointed out that Oracle is strategically aligned with Linux in its position as a Linux distributor, and all its products are developed and run on Linux.

“Oracle is a key supporter of open standards such as ODF and we believe this only strengthens that stance,” said Zemlin. “This acquisition could prove fruitful for Open Office and ODF support in the enterprise.”

I was on the phone for the Canonical Ubuntu 9.04 release press conference, and one of the participants asked Canonical CEO, Mark Shuttleworth, what his reaction was, specifically regarding Java support.

“It is far too early to tell,” said Shuttleworth. “Java has been open, it tends to be a one-way trip – once you’ve made that commitment it makes sense to have it as highly available as possible.”

Shuttleworth also saw the move as a bit of further evidence of the worth of open source in the enterprise software industry.

“This really cements that free software and open source is the driving force today,” he said. “All of the major forces today are either free software or powered by free software — Java, Google, and onward. The software marketplace is consolidating at an extraordinary pace. Part of the reason for that is that open source is dominating the innovation pipeline. The fact that one of those five has just announced a $7 billion acquisition of a company that describes itself as the world’s biggest free and opens source software company proves that open source is the big game in town.”

Lastly, analyst Dana Gardener painted what I feel is the most level-headed picture of what the whole deal means.

Suffice to say that whatever momentum Sun had behind open source everywhere will be muted to open source some times as a ramp to other Oracle stuff, or to grow the community and keep developers happy. If nothing else, Oracle has been pragmatic on open source, not religious.

What do you think this means for open source? Are you considering moving to PostgreSQL if you weren’t already? Are you a programmer worried about Java support? Share your thoughts in the comments

More analysis from TechTarget:
Oracle-Sun combo: What does it mean for enterprise Java?

Will Sun help Oracle eclipse IBM?

VARs turn wary eye on Sun-Oracle combo

Oracle-Sun: A threat to VMware?

Splunk highlights data management maturity at LinuxWorld

Software company Splunk creates products that aid companies primarily in log file management - collecting information about the data in their systems and continuously reporting it back. At this year’s LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, Splunk will highlight several further-reaching data management products: Splunk for Virtual Server Management, Splunk for Change Management and Splunk for Server Management.

The products, in providing fuller access to information about what and how your system is doing, promise to make system management more practical and security maintenance more immediate.

The products being released this week at LinuxWorld integrate log file management with a variety of other tasks. They can simultaneously manage log files and collect and manage messages, traps and alerts as well as statistics from all system areas.

As one administrator commented on the blog of Splunk CEO Michael Baum, “Log file management is DEAD.” It is becoming just one side of the larger task of system management. For help on configuring Splunk, check out this tip.

Rowgen the full package, IRI CoSort says

Data protection and security may become easier if a new Linux-friendly product from IRI Cosort delivers on its promises. The product, Rowgen, integrates the formerly independent tasks of data sorting and data synthesis.

“A lot of security softwares are device-centered or hard drive-centered. We’re applying protection to specific fields so that you can access the parts of a document that don’t need to be protected,” IRI CoSort’s David Friedland told me recently. Friedland, vice president of business development, said the product reveals a new vision of software security.

IRI’s CoSort’s product page for Rowgen explains, “Until now, you could either forgo adequate testing and make inaccurate suppositions and extrapolations, or, you could spend a lot of time writing custom 3GL or shell programs to build specific test sets with the layouts you want,”

Friedland claims that Rowgen is breaking new ground in being able to run comprehensive tests while administrators perform multiple other tasks simultaneously. The software is compatible with a variety of Linux flavors, including Itanium, SUSE, Fedora Core and Ubuntu.

The target customer for Rowgen is the “security-sensitive manager,” Friedland said. These IT managers have a great need for stronger data protection as information theft crime is on the rise, he said.

On the flip side, automating data security in this way may have a negative impact for lower-level security administrators. Fewer programs will mean fewer employees required to manage them; data center security will change shape in more ways than one.

Red Hat out-marathons the pack in financial services

You have to run pretty fast to keep up with Red Hat these days.

The leading open source vendor just broke two speed records for the financial industry. First, it broke the gold standard for real-time status by processing updates in less than one millisecond, completing a single transaction in .9 of a millisecond. Typically, the fastest processing rates are 10 milliseconds to 20 milliseconds per transaction.

Second, Red Hat had the lowest standard deviation ever recorded or less than .5 milliseconds, which in layman’s terms translates into greater consistency. And third, a single server with a stacked Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) completed a very high ‑- but not record-breaking ­­­­­- volume of transactions, 5.8 million updates per second.

The Securities Technology Analysis Center, which provides performance measurement services to the financial service industry, performed the tests, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, the latest version, with RDMS 6.0 on IBM BladeCenter H and 10 gigabit Ethernet.

