A question that I am asked very often it exactly what features are compatible between EnterpriseDB and Oracle. The short story is that the areas that you think of as “development”, i.e. SQL, Code, etc are the areas where the compatibility exists.

Maintenance tasks are generally familiar as is the overall architecture. Any modern database will have logging, recovery, backups, etc. In EnterpriseDB, the way you code an application will be compatible with Oracle and the maintenance of an EnterpriseDB database will be familiar.

EnterpriseDB has published a white paper called, Delivering Oracle Compatibility.

Somewhat following on the heels of my post yesterday, Sympathy For The Devil is in the Details, Tim DiChiara of SearchOracle posted The Market Battleground.

Tim mentions that with Oracle’s steady lead (41%) in the database wars, maybe Oracle doesn’t need to worry. He points out though that microsoft, while enjoying a lower market share, is growing at 28% of over 2005 and may pass DB2 in the market.

Tim didn’t even mention open source databases though. Just this week, DBA Village, an Oracle forum/news site, had a poll asking which database most people thought Oracle should worry most about.

Matt Assay has a great blog entry today, Sympathy for the Oracle. He basically describes things I have said many times, Oracle would rule the database world if it adjusted it’s licensing model; Oracle Releases 11g Pricing and A Kinder, Gentler Oracle being two examples of that.

Matt talks about Oracle losing sales to SAP because of the approach to selling. SAP starts with thoughts and ends with execution while Oracle begins at the execution step.

Because open source makes it easier to win the bottom-up war.

I don’t think Oracle needs open source. It already has the best database.

I will be doing a webinar next week, Aug 22 at 1PM Eastern. If you can’t make it in real-time, the webinar will be recorded and will be available for viewing afterwards on the EnterpriseDB.com web site.

The webinar was announced in the EnterpriseDB press release for my book, EnterpriseDB Announces Availability of Definitive Reference Book.

From the press release:

Lewis Cunningham will describe his progression from EnterpriseDB skeptic to advocate in a live Webinar, From Oracle to EnterpriseDB: An Oracle ACE’s Journey, on Wednesday, Aug. 22 at 1:00 p.m. EDT.

EnterpriseDB, the Oracle-compatible database company, today announced that EnterpriseDB Advanced Server has won the LinuxWorld Product Excellence Award for Best Database Solution. EnterpriseDB Advanced Server beat both Oracle 11g and Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite to take the top honor.

“EnterpriseDB uniquely enables enterprises to run applications written for Oracle databases for a tiny fraction of Oracle’s cost,” said Andy Astor, chief executive officer, EnterpriseDB. “We were thrilled in 2005 to have taken the LinuxWorld Product Excellence Award for our industry-changing product and again in 2006 for our continued innovation.

Running on an IBM System p 570 with two dual-core 4.7 GHz POWER6 processors, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 achieved 404,462.54 tpmC (transactions per minute) with a price-performance ratio of $3.50/tpmC — a record achievement in 4-core performance.

“This TPC-C benchmark result, as well as those from the recent two-tier SAP SD Benchmarks, reinforces Oracle Database 10g’s performance and scalability leadership,” said Juan Loaiza, Oracle Senior Vice President Systems Technology. “It also demonstrates that Oracle Database takes full advantage of advances made in servers like IBM’s p 570 to continue providing customers with unprecedented performance and scalability.”

I wonder what 11g will do?

LewisC

oracle benchmark performance

EnterpriseDB has introduced a new feature called the ROI Calculator. The calculator allows you to enter an Oracle configuration and compare the cost to an equivalent EnterpriseDB cost. You can even add extras like the partitioning option, OLAP, Data Mining and Spatial. A nice addition is the ability to enter a discount for Oracle. Most organizations get at least a partial discount on their purchases. The ROI also includes a 5 year support cost which somewhat skews the results (but in a direction you will likely go anyway).

I played with several configurations to see how they compared.

