Probably the most popular question I am asked is something along the lines of, “I just graduated college and want to learn Oracle. How can I do that?” Sometimes, it may be, “I have worked as a functional on an Oracle Applications implementation and want to learn technical.” The question that some times frightens me is, “I heard I can make a lot of money with Oracle. I want to be a DBA or developer, which ever makes more money.”

Ok. So I am going to make the assumption since you are reading this that you want to learn Oracle.

So you’ve decided to learn/evaluate/use EnterpriseDB. That’s great. The first thing you need to do is get it and install it.

Download

To get EnterpriseDB, you need to navigate over to the EnterpriseDB download page. If you haven’t already signed up for an account, you will need to get one. It’s free and, by signing up, you will also have access to the support forums.

When you sign up, you will get an EnterpriseDB Network Account ID. This ID will be emailed to the account you sign up with. SAVE THIS EMAIL!

Have you ever wondered why you should choose one open source database over another? What features would make the most sense for your Organization? Maybe you’re a developer looking to learn a database and can’t choose where to start?

The folks at PostgreSQL have put together a wiki, Why PostgreSQL instead of MySQL. It’s, by no means, complete at this time but it is a good start.
The wiki is not editable by the public but it is open for reading. The wiki entry compares PostgreSQL 8.1 and MySQL 5.0.

Stefan Arentz posted an entry on his blog, about a hack he’s done for PostgreSQL. He’s added a native UUID to the database. This is pretty slick.
Most of your users will never notice but it can help on databases that need it. He lists some advantages on the google code page:

Database Size – Using a native UUID type on a table that also has an index on the uuid column saves 47% space. This is good because there is less data on disk and in memory. Which really matters if you have potentially hundred of millions of records.

InformationWeek has a good interview with Charles Phillips where he discusses Oracle’s competition. Charles Phillips has been in the background at Oracle for a long time but in the last few years has really been the driving force. I think he is largely responsible for the current acquisition strategy that Oracle is following.

Some good Q&A from the interview (some of these are not the entire quote, read the article fore the entire quote):

InformationWeek: Oracle can’t possibly replace the majority of SAP ERP deployments since companies have gone through so much time and expense putting them in place.

The number of Oracle users is huge and Oracle has the numbers available. The number of EnterpriseDB users is smaller but EnterpriseDB tracks those also. I would like to know how many people are using PostgreSQL in production and what kind of systems they are running.

If you monitor the some of the Postgres email lists, such as General, Jobs, and, maybe the Docs group, you can get a basic feel of some usage but only from the more verbal and connected in the community.

Does Forrester Research or Gartner track open source database usage? I haven’t seen anything.

Earlier today, I attended a webinar by Hotsos. The webinar, titled Cost Based Optimizer: 1 of 2, was a basic introduction to the Cost Based Optimizer (CBO) in Oracle and the 10053 trace file. The CBO optimizes SQL queries and that optimization can be seen in a 10053 trace. It was not, what I would call, an advanced webinar but was done with plenty of examples and was very accessible for new comers to performance tuning.

EnterpriseDB has announced that Bob Zurek will be the new Chief Technology Officer. Zurek was previously at IBM where he was the director of product strategy in IBM’s Information Platform and Solutions Group. He was responsible for driving and executing the technical strategy for information integration solutions as they relate to software, hardware, services, vertical industries, and emerging markets.

Before IBM, he was vice president of product management and advanced technologies at Ascential Software (later purchased by IBM), where he was instrumental in developing and driving Ascential’s enterprise data integration software strategy.

Zurek is also a blogger at IBM.

woodjr over at the sun.blogs.com site that they ran a new SPECjAppServer 2004 with GlassFish v2 and got a better response than what Josh posted a while back.
Check out the post,GlassFish Benchmark Results Keep Climbing.
LewisC

Tags: postgresql sun benchmark

Oracle is linking development and solution centers in Asia Pacific and Japan to build a new R&D center. This center will develop local and global solutions. The center will incorporate people from Beijing, Gurgaon, Seoul, Shenzhen Singapore, Tokyo and other Asia pacific locations.

“This new collaboration will significantly enhance our Asia Pacific innovation development process and ultimately benefit our customers and partners in this region,” said Kevin Walsh, chief technology officer,Oracle Asia Pacific & Japan. “With all sides of the globe participating and contributing to technology solutions, our customers will gain access to some of the most cutting-edge IT projects in the world.

Don Klaiss, Senior VP of Applications at Oracle has left to to be CEO of Compiere. Compiere is the largest, and, I think, oldest, open source ERP provider. Compiere was an early adopter of Oracle as a backend for its open source database.

Klaiss says, “After 15 years with Oracle, I decided to move on. Building and running such a large applications business had been challenging and exciting, but as the industry matured and began to consolidate, I felt there was a lack of innovation happening in traditional enterprise software.”

“Why?

MicroOLAP Database Designer is an easy CASE tool with intuitive graphical interface allowing you to build a clear and effective database structure visually, see the complete picture (diagram) representing all the tables, references between them, views, stored procedures and other objects. Then you can easily generate a physical database on a server, modify it according to any changes you made to the diagram using fast ALTER statements. You can get it for PostgreSQL and MySQL.

What’s new:

[*] CHECK constraints expression Reverse improved a lot

[*] Model tags are treated case-insensitive now

[*] Disallow modification of columns and constraints referenced by Foreign Key

[+] Smart reference counter added to avoid name duplicates

[+] Ability to choose default folder for model files added

[+] SQL Reverse Engineering for CREATE statements added

[+] “Open last edited files at startup” feature added

[+] Interval backup/autosave

[+] “Leave current tool” options added

[+] “Quick hand tool” feature added

[+] Ability to select references or tables connected to selected table (Popup menu item)

[+] Enhanced reference visualization for selected tables added

[-] “Modify Database is trying to ALTER TYPE for timestamps with the same parameters” bug fixed

[-] “Modify Database is trying to DROP DEFAULT on SERIAL columns on PostgreSQL 8.2.x” bug fixed

[-] “Duplicate operation in Table Editor duplicates column and constraint ID” bug fixed

[-] “Table object context menues “SQL Preview” & “Format” open wrong Table Editor tabs” bug fixed

[-] “Error while reverse scalar types: index out of range(4)” bug fixed

[-] “Storage properties were fetched incorrectly” bug fixed

[-] “Impossible to define SETOF return of the SP in Stored Routine Editor” bug fixed

[-] “Copy/Paste is unavailable in rule actions memo of View Editor” bug fixed

[-] Problems with references numeration

[-] Bug with object search by partial string

[-] Scale Combobox is not updated on Actual Size (F5)

Check it out.

What does EnterpriseDB mean when they say they are “compatible” with Oracle?

Read, EnterpriseDB FAQ – What does compatibility mean?

In this blog entry, you will get a list of what parts are compatible between EnterpriseDB and Oracle, what is not compatible and what versions of Oracle are compatible with EnterpriseDB.

You can also answer some questions:

Where do you fit? Do you think the company you work for is a good candidate for EnterpriseDB? Have you downloaded it to try it out?

If you are a consultant, will you add EnterpriseDB to your arsenal?

I’m really interested in what people think about this.

Oracle® Buys Online Identity Theft and Fraud Detection Leader Bharosa

Bharosa, Inc., is a leading provider of software that helps combat online identity theft and fraud. This should tie in nicely with Oracle’s Identity software.

According to the article:

With more than 25 million users, Bharosa’s real-time fraud detection and multifactor online authentication security solutions for the enterprise, combined with Oracle’s established web single sign-on and web-based authorization solutions, will result in a differentiated solution that protects investments by extending internal web Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions to external users.