Oracle + Open Source
two worlds inexorably colliding

In our latest database journal piece, we cover some useful Oracle-supplied pl/sql stored procedures to help you instrument and debug your code, dump metadata descriptions of your database objects (a la MySQL dump –no-rows) and much more.

Take a look at  DBA Insider - Useful PL/SQL Packages.

Hard to believe we’ve reached our 45th issue of our monthly newsletter.  Time flies, that’s for sure.

This month’s topic is fixed fee contracts.  We tell a story of a recent business experience, the trouble, the challenge, and the resolution.  Hopefully it’ll help folks out there who are also looking at fixed fee project-based billing, and how to manage scope, and client expectations.

Open Insights 45 - Contractualities

What is ASM, and why do we need it?  In this piece, we cover the impetus for it’s creation, and what you can do with it.  Oracle Automatic Storage Management

If you’ve ever wanted to write scripts to talk to your database, perhaps to perform a routine maintenance operation, or to build a more full-fledged application, you may have considered Perl.  It’s a flexible language, with a huge collection of prebuilt modules, and components to choose from.

In this May article over at databasejournal.com, we give you an insiders introduction to the goodness that is Perl + Oracle:  Programming, Perl + Oracle.

Oracle Indexing - What, Where, When?

This piece was published in April over at databasejournal.com.  In it we discuss some of the myriad different index types available to you in Oracle, and try to sift through to the most important ones.

In March 2008, we published this article over at Database Journal: Create a Database Manually - When & Why?

In Oracle you have the option to use the GUI database creation assistant tool, or you can script the process.  We discuss how to do this manually, when you may want to, and hopefully learn a few new things along the way.

We skipped a month of our newsletter accidentally.  Somehow our email management software never sent it.  So Open Insights 44 came out in June instead.

When an idea “gains legs”, it begins to have a life of it’s own.  We can see this a lot in the presidential election, but it also applies to consulting.

We’re a little behind on our Oracle + Open Source updates…

April’s newsletter was Open Insights 43 - On Prudence.  We talked about risk taking, both the kind we think we like, and the kind that one might call prudent.

Our two part article on migrating a MySQL database to Oracle features in Database Journal in January and February of this year.  Take a look and please post your comments!

Migrating From MySQL To Oracle - Part I

Migrating From MySQL To Oracle - Part II

The second in a series of two articles on Oracle security was features over at Database Journal back in December 2007.  Take a look at Eight Ways To Hack Oracle Part 2.

Our latest newsletter, issue #42 this month, features a discussion on efficiency, and how it can vary so dramatically between resources, or individuals that you hire for work. Take a look at Open Insights 42.

February 2008’s issue of Open Insights talked about the Japanese classic, Roshomon, a movie with three different characters and three dramatically different views of what transpired during a murder.  We apply this phenomenon to consulting, discussing differing views from different players in the drama, and how to hopefully walk the tightrope between them in Open Insights 41.

Just catching up with some of our backlog of postings.  January’s newsletter talked about being self-taught.  Take a look at Open Insights 40.

As many of you may have already heard, Sun officially announced their purchase of  MySQL today.  After the last few years with Oracle pushing Linux and commodity hardware, Sun has certainly taken the hit.  I guess this is their turn to hit back.

With MySQL 6.0 out, increasingly we find the full compliment of sophisticated database features in MySQL.  But a lot of the devil is in the details.  Where Oracle has had problems with the sheer size of the codebase, and addressing security vulnerabilities, and other bugs in a timely manner, MySQL has the problem of a mature codebase.  Some of these features are newly available, and if my experiences with replication are any indication, often have hidden gotchas and “features” which are not emphasized in the literature.

The next question on my mind is, how does Oracle’s purchase and now ownership of Innobase impact the above purchase.  It means a direct competitor owns a core component which provides transactional support to your database.  A very good question.

Time will tell, so stay tuned.

Justin Kestelyn has posted an excellent article on his blog listing the Most Popular Technical Articles of 2007.  Among the top ten articles an amazing SIX discuss open-source technologies such as running Oracle on Linux, Linux administration, or PHP programming and integration.   Good stuff!

