Michael J. Ross writes "MySQL may be the most popular open source relational database management system (RDBMS) in the world, but during the first decade of its existence, it lacked support for stored programs, i.e., store procedures, functions, and triggers. The major commercial RDBMS vendors — including Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft — could point to this deficiency as reason enough to choose their proprietary systems over MySQL or any other open source system, such as PostgreSQL. But with the release of MySQL version 5.0, in October 2005, the "little database engine that could" dramatically improved its position against the competition. The most comprehensive discussion of these new capabilities is in the book MySQL Stored Procedure Programming." Read below for the rest of Michael's review

atbarboz writes "One of the first converts to Oracle's support for Linux said it has endured a public backlash since its decision to drop Red Hat. 'Melbourne company Opes Prime Stockbroking told ZDNet Australia that in the weeks following its announcement to adopt Oracle Linux, upset Linux enthusiasts phoned, e-mailed and wrote about the company online to complain at the decision. "People called us out of the blue to tell us we were idiots," said Opes executive director Anthony Blumberg.'"

SlashRating©
11.9
slashdottit! tm

krow writes "One of the unique qualities of the MySQL server is its ability to have multiple storage engine operate concurrently. Companies like Oracle and Solid have contributed their own storage engines to the open source project. With 5.1 MySQL has added the ability to now do this in a loadable fashion, allowing dynamic engines in the same manner as Apache with its modules. Now PostgreSQL can add its self to the list of databases who have contributed a storage engine to MySQL. I'm releasing today a plugin so that you can now plugin the Postgres database engine into MySQL and have it work natively along side other engines."

An anonymous reader writes "The Register takes a look at spam touting everything from Viagra to phishing sites being sent from Fortune 1000 networks. Oracle was found to have a machine pushing out a PayPal phishing scam, and BestBuy had a system sending thousands of spams a month. The Washington Post's Security Fix blog also is tracking this story, finding stock spam being pumped from ExxonMobile and from American Electric Power, among others. Another machine at IndyMac Bank was the source of spam touting generic prescription drugs. From the story: '...an IT engineer with American Electric Power, said the stock spam came from a bot-infected computer belonging to a contractor at one of its power generator plants.'"

TodoInSATX writes "Oracle has filed a lawsuit against SAP. Among the claims made against SAP are violations of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, Unfair Competition, Intentional and Negligent Interference with Prospective Economic Advantage and Civil Conspiracy. From the actual complaint: 'SAP has stolen thousands of proprietary, copyrighted software products and other confidential materials that Oracle developed to service its own support customers. SAP gained repeated and unauthorized access, in many cases by use of pretextual customer log-in credentials, to Oracle's proprietary, password-protected customer support website.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat has a new release out for Enterprise Linux, reports Ars Technica. Along with several anticipated new features, Enterprise Linux 5 marks the rollout of the RedHat Exchange (RHX), which will be a source for commercial third-party software applications. 'RHX will allow consumers to buy software support services for third-party open-source technologies like MySQL database software and SugarCRM customer management systems directly from Red Hat ... Linux vendor Novell, which recently partnered with Microsoft to provide stronger Windows interoperability, is already carving out a growing portion of the enterprise Linux market. Red Hat also has to contend with proprietary database vendor Oracle, who now offers commercial Linux support for Red Hat users.'"

stephe writes "Brent Williams presented 'Open Source Business Models: A Wall Street Look at a Wild 2006 and the Prospects for Even More Fun in 2007' at EclipseCon last Tuesday. Brent is (temporarily) an independent equity research analyst, who moved to Wall Street after 20 years in the software trenches. He starts with a tear-down of the Oracle Linux debate and the Microsoft Novell deal. I especially like his taking apart the commoditization myth and his observations around interface standards versus standards of implementation. He graciously allowed me to post the slides on my blog. They're getting a lot of interest from the open source business crowd, and I thought the Slashdot crowd would want to see them as well. Enjoy."

Eric^2 writes "Oracle announced on Tuesday that TopLink will now be open source and a full-fledged Eclipse project. TopLink is an object-persistence layer for Java that maps Java objects to a relational database."

An anonymous reader writes "As we've discussed several times before on Slashdot, the US patent office is looking to employ a Wiki-like process for reviewing patents. It's nowhere near as open as Wikipedia, but there are still numerous comparisons drawn to the well-known project in this Washington Post story. Patent office officials site the huge workload their case officers must deal with in order to handle the modern cycle of product development. Last year some 332,000 applications were handled by only 4,000 employees. 'The tremendous workload has often left examiners with little time to conduct thorough reviews, according to sympathetic critics. Under the pilot project, some companies submitting patent applications will agree to have them reviewed via the Internet. The list of volunteers already contains some of the most prominent names in computing, including Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, as well as IBM, though other applicants are welcome.'"

Oolala submitted an article that opens: "Business software maker Oracle Corp. will buy Hyperion Solutions Corp. for $3.3 billion in cash, renewing a shopping spree aimed at toppling rival SAP AG. The deal announced Thursday will give Oracle an arsenal of Hyperion products that are widely used by SAP's customers. Hyperion's tools, known as "business intelligence" software, help chief financial officers and other top corporate executives track their company's performance."

Andrew writes "IBM has thrown a spanner in the Oracle Linux works by refusing to certify that IBM's software portfolio will run and be supported on Oracle Unbreakable Linux. If IBM applications turn out to be incompatible with Oracle Linux, then it will be up to Oracle to resolve any issues. This conservative stance of IBM's is unlikely to help Oracle sell Linux subscriptions to businesses that use any of IBM's large software portfolio."