“In financial services, speed is the difference between making money and losing money,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat’s platform business unit. “The result is clear: more data, faster data, means better trades and better decisions.”

As if that weren’t enough, Crenshaw struck a blow to proprietary software. “We were 2.4 times faster than Sun Microsystems,” he crowed, comparing Red Hat’s 5.8 million updates with Sun Solaris’ record of 2.4 million updates.

Go, open source! Guess you should have been here for the Boston Marathon!

VIPs’ drop-ins delight MySQL dinner guests

At the MySQL conference in Santa Clara, Calif., Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green, Sun’s senior vice president of software, dropped in unexpectedly in an informal dinner organized by the open source community and spent several hours chatting up the crowd.

Beyond the photo op and blogging opportunity, the visit was encouraging to the group, according to Zack Urlocker, Sun’s vice president of MySQL products. “It was a very nice touch, showing that they are actively listening to the community and understand its importance in the open source world,” he said.

IT job strategies: Vendor vs. generic certifications

IT pros are divided on the value of brand-name certifications. On the one hand, vendor-neutral certifications seem a better fit today’s world of commoditized products. Then again, a Red Hat certification certainly appeals to the majority of Linux-friendly employers.

Last week I chatted with Linux Professional Institute (LPI) president and CEO Jim Lacey about the merits of vendor-neutral certification. In November, LPI joined forces with several organizations, including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Novell and Sun, to revitalize the certification market by forming the Information Technology Certification Council (ITCC). Responding to the Lacey interview, users generally agreed that specialization is useful and can win jobs; but today’s IT environments require IT pros who can think outside just one vendor’s box.

Jesse Becker, a member of the DC Linux User Group (DCLUG), values peers who can apply their specific knowledge to a larger scope of products and technologies. “A good generalist can probably do whatever is needed, even if they may take slightly longer than someone focused on a specific product or system,” Becker said. “Knowing how IP, disk partitions or file systems all work is much more useful than just knowing how to run tools or knowing the magic options to ifconfig, or fdisk or fsck.”

Most Microsoft pros are not good generalists, and most Linux pros are, says Ed Kohlwey, technology director of The ASCII Group of Bethesda, Maryland. Largely, Linux pros have had to be able to work in heterogeneous data centers. Microsoft pros have not, but that’s changing.

Linux administrator Ed Sawicki of Lake Oswego, Ore. thinks vendor-neutral certs encourage innovation and could help break up IT vendor monopolies. “Corporations tend to solve problems in ways that maximize their profits. I don’t believe this changes just because the vendor is selling open source software like Linux. Vendor-specific certifications encourage people to build social capital in specific brands, thus encouraging the formation of a monopoly. We’re all better off if certifications are neutral.”

Vendor-neutral certifications are most useful with commoditized, broadly available and rapidly changing technologies, according to Forrester Research analyst Jeffrey Hammond. They also help IT pros deal with issues independent or orthogonal to specific technologies like programming languages and database products.

On the flip side, Kohlwey told me, vendor-neutral certs may lack clout with employers, who don’t know what those certs mean. It’s easy to recognize the value of a certification from a big vendor, such as Novell, Red Hat, Microsoft or Sun. So, employers most often judge the merits of an IT professional based on their own experience with and current usage of a certain product.

Vendor certs are effective marketing tools for IT professionals, says DCLUG’s Becker. He thinks that’s unfortunate. He’d rather work with or hire an IT pro “with no certifications and a firm understanding of the tasks at hand,” instead of someone who has many brand-name certifications and can’t think outside the box.

If you want to sound off, leave a comment below. Thanks to the DC Linux User Group for sharing their thoughts on the subject.

Vendor-neutral Linux certs becoming popular

Linux Professional Institute President and CEO Jim Lacey told SearchEnterpriseLinux.com that he believes vendor-neutral Linux certifications are becoming more popular and signal a larger trend within IT of area specialization versus proficiency with a single product. Lacey also tells us where he thinks Linux managers face challenges in the enterprise.

SearchEnterpriseLinux.com: Recently, HP announced that it would require LPI certification as a prerequisite for its HP Certified Professional Program. What are the trends in Linux certification? Which certification sets have fared well in the Linux marketplace?

Jim Lacey: Linux and open source are becoming more entrenched in larger organizations, and the consistent growth of the LPI organization over the past eight quarters is evidence of that. One of the reasons we are seeing growth is because we aren’t allied with a certain product. Our programs are vendor independent.