Oracle releases a setup tool (YaST), Data Integrity (DIF Standard Implementation), and the Btrfs (Linux File System) to open source. You can read the press release at theNewsRoom.com.

oracle linux open source

Two must have links: Oracle Linux Download and the Oracle 11g Documentation Homepage.

11g is currently Linux only but I would expect Solaris very shortly and other flavors not long afterwards. I would imagine Windows will be available by year end.

This is awesome. I have SO been waiting for this. Oracle teased me with the “release” on July 11 and it has taken almost a month to actually get the software. Yeah!

LewisC

oracle 11g documentation linux

On Aug 8th, Oracle released a preview of Oracle Authentication Services for Operating Systems, a piece of software within Oracle Fusion that centralizes Identify Management. It integrates with Oracle Internet Directory.

Even though it is called “Oracle Authentication Services for Operating Systems”, it looks like it is only available for Linux at this time. You can get it from the Oracle Unbreakable Linux Network.

“With its hot-pluggable architecture, Oracle Identity Management makes it easier for organizations to incorporate identity and access management capabilities into their Oracle and non-Oracle environments,” said Hasan Rizvi, vice president, Security and Identity Management Products, Oracle.

This is just too cool. Today, EnterpriseDB announced at LinuxWorld that they are offering GridSQL, a data warehouse and OLAP clustering solution. According to the doc, the EnterpriseDB page for GridSQL, the tool offers:

• Quickly and easily create, maintain, and access very large databases for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing applications

• Offload reporting from expensive hardware platforms onto an inexpensive grid of commodity hardware, creating significant savings

• Run reporting and other applications with very large datasets, improving organizational decision-making

• Improve organizational productivity and agility by enabling quick access to large amounts of informationThis is supposed to be a true, shared nothing approach to clustering.

InformationWeek has a good interview with the CIO of GM. Why would I post that on this blog? They interviewed him about Oracle. Yep, General Motors’ CIO Speaks Out On Oracle’s Acquisition Strategy.

I have to ask myself why this is news. Why does what the CIO of a car company have any bearing on Oracle? The interview itself, the questions and answers, make the point.

I’ll let you read the article to get the details but the gist of the interview:

Q: What do do you think of Oracle’s spending spree?
A: Like it.

I’ve been looking. I’ve been waiting. It’s just not out there. At least nothing I found to be particularly interesting. If you hear any good bits, drop me a comment or email me.

I did want to post a link to my article on my Expert’s Guide to Oracle though. Some waste of valuable bandwidth posted a ridiculous entry about Oracle and PHP. Hope fully you find it worthy of a read.

postgresql news oracle php

In2M is a company who makes an online financial productivity and personal spending management system, including MVelopes Personal which won the prestigious 2006 PC World World Class award and was selected as one of the Top 100 Best Products of 2006.

In2M recently switched from an open source database (I’m not sure which) to Oracle Standard Edition. Oracle Standard is the lower tier database (i.e. cheaper) that does not offer additional features such as partitioning or OLAP processing. Notably though, Standard Edition comes with RAC as part of it’s feature set and does not require additional licensing for it.

EnterpriseDB got the finalist nod for Best Database Solution, for the third year, and for GridSQL For EnterpriseDB. This is the first I have heard of GridSQL and I am looking forward to more info.

All it says in the announcement is:

GridSQL for EnterpriseDB Advanced Server is a new product that will be announced at LinuxWorld on Aug. 7, 2007.

About all I can think is that it is something like pgCluster which is a multi-master, bi-directional replication tool for PostgreSQL. I have a hard believing that’s what it because 1) they already have a replication tool and 2) the naming would be incredibly unfortunate.

I say option 2 because when most people hear grid associated with “an Oracle compatible database”, they think of Oracle RAC and/or Grid (which most people erroneously think is the same thing but that’s a different blog).

So now I wait with baited breath. I wish I had gotten a head’s up at least.

oracle enterprisedb gridsql linux world award pgcluster

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I started working on a task for a project and decided that there were some very good properties that I could use to help me teach people PL/SQL and XML. I expanded a bit on the idea and ended up with a scripting language, implemented in XML, that can be passed into a PL/SQL procedure. The script can execute stored procedures, it has looping logic, conditional (CASE) logic, user defined variables, etc.