Robert writes to tell us Red Hat's CEO Matthew Szulik is encouraging customers to take Microsoft up on their support voucher offer for Novell's rival Linux system in order to "get the issue over with." Dismissing the impact that the Microsoft-Novell deal has had on business, Szulik is just happy to see customers taking Microsoft's money. "Szulik also dismissed Oracle Corp's attempt to under-cut it on Linux support on similar grounds, insisting that customers were unlikely to be convinced by cost savings that are a small percentage of their overall software spend."

BobB writes "Michael Stonebraker, who cooked up the Ingres and Postgres database management systems, is back with a stealthy startup called Vertica. And not just him, he has recruited former Oracle bigwigs Ray Lane and Jerry Held to give the company a boost before its software leaves beta testing. The promise — a Linux-based system that handles queries 100 times faster than traditional relational database management systems."

munchola writes "MySQL CEO, Marten Mickos, has revealed to CBRonline that Oracle has threatened to provide support for MySQL and is already distributing the open source database. "They have hinted to us that they will," said Mickos, indicating that the database giant is planning to repeat its October 2006 Unbreakable Linux plan, which saw it undercut Red Hat with enterprise Linux support. Despite the competitive threat, Mickos is unmoved. "I hope they do that," he said, noting that it would be seen as an endorsement of the open source database.""

gollum123 writes about a dream come true and a dream dashed. Brian Emmett, a software consultant from the San Francisco Bay area, entered a contest sponsored by Oracle in 2005. He answered some questions on Java coding, won a free trip into space, and then reluctantly gave it up. The latter decision came once he had computed the taxes he would have to pay on the $138,000 prize — roughly $25,000. From the article: "Since the Internal Revenue Service requires winnings from lottery drawings, TV game shows, and other contests to be reported as taxable income, tax experts contend there's no such thing as a free spaceflight. Some contest sponsors provide a check to cover taxes, but that income is also taxable."

Andy Updegrove writes "On Sunday afternoon, the Free Standards Group (FSG) signed an agreement to combine forces with Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) to form a new organization — The Linux Foundation. The result of this consolidation will be to dedicate the resources of the combined membership to 'accelerate the growth of Linux by providing a comprehensive set of services to compete effectively with closed platforms.' Jim Zemlin, currently the head of FSG, will lead the new organization as its Executive Director. The new organization will continue to support Linux in a variety of ways, including by providing economic support to Linus Torvalds and other key kernel developers, managing the Linux trademark, and providing legal protection to developers through such initiatives as the Open Source as Prior Art project, the Patent Commons, and the Linux Legal Defense Fund. All in all, a tall order, but eminently possible given its membership: The Linux Foundation's founding members will include every major company in the Linux industry, including Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, Oracle and Red Hat, as well as many community groups, universities and industry end users."

Scott Walters writes "Many of the recipes in SQL Hacks will improve the SQL you write day to day, and many will give you the confidence to attempt much more involved tasks with SQL. Other recipes will rarely if ever be needed, but make for a entertaining and education reading in a similar way that "worse case survival scenario" books do — SQL is pitted against the most difficult analysis tasks just as survival scenario books pit humans against pavement and lions. SQL Hacks fits well in the Hacks series, which raises the bar on advanced books by offering large, eclectic sets of tricks for problems that an unambitious person (a non-hacker) wouldn't ever push technology hard enough to run into. Put another way, the questions answered in a good Hacks book are ones that would get a "good question" comment rather than a an "RTFM!" response. It does a good job continuing where O'Reilly's SQL Cookbook left off, which is always difficult with two books written at slightly different times by different authors. Still, it's harder to review a Hacks book than a Learning book as, with hacks, the sky is the limit, and the reader will always find herself wishing for more. To this end, I hope O'Reilly continues to publish newer editions of their various Hacks books, drawing in more and more content in each edition, and identifying recipes that might better serve in the Cookbook counterpart." Read the rest of Scott's review.

An anonymous reader writes "A pair of security researchers has picked January 2007 as the Month of Apple Bugs, a project in which each passing day will feature a previously undocumented security hole in Apple's OS X operating system or in Apple applications that run on top of it. According to a post over at The Washington Post's Security Fix blog, the project is being put together by researchers Kevin Finisterre and the guy who ran November's Month of Kernel Bugs project." From the post: "It should be interesting to see whether Apple does anything to try and scuttle this pending project. In November, a researcher who focuses most of his attention on bugs in database giant Oracle's software announced his intention to launch a "Week of Oracle Database Bugs" project during the first week of December. The researcher abruptly canceled the project shortly after the initial announcement, without offering any explanation."

An anonymous reader writes to let us know that PostgreSQL 8.2 has been released (bits, release notes). 8.2 is positioned as a performance release. PostgreSQL it is still missing the SQL:2003 Window Functions that are critical in business reporting, so Oracle and DB2 will still win out for OLAP/data warehouse applications.

jcatcw writes, "Next Generation Security Software Ltd. of Surrey, England, compared bugs in Oracle and SQL Server that were reported and fixed between December 2000 and November 2006. The tally: Oracle had 233; MS SQL had 59. The products compared were Oracle 8, 9, and 10g; SQL Server 7, 2000 and 2005. From the article: '[The head of the survey said,] "The results show that the reputation that Microsoft SQL Server had back in 2002 for relatively poor security is no longer deserved."' Oracle's response: 'Measuring security is a very complex process, and customers must take a number of factors into consideration — including use-case scenarios, default configurations, as well as vulnerability remediation and disclosure policies and practices.'"