Vendor-neutral certification is becoming more important. As things become more ubiquitous, it’s becoming more difficult to standardize on any one product or platform; people are becoming more IT focused in different areas rather than skilled with specific products. Whether you started out on Unix or Windows, you really need a wide variety of skills. Obviously, professionals working in markets that are most saturated, such as the Windows certification markets and even in the server market, aside from the [professionals with] power-user certifications, are looking to expand their skill set. Vendor-independent certifications are really starting to take hold, and that’s where we are seeing some of the growth coming from in the IT space.

SEL: So if certifications have become less product oriented, how do people track their professional development? Are they following specialized area interests in, say, virtualization or Web services?

JL: Definitely. This is one of the things that we are starting to see, as people become more familiar with the technology. To address these more specialized areas, LPI launched the LPI Level 3 certification in January 2007. As we took our questions to the global marketplace, we heard that operating in a mixed environment was important to enterprise customers. More specialization occurs at the top, in different vertical areas, such as virtualization and also security, Web services, mail and messaging. These areas can become much more vertical in the future, especially in mixed environments.

SEL: How are Linux administrators using these certifications?

JL: At the higher levels of certification, people who are more senior in the enterprise with three or more years of experience with Linux in a corporate environment are moving into more mission-critical areas.

In years past, people were certainly using Linux, sometimes unbeknownst to the CEO and CIO of their organization, because it was solving print services or Web services problems. But now that it has become more entrenched, people are looking to upgrade what their Linux OS does or Linux environment does. And that’s why you’re seeing success in the Linux IT space, with products like Sugar CRM being deployed, proving its value. Others are also making that same transition.

SEL: What challenges do you see facing Linux managers in the enterprise-level IT space?

JL: Even if a manager is working on a mission adoption curve, a disruptive technology such as Linux or open source always presents a challenge. I think that the biggest challenge is in the amount of applications available. As companies look to migrate, they are looking to user-end applications. Security, portability and scalability are also to be addressed.

When you look at the trends for North American enterprises with between $50 million and $1 billion in revenue, whether they’re in applications, servers, database management or software development, more than 50% of these companies are doing something with open source, including widespread adoption, limited adoption, and evaluating a pilot. And in the enterprise, we are seeing a growing wave in services. As more funding goes behind services, open source usage in companies trends upward.

Some of the figures to which Lacey referred to can be found in the following reports:

Optaros 2005: The Growth of Open Source Software in Organizations
Actuate 2007
Ovum Research 2007

We would like to hear from you. If you have an opinion on vendor-neutral certification, please share it in the comments section below.

A bright future for MySQL

The recent acquisition of open source database vendor MySQL by software supergiant Sun Microsystems has many asking if this is a good thing. SearchEnterpriseLinux.com expert Don Rosenberg thinks so. He tells the Enterprise Linux Log why he agrees with Andrew Kutz that this might be the best move for MySQL.

Sun now owns the M in the famous LAMP stack. A good thing? Definitely. Open source fans are always happy to see the success of open source pioneers, such as Monty Widenius and David Axmark who have been with MySQL since 1995. One might have mixed feelings about MySQL being acquired rather than going public, for it would be nice to see some large companies develop in the open source market.

When it comes to open source, Widenius and Axmark played by the rules, initially licensing under the GNU lesser general public license (LGPL) and later under the GNU general public license (GPL). Like Red Hat, they understood the value of a large, evangelical user base that paid no revenue but helped spread the product. But unlike Red Hat, MySQL owns all of its code, adding a proprietary advantage to its strategy. This allows MySQL a proprietary license and companies to embed MySQL in proprietary software without violating open source rules. I suspect this proprietary wrinkle of MySQL was one of the things that made Sun interested.

Sun’s strategy a concern
Sun has always been schizophrenic about open source, as evidenced in their Sun Community Source License (SCSL) and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). When it offered a Linux desktop, rather than putting the Linux name on it, Sun stamped it with the Java trademark instead. So it’s not hard to believe that the idea of actually owning MySQL versus merely being an equal user of the source code strongly influenced Sun’s decision.

That being said, I’m a little concerned about how slow Sun has been to warm up to open source licensing. In addition, as Sun was also slow to address the fact that software (e.g. Solaris) was as important to its business as hardware, it took a long time for Sun to wake up to the fact that many of its customers were Linux users.

This large-company lethargy influenced Sun’s open source possessions. It took years for OpenOffice to put up a Web page of add-ons, which were buried in a Sun database that only corporate purchasers would be attracted to. Some years ago Sun hired the leading developers of NetBeans and put them in its Prague laboratory, where they were to extend the functionality and reliability of the NetBeans foundation while Sun added upper layers, some of which were to be enterprise-level and proprietary. But outside developers were faster at add-ons than Sun was, and the young Eclipse (note the irony) from IBM was better at gaining market share and functionality.