The nice thing about it is that it’s very easy to read and modify. The XML structure is also very easy to read.

Oracle provides a lot of XML functionality in the database. This entry will cover the different tools Oracle provides and future entries will get into the details of each.

The three primary XML tools that oracle provides are: XML Developers Kit (XDK), XML DB and SQL Extensions for XML (SQLX and XMLType). Below is a definition of each.

XDK

The XDK is a complete XML development toolkit that was introduced for 8i. I think the first version was labeled XDK9i but the toolkit actually was available for 8i. I remember using the beta product.

I could have called this OO In Oracle: A Techie’s View. But the Sorcerer of OO is a much cooler title. You have to pronounce OO as ooh! as in Ooh and Aah!

What is OO? OO stands for Object Oriented. OOD is OO Design, OOA is OO Analysis and OOP is Object Oriented Programming. Oracle is an ORDBMS, an Object Relational Database Management System. In this article, I am going to present a sample java class and show how you would implement the same class in Oracle. This is a technical article comparing Oracle objects with Java.

This is part 4 of a 3 part series. Heh I guess this qualifies as a little lagniappe on security and audit. I could have called this Oracle Audit but I already spoke about audit in Part 3. I just decided to continue on in the series.

This is a brief, technical discussion about the implementation of audit in Oracle 10g. I’ll quickly show how to turn on standard audit and how to see some of the audit taking place. I’ll follow that with an implementation of FGA and finally a trigger based audit.

One aspect of auditing is to audit your administrators.

Warning: Personal Soapbox Approaching.

I was reading a newsgroup discussion and the topic of DBAs and their usefulness/trivialization came up (yet again). This topic seems to show up at one time or another on every Oracle discussion board.

Whether I agree or not with any of the things said in the discussion doesn’t really matter. It got me thinking about the topic and I have a different perspective to the question. My personal soapbox on this issue is the definition of DBA. Are DBAs being trivialized in the enterprise?

This is a three-part definition of Oracle Security (specifically in 10g but applies to later versions also). Part 1 covers the various types of security Oracle provides. Part 2 deals with Users/Schemas, Roles, Permissions and Data Access. Part 2 will be a more technical discussion than parts 1 or 3. In part 3, I will discuss implementing an Oracle auditing scheme and how to ensure you comply with security and audit regulations.

What exactly do I mean by security? There are several aspects of security in an enterprise work place: locked doors, guards, cameras, etc. There are just as many aspects when protecting enterprise data.

I ran across this link while looking for something else. This is a discussion about Oracle PowerBrowser. Talk about a ride in the way back machine!

Lewis

Technorati : backmachine, browser, html, internet, nostalgia, oracle, oraclepowerbrowser

Mother’s Dictionary

APPLE: Nutritious lunchtime dessert which children will trade for cupcakes.

BABY: 1. Dad, when he gets a cold. 2. Mom’s youngest child, even if he’s 42.

BATHROOM: a room used by the entire family, believed by all except Mom to be self-cleaning.

DUST RAGS: See “DAD’S UNDERWEAR.”

EAR: A place where kids store dirt.

EYE: The highly susceptible optic nerve which, according to Mom, can be “put out” by anything from a suction-arrow to a carelessly handled butter knife.

HANDI-WIPES: Pants, shirt-sleeves, drapes, etc.

HEARSAY: What toddlers do when anyone mutters a dirty word.

See Mother’s Dictionary for more definitions.

I know I said “A day with Ralph Kimball, Part 2″ would be next but I wanted to get this tech note out there while it was fresh in my mind. I’ll post items like this periodically as they occur to me to do so.

I upgraded our Oracle Designer repository from 9i to 10g. It looks like the little things that annoyed me in 9i will continue to do so in 10g, at least in the short term. I don’t see any dramatic changes and my problem child ERD still can’t be transformed to tables.