M-A-O-L

Brian Aker wrote a good article about MySQL, State of the Ecosystem on his blog. Glad to see a key figure for MySQL be positive about the future of the ecosystem!

At times it’s difficult to judge what things are really about. Look at the following announcement by the folks at Nutanix. They got Aster Data, Google File System and Oracle Storage Layer (incl. Exadata, they say) background, but what’s the point of this appliance? Hope we’ll soon here more from them.

The key to Nutanix is virtualization, which provides the abstraction and the additional storage connections necessary to give Nutanix the performance edge it claims. The company is big on solid-state drives for performance and consolidation, but Pandey says that legacy storage systems are limited to the amount of SSDs they can handle. With a virtualized computing layer, however, each virtual server and each physical node provide the requisite housing and connection to an additional SSD. The Nutanix appliance combines both SSDs and hard disk drives to achieve maximum levels of performance and affordability, Pandey said.

via Nutanix Gets $13.2M for Google-like Storage Architecture.

Now that’s a thing: Kevin Closson Joins EMC Data Computing Division To Focus On Greenplum Performance Engineering! Kevin’s been the public voice of Exadata in the blogosphere for much of four years, so that’s quite a loss for the folks at Oracle. And a big win for EMC, I would say. Good luck, Kevin!

Oracle recently released it’s Oracle Database Firewall.

[The] release of Oracle Database Firewall is the culmination of the company’s  acquisition of database security vendor Secerno last year. The product  creates a defensive perimeter around databases by looking at SQL  statements sent to the database through the wire to determine whether to  pass, log, alert, block, or substitute SQL statements based on an  organization’s policies. Users can set whitelist or blacklist policies  to control the product, which is designed to work not only with Oracle  databases, but also other major platforms, such as DB2, SQL Server and  Sybase platforms.

As usual, they claim it’s going to replace all competitor’s remotely similar products, which is now causing quite a controversy among them, nicely summarized by Pete Finnigan in Oracle Database Firewall Controversy.

Gartner released it’s 2011 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, and Oracle apparently is sponsoring it for the public.

We have to obvious suspects in the leaders quadrant: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP, as well as a few smaller folks. Most of the remaining vendors are in the niche players quadrant, there are no visionaries and just two in the challengers quadrant.

The market according to Gartner appears to be mature, and most vendors have found a good (or should I say: boring?) balance between vision and execution.

It’s that time of the year again: January 2011 Oracle Critical Patch Update Released. People using OEM Grid Control on 11g versions and people using RAC on 10g and newer are vulnerable to remote vulnerabilities not requiring authentication, so again quite a serious CPU. Go and patch!

Kevin Closson introduces us to the Oracle 11g Direct NFS Clonedb Feature in a mini-series (part 1.5). Sounds very interesting from what I hear. And I wonder if this is a(nother) sign of Oracle going against NetApp, i.e. maybe even a sign of soon to be announced features or products that will further de-value NetApp features with offerings from the combined Oracle and Sun stack?

Oracle took the popular DBA Views poster and now provide a Flash based digital version for download at Oracle 11g Interactive Quick Reference. I’m not sure how helpful that’s ultimately going to be as it doesn’t allow for the same kind of visual browsing, but wanted to post this anyway.

Via the Oracle DB Insider blog.

Oracle answer one of the most asked questions around CPUs: What are the criteria used by Oracle to decide whether a vulnerability warrants a fix in the CPU?