MySQL’s future
But I think that MySQL has enough mass and momentum to hold its course, and the slow rate of change in the database industry may be more suited to Sun’s pace. Jonathan Schwartz said on his blog, “MySQL is by far the most popular platform on which modern developers are creating network services,” and Sun did have the long vision some fifteen years ago when it made the McLuhan-esqe proclamation that “the network is the computer.” In this age of cloud computing the network is a better-and-better bet.

The billion-dollar acquisition of MySQL by Sun also illustrates a number of truths about today’s software and open source market. The name of the game is support in one form or another. Oracle is trying to increase its support revenue to match its licensing revenue. Why? Because licensing revenue will eventually drop as open source databases become increasingly common. Sun is already offering paid support for Oracle and Postgres databases; it might as well be the go-to location for support for the most popular of the open source databases, MySQL.

As IT departments discover that database systems are taking an increasing share of the budget, more are discovering open source. Proprietary companies that want to survive will have to do it with better service and lower prices.

MySQL is an example of a disruptive technology. At first, it was too puny for the proprietary databases to notice, and satisfied only small users. But its powers grew, and the size of the companies using it also increased. It cannot match the upper limits of DB2 capability at this point, but it will be interesting to see if and when that day comes. But it doesn’t have to; it is already transforming most of the database market. May Sun invest the money (and employ the open source software developers) to take it to the top.

The best open-source SQL server under the sun?

SELECT company FROM mysql INNER JOIN sun ON mysql.about_time = sun.smart_move

By now most people have heard the news: Sun is acquiring MySQL. I was sharing the announcement with co-workers when one of them said that it is old news. He apparently heard about it last night or this morning. But as you can tell from my SELECT statement, I think that MySQL’s acquisition is long overdue.

MySQL: Icarus rising
Some things catch fire when they get too close to the Sun, but MySQL is poised to set the world ablaze. A blog on CNET remarked that “an acquisition by Sun means that MySQL gets to continue being a pureplay open-source company and won’t need to sacrifice the ideals or the benefits of open source to suit a halfway (and half-baked) stance on open source” and another blog wondered aloud if MySQL was ever really innovating. I agree with both of these statements. The reason that MySQL has become the most popular open-source database is not because it is the best open-source database (although you could argue that it is), but because MySQL has a terrific support model. However, the technology itself needs to catch up with some of the competition, such as Postgres schemas.

Almost serendipitous is my previous blog about Trac. The Trac development community has a love/hate relationship with MySQL; that is, for the most part, they love to hate it. Their problems begin with the lack of schema support as well as many others. Perhaps as CNET mentioned, having some backers with deep pockets, MySQL might spend a bit more money on building out its feature set (I cannot wait for 6.0!)

A new Sun on the horizon
Sun has been busy this last year, first rebranding their NYSE ticket from Sun to Java, and then becoming a Windows OEM. Despite reassurances, it is obvious that Sun is looking to make moves that boost its bottom dollar, and acquiring the leading open source database server is the right direction to take. MySQL is famous for its scale-up architecture and what better commodity platform to scale on then one that can offer 32 parallel threads? Sun hardware + Solaris + MySQL equals one fantastic database box.

Will MySQL leverage its newly acquired wings to explore innovative ideas, or will it, like Icarus, get burned by the (ahem) sun?

UPDATE REMINDER: Product of the Year nominations are going on now!

Working with vendors is tough. You need their help, they want your money. Hopefully, whatever it is they help you install works and the price meets you both somewhere in the middle (as in your side of the middle, right?).

Sometimes this process is a headache, but sometimes a project can really surprise you—things just work and upper management is just peachy keen with how the whole thing looks on the balance sheet.

In that vein, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com wants to help its readers discover the best of the best in Linux products for the enterprise in our prestigious SearchEnterpriseLinux.com 2007 Products of the Year awards. We’ve been asking readers and vendors over at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com to nominate a favorite product they’ve used or to nominate their own new product, and now we’ve opened it up to the Intertubes here at the Enterprise Linux Log. Regardless of where you fall — vendor, user or general Linux guru –the deadline is drawing near!

Our editorial team and a select panel of industry experts and analysts are currently accepting submissions online until 5 p.m. PST on Nov. 9, 2007 in a range of categories, including: Server Linux platform product (either a distribution release or a new, integrated server Linux offering); Security applications/tools for Linux on the server; Virtualization product for Linux on the server; and Linux administration tools. You can access the 2007 POY submission page in the link above.

To qualify, new or significantly upgraded products must have been shipped after October 31, 2006, and before November 1, 2007. Submit your entry today and let us know what you think are the top data center products on the market!