Ok I am sure others are thinking things but I am going to be bold and list my predictions for the world as it may be post the Sun Oracle Merger. I have been telling this to people around the office and I thought well lets make a real fool and try it out there in the big wide world.

This is my take on how the Sun products fare after the merger, here we go:

Why you ask, MySQL has a huge base in lightweight databases across the web supporting many Open Source projects and millions of websites. Oracle cannot sell Oracle databases licenses to all those Most cannot afford it and many will just migrate to a new free product. Instead Oracle will increase support for MYSQL doing what it does best. It will look to leveraging from those customers so that when they need to scale up to something bigger for a project, they will look to Oracle for the Oracle database to support that project. Oracle already a couple of years ago bought a transaction engine for My SQL, so that will dovetail in nicely. One of the first things I expect oracle to do is get the MySQL people together to understand the issues with the fragmentation of the code base and forks that have developed and bring everyone back to the same single code base. It is to Oracles best interest to have the efforts singularly focused to utilise MySQL as a great feed product into the use of the other products and Oracle Support for your MySQL databases.

Prediction: It’s staying and will get bigger and better

This is probably the real baby oracle wants out of all this. They have been major contributors for a number of years to the development of Java. Oracle has a huge investment in Java and its future, They will tend and care for it well as if they convince IBM of their unworthiness of holders of the flag IBM will make their life hell. It probably will not help either and be a benefit to Microsoft more than any other. FX will have a lot of effort poured into it to develop rich Java applications this is something Oracle will see great benefit in not only for their own products but for many other products. Expect to see a lot of good stuff come from the Java team to support all Java developers to build fast rich and easy developed Web Applications.

Prediction: It’s staying and will get bigger and better

This has been a niche product for most of its life. It had many issues and Sun never saw it worth developing fully. I don’t see it going away instead I see the Open Source project being better resourced to garner product enhancements that go into the SPARC platform. Expect a solid X86 Open Source project, but don’t expect Oracle databases to run unless it develops code compatibility with Linux and its usage widens dramatically. Oracle has supported Oracle 10 on x86 but has seen little penetration.

Prediction: Will remain as Open Source

The Glassfish project will remain and will be open-source, the commercial end will go as Oracle focuses its efforts on Weblogic. Interesting and useful features and ideas will evolve in Glassfish and be ported into Weblogic.

Prediction: Its staying but only as open source

Particularly the SPARC business was always part of the main plan so it has a proposed long life ahead. X86 there is no reason to ditch it as it runs the Linux program of which there is a large investment on Oracles part. hardware not going anywhere and I expect further acquisitions to build out the Sun hardware product range over time to provide a Sun data centre.

Prediction: Its staying, but only as open source

Sun has a good business here and some of the Oracle product might end up dead instead, replaced by Sun product. Once again the open Source projects will be alive and well. Oracle has a great source of product ideas in all the open source project, They are great at the business end and will monetise it. Some will stay and some will be retired as oracle puts together a better solution out of existing and the new Sun gear.

Prediction: Some of it is staying

Netbeans is possibly going to fold. Oracle already has JDeveloper and supports Eclipse for Weblogic. I don’t see why this would be kept unless it has a substantial user base that is worth maintaining.

Prediction: I expect it to go.

This just doesn’t fit with Oracle, but could it I do think it has great value. Weave the oracle Instant client into the product in the Star Office version or just make it easily integrate and allow the use of Open Office base or any other part be able to integrate to the databases both Oracle and MySQL. I see further integration to other products in the Oracle suite driving a compelling reason for corporations to give Open Office some daylight in their product mix.

Prediction: Its staying

I also see Oracle working to develop a bundle for deployment that targets Microsoft from the bottom in the application server and database market using Linux/Solaris x86/Glassfish and MySQL as the basis of that offering. many of them would not have bought Oracle but will have to opportunity of buying Oracle support for their bundled server. Oracle only needs to add some great console tools similar to a CPanel product that web hosts already use and a well managed web driven appliance product is ready to rock and white ant the low end MS customer base

I think the new Sun driven Exabyte “Wow what a machine is showing the way of the future with the Sun Oracle Merger and unfortunately it doesn’t run Solaris for those that were wondering”

There will be some products that end, but they probably never would have lived with Sun as an independent business anyway.

So that’s my predictions

Anyone else willing to guess the future?

See ya round

Peter

Just having a look through the CPU for July and the first item CVE-2009-1020,  makes this CPU very important to Windows hosted databases. The Windows installation method for Oracle products that requires Administrator Group privileges means this bug provides an attack vector which through this attack you can compromise the entire server, a not so nice proposition. The impact on this is not so bad for Unix and Linux, as a total compromise of the database is not possible and therefore there is less impact. As Oracle runs under user non root privilege accounts on Unix and Linux, you avoid the potential complete compromise of a server at the same time. Other problems addressed in the patchset  are not as bad, as none create a full compromise. One worrying aspect is most are of Low access complexity or to put it simply are easy to implement to set up an attack. CVE-2009-1019 is of concern as it is remotely exploitable without authentication. CVE-2009-1019 also breaks all aspects of CIA for the database, however it is only a partial compromise across the board.