The folks over at zmanda who specialize in MySQL backup are doing a webinar on December 13th, this Thursday.  They specifically mention it as relevant for Oracle DBAs or anyone moving to MySQL.  Looks to be an interesting event.

Wim Coekaerts is the VP of Linux Engineering at Oracle.  He was basically the guy who put Linux on Oracle’s radar back in the day.  I remember his OCFS project, oss.oracle.com and the Oracle RAC on Linux with Firewire project.  Those were interesting days.  I had the opportunity to meet Wim this year at Oracle’s OpenWorld.  He’s a very down to earth, no-nonsense guy, and gives the straight scoop on all the exciting things that are happening on the technical side.

The latest newsflash for those who have been sleeping at the wheel is that Oracle is offering support for RHEL called Unbreakable Linux Network.  ULN is basically an up2date or yum network service which will feed you the latest RPMs.  These RPMs have been rebranded for Oracle, but are not a fork or a new distribution.  What you’ll also find as a ULN subscriber is that a little rpm called oracle-validated-configuration is available.  This little package will include lots of Oracle specific tweaks to make installing on Linux that much easier!

For those who’d like to hear all of this from the horses mouth, please read Wim’s Post on Unbreakable Linux.

For those of you out there of love all things Apple, a new store is opening in Manhattan’s meat packing district.

Oh, and don’t confuse the high-design below with train lines. You’ll use the L or A/C/E trains to get there!

The latest issue of Open Insights is out, hot off the presses.  You can view it online here. Other recent issues can be viewed online as well.

This month’s topic is Reputation Management, or Search Engine Reputation Management.  Related closely to Search Engine Optimization, it is all about building your personal or business brand around your products, services, writings, and social networking memberships.

Archives of the newsletter are available here.  If you like the newsletter, go ahead and subscribe here.  It is published the first of every month.

A lot of folks are sounding the alarm bells over Unbreakable Linux.  Given that this direction at Oracle speaks squarely to my topic here at Oracle + Open Source, I thought I should at least comment.

Oracle’s decided to provide their own support for Linux.  Are they rolling their own distro?  Well actually, no.  They’re doing what CentOS and a few other folks out there are doing.  They’re rebuilding from RedHat’s distro, effectively repackaging their Enterprise Linux distro and in the process testing rigorously, and reporting bugs and issues back, or fixing those themselves.   What’s the deal?

Due to various license requirements with the GPL, RedHat’s distributing Linux must be done as source, so that means third parties can freely recompile that source, effectively using those same tweaks and packaging it up as their own.  Well gee, that’s not fair is it?

I have to admit I’m on the fence on this one.  Honestly folks, the open-source community, of which I consider myself a part of, has been championing Linux, and pitching it to Wall Street,  and big business for over a decade.  So in that vein, hey we’ve done it, and we’re continuing to do it.  That’s great.

It does seem a little odd though that CentOS and Oracle can redistribute RedHat’s sweat and tears.  Or does it?   The logic at CentOS goes if you want support, you can buy RedHat.  If you don’t, you’re free to go ahead and install CentOS as you like.  So despite CentOS being free, Oracle charging a license fee for the support they’re providing, that seems to make sense too.  The truth is that with open-source, we effectively throw IP (intellectual property) to the wind, and let it land wherever it likes.  So if Oracle wishes to capitalize on this, more power to them.

The truth is that the complaints from some camps miss a really important point.  Despite Oracle’s marketing message about making Linux Unbreakable, and Larry’s various trumpeting, Oracle actually does contribute a *LOT* to the Linux community.  Take for example this huge site of open-source projects all by or directly supported by Oracle.   Or another example, Oracle’s rolling Apache into it’s middle tier Fusion product.  Or take another, it’s building of a better driver for PHP.  All of these are very real, very measurable contributions back to the community.

Obviously it’s in Oracle’s interest for open-source technologies to work, as a lot of their customers want that interoperability.  So do I, frankly.  I’ve been working as an independent consultant for over twelve years providing professional services for Oracle and open-source technologies, and making a healthy income, thank you.