For those of you interested in developing you security knowledge further then going and reading about the CVSS program is worthwhile, as it allows you to provide a better assessment to the problems and their impact on the databases and other products you manage for your organisation.

Recommendation: Update your databases to  apply this CPU

With Application Server the items are a little lower, however they are both remote attacks without authentication, one compromises the HTTP server and the other impacts security tools. Neither are of a high degree of difficulty to implement an attack.

Once again as the HTTP server is a front line device it is important to update that as the vulnerability may be used more creatively than expected by Oracle and the security analysts have envisaged. Recommendation: Patch and update

I don’t work presently with E-Biz and Peoplesoft, so i wont comment other than to say since you already now have a need to patch your Oracle database and your application server then you should review and apply the patches across the board

From teh BEA technologies the JRockit vulnerability is derived from a number of Java bugs, Sun has provided data on this, if you use JRockit for public facing systems this is a critical patch to address. The 10 rating along with that an entire compromise is worrying. Some will already have applied the Sun patches and have avoided some or all the issues addressed in this patch.

Recommendation: Upgrade now

That has made for an interesting bundle this quarter, so happy patching.

See ya round

Peter

I am installing the 10.2.0.5 Agent for Oracle Grid Control and found the following as just a little humorous. You see the one off patch is showing as optional. Now that would be good if I had been given a chance to choose to install the “Optional” one off patch, but at no time leading up to this little screen showing up was I informed that a one off patch existed and it was in fact optional to install it. Now I am not sure about you but Oracle has decided that a one off patch needs to be installed in the process of installing the Agent or any other software, then I am not likely to finish the installation and then first thing go and remove that patch as it is “Optional”.   Ok it must have been a slow morning to find it funny. Enjoy the thought that you can have optional when its not really. I guess I can now run OPatch and find out as the the merits and remove it if I want however that might mean other issues down the track so I think I will just leave the

optional patch there

Martin Evans has announced that the DBD::ODBC 1.20 was released eariler this week. He has advised there is still an issue with SQL Native Client at version 10.00.1600 and is looking for testers to work with him to verify the code.

Below is the changes from this release

• Fix bug in handling of SQL_WLONGVARCHAR when not built with unicode support. The column was not identified as a long column and hence the size of the column was not restricted to LongReadLen.  Can causeDBD::ODBC to attempt to allocate a huge amount of memory.

• Minor changes to Makefile.PL to help diagnose how it decided which driver manager to use and where it was found.

• Offer suggestion to debian-based systems when some of unixODBC is found (the bin part) but the development part is missing.

• In 20SqlServer.t attempt to drop any procedures we created if they still exist at the end of the test. Reported by Michael Higgins.
• In 12blob.t separate code to delete test table into sub and call at being and end, handle failures from prepare there were two ENDs.

• In ODBCTEST.pm when no acceptable test column type is found output all the found types and BAIL_OUT the entire test.

• Skip rt_39841.t unless actually using the SQL Server ODBC driver or native client.

• Handle drivers which return 0 for SQL_MAX_COLUMN_NAME_LEN.

• Double the buffer size used for column names if built with unicode.

Like all things, test before implementing this against production systems.

See ya round

Peter

Today the Team released the latest Perl DBI driver for DB2 Announcement details below

IBM DB2 Database Driver for Perl DBI Version 1.7 has been uploaded on CPAN. Testers are please welcome to test the new features and report the bugs.

DBI is an open standard application programming interface (API) that provides database access for client applications written in Perl. DBI defines a set of functions, variables, and conventions that provide a platform-independent database interface. The DBD::DB2 driver works with DBI and a DB2 client to access databases.

**New In Release - Improved support for Getting Client Info using DB2 CLP “db2 list applications”. Enhancement on previous version defect 160229 - Errors while retrieving multiple resultsets from stored procedures using db2_more_results defect number 172486 - Support for Decfloat Datatype – 172301 - Support for SQLRowCount to prefetch the number of rows that can be retured by a Select/Update/Delete/Insert query 173018

Special Thanks to Hildo Biersma from Morgan Stanley for helping us gather a lot of these requirements and making our driver better and useful.

Download Link

http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/I/IB/IBMTORDB2/DBD-DB21.6.tar.gz

Installation Instructions for both Linux and Unix and PPM repositories Information

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/perl/

Support Email Addresses

* This release is supported by Open Source Application Development Team * You may also report your bugs via the CPAN resolution tracking system: http://rt.cpan.org/ by searching for module DBD-DB2 * Such bug reports can be sent by email to bug-DBD-DB2@rt.cpan.org; they also get sent to opendev@us.ibm.com, etc.

Download DB2 Express-C for free, go to:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/download.html?S_CMP=ECDDWW01&S_TACT=ACDB201

Getting started with DB2 Express-C:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/DB2/FREE+Book-+Getting+Started+with+DB2+Express-C

Thanks, Tarun Pasrija IBM OpenSource Application Development Team India Software Labs, Bangalore (India)