I’ll also admit that some of the folks in the Unbreakable Linux team I know personally, and very much respect professionally.  I’ve also met a few of the folks who head up the initiative at Oracle OpenWorld.  They’re all bright, approachable technologists who are as excited about open-source as they are about the Oracle core database product.

I know this may disappoint some of my open-source colleagues, but hey what’d you expect from Mr. “Oracle + Open Source”, hmm?

I just published the first half of a two part series over at Database Journal called Eight Ways to Hack Oracle.

The article is really an overview of vulnerabilities in the core database product, and how to protect against them.  Part one covers SQL Injection, a way of putting malformed entries into a web page in order to trick the application to run your query.  This can be very dangerous, and is a lot more common than you might think.  Next we cover default passwords, those are obvious right?  Except you’d be surprised how many there are, and how much of a pest they turn out to be.  Next we talk about brute force methods to get into the database, and how affective they are.  And lastly we speak about sneaking information out of the database, and how it can be done.

In part two of the series we cover listener vulnerabilities, privilege escalation which allows some of those underprivileged and default passworded accounts like scott/tiger to become extremely useful.  Lastly we hit on operating system and filesystem vulnerabilities, and how to protect against them.

 In the spirit of a long line of O’Reilly “missing manuals”, and hacker opuses, take a look at Chris Jones opus: The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual.

It’s a short week, so we’ll catch up with you all next week.  Happy Holidays!!

Although this years event was huge, and as such a bit of a jumble at times, I enjoyed it very much.  I made many many new contacts this year, spontaneous hellos, introductions, business connections, and so on.

There is a *LOT* of new stuff going on in the Oracle space, what with various new acquisitions, and no one person probably understands it all.

I’ll also say that I ran into an incredible number of new terms which I like to think of as reframing, or looking at things in a new way.  You might also call them buzzwords, so take your pick.  Some you may have heard before, some appear in a new context, and some are old and familiar.  At any rate go ahead,  mull over them and digest:

• information fabric
• information as a service
• service oriented architecture
• what’s the cookbook for doing that?
• oracle by example
• business process management - from order to cash
• extreme transaction processing
• data virtualization
• coherence
• data masking
• it comes baked in or built in
• moving from reactive to proactive
• we can triage their problem
• the democratic, approachable, modern leader
• preintegrated
• comprehensive
• hot pluggable
• go around the corner to find the treasure of an idea
• drinking the open-source koolaid

So long Oracle OpenWorld, see you in 2008!!

Well, Oracle has definitely drank the web 2.0 koolaid. It’s exciting to see it happen. From a new wiki, to a video cast, and even an unconference!

OTN has also been podcasting for some time via the OTN Techcasts which I like. We even see some twittering, and meeting with bloggers.  I also see an Oracle user on twitter, and Justin Kestelyn.

Overall I think Oracle’s moves to promote social networking and transparency are good ones.  Perhaps it will be widgets and OpenSocial next, or maybe mashups!!

It seems that Friedman’s “flat world” is now doctrine.

Certainly The World Is Flat is a powerful book, and a powerful idea about what is happening to our global marketplace of ideas, products, and services. But once something becomes a marketing slogan you know it has reached another level of headiness, and universal application. Folks in technology may have had a particular propensity toward those ideas because of such outsourcing pressures on our skills in recent years.

But hold on, haven’t you heard about the new trend? The world is *not* flat, or so says the Economist, after reading Pankaj Ghemawat new book Redefining Global Strategy: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter. I agree wholeheartedly. Granted the pressure to outsource has been felt, but if economic numbers are to be trusted, it is quite small as a percentage of the whole, and now it seems the pendulum is swinging back the other way.

Rob Preston at Information Week argued something similar, that “The new ‘Flat World’ tilts back and forth and does not stay horizontal for long!”

Still it looks cool as a slogan on a stairwell anyway… Cheers!!

Gosh I really love that word “open”.  When I hear it, I just get all warm inside.  I’ve always liked that Oracle used the word in it’s big annual conference name.  And this year’s show is bigger than ever.  I heard a rumor that there were 50,000 people here this year.  With an ever increasing round of acquisitions, the exhibitor and user communities just keep growing.

As you can see from this photo, they’ve totally blocked off Howard Street.  The video billboard there is at the 3rd street end.  I managed to catch it showing a frame of an open world!

Behind the billboard are tents where the lunchtime cafeteria was, because all the other square footage is now taken by exhibitors big and small.

And wow, were there a lot of vendors.  Even MySQL AB was here, as I blogged about earlier.  Open-source is a huge and growing component to the Oracle landscape now.  Oracle users seem to concur.  In 2000 when I was writing my book “Oracle and Open Source” no one would have believed that.  But the market pressures are working their magic, whether we like it or not.  I talked at length with Anand Pandey, a Senior Consultant with MySQL.  He handed me a very interesting whitepaper “Open Source in the Enterprise: New Software Disrupts the Technology Stack“.  A very interesting read indeed.

Stay tuned for more tomorrow.

Incredible, but true.  It seems that MySQL AB will be exhibiting next week at Oracle Open World.  This of course isn’t the first time a competitor would advertise or exhibit on it’s rival’s home turf.  Still it certainly signals a changing landscape, and heats up the battle for market share.

Here’s a longer list of exhibitors at the conference.  I don’t see Enterprise DB there, but anything’s possible.  You will see RedHat as well as Suse, now owned by Novell, represented there as well.  Also if you make it to the conference, be sure to visit the Oracle pavilion section, where there are sure to be smaller booths for the Open Source Group, as well as Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support program.

SQL can be tricky. Here’s a way to display date based summations across one row of output…

Suppose you have quarterly totals for 2006 like this:

SELECT TO_CHAR(orderdt, 'Q') Q, sum (price) the_total
FROM my_orders
WHERE orderdt >= '01-JAN-2006'
AND orderdt < '01-JAN-2007'
GROUP BY TO_CHAR(orderdt, 'Q')
ORDER BY 1;


The results would be like this:


Q THE_TOTAL
- -----------
1 1000
2 1500
3 1300
4 2000


Now let’s throw some SUM and DECODE functions into the mix.


SELECT
SUM (DECODE(TO_DATE(orderdt, 'Q'), '1', sale_price, 0)) Q1,
SUM (DECODE(TO_DATE(orderdt, 'Q'), '2', sale_price, 0)) Q2,
SUM (DECODE(TO_DATE(orderdt, 'Q'), '3', sale_price, 0)) Q3,
SUM (DECODE(TO_DATE(orderdt, 'Q'), '4', sale_price, 0)) Q4
FROM my_orders
WHERE orderdt > '01-JAN-2006'
AND orderdt < '01-JAN-2007'
GROUP BY TO_CHAR(orderdt, 'Q');


Results would then look formated I think how you would like:


Q1         Q2         Q3         Q4
---------- ---------- ---------- ----------
1000       1500       1300       2000


Though I haven’t seen much of them in the news lately, I thought I’d do some digging.

• June 19th xStarter job scheduler
• July 13 IB LogManager v2.8.0
• August 27 - Firebird 2.0.2
• August 31 - Firebird 2.0.2 recalled (oops!)
• September 27 Firebird v2.0.3 released
• October 5th - IBReplicator Server v2.5.1
• October 22nd 2.1 beta 2 released
• November 5th, released for Mac OS X Leopard.

There are of course many other news flashes, so if you’d like to catch up on Firebird, take a look at the .

We blogged about Facebook’s Open API over at #comments as a guest blogger. It seems everyone wants in on the social networking openness. Tomorrow, Google is slated to release it’s OpenSocial.

Oracle and Salesforce.com are also jumping on the bandwagon with Open Social support, along with Linkedin, Plaxo, hi5, and Friendster. Does anyone still use friendster?

The exciting thing for developers, and ultimately the user community who may use such apps is that developing for Google’s new API will easier, and will work across a lot of differen social networks. Granted Facebook has a huge inertia behind it, but still build-for-one and deploy-across-many is a powerful motivator for everyone.

And if my experience with Friendster, then Tribe, then MySpace, and then Facebook is any indication, people will get excited about the next great community, social networking site and forget about Facebook just like they did every single one before.

NOTE: As of Thursday, you’ll be able to go to Google’s homepage for the project: OpenSocial