lynnfredricks.com » Databases http://www.lynnfredricks.com The Technology Tribe Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:32:08 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Valentina 4.6: The Ultra Fast Database Gets Faster http://www.lynnfredricks.com/2010/05/04/valentina-4-6-ultra-fast-database-gets-faster/ http://www.lynnfredricks.com/2010/05/04/valentina-4-6-ultra-fast-database-gets-faster/#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 16:03:45 +0000 Lynn Fredricks http://www.lynnfredricks.com/?p=228 Valentina DB 4.6 was released yesterday, with some very impressive speed improvements both in index searches and also something as simple as opening a database file. There are also other improvements, like being able to automatically look up functions, store comments and interactively receive log information through an integrated console in Valentina Studio. But what brings it all back to speed is that it enables applications built around Valentina DB, and Valentina Reports, to vastly improve performance, and therefore value. Speed can be your next upgrade.If you develop commercial applications, you are on a perpetual wheel of providing new value to your customers through upgrades.   The way we’ve structured Valentina DB releases is to provide not only fixes, but as many additional features that can pass through to end users. That’s when even a modest increase of speed is exciting, because that’s an upgrade that goes right into your upgrade – your app can be 10-20% faster than it was only recently.

]]> http://www.lynnfredricks.com/2010/05/04/valentina-4-6-ultra-fast-database-gets-faster/feed/ 0 MySQL Mess To Get Worse in 2010 http://www.lynnfredricks.com/2010/01/01/mysql-mess-to-get-worse-in-2010/ http://www.lynnfredricks.com/2010/01/01/mysql-mess-to-get-worse-in-2010/#comments Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:44:22 +0000 Lynn Fredricks http://www.lynnfredricks.com/?p=159 Michael Widenius certainly has his concerns about the Oracle acquisition of Sun. Michael is the original developer of MySQL and worked on the project for more than 27 years. It is worth reading his posts about the importance of the GPL in MySQL licensing and even goes on to tie the fate of MySQL to the free nature of the Internet. What I find facinating is that his argument is that the open source project requires a strong corporate master invested in making it competitive with closed source databases.For all the arguments and worry about MySQL, I believe that the Sun acquisition was more motivated by the fate of Java than MySQL. It is understandable why Sun was seeking to sell itself.  Although much of the success of today’s internet is a result of resting on the highly stable Solaris OS and the development of Java enabled an entirely new (and not always rock solid) way to deploy server side and handheld applications, new technologies have come along to kick out their revenue potential.  Oracle has heavily invested in Java as a development environment, and the threat over the last two years of a possible acquisition by rival IBM of Sun made the acquisition of Sun an important step for Oracle. Oracle really does not need MySQL, but they needed Java. Solaris is also a nice alternative to Linux, too.

I think Michael is going to have a lot of heartache in 2010. MySQL AB had an extremely aggressive sales force and rather difficult to understand licensing that, in combination, generated revenues for MySQL AB from confused executives at development companies and end user companies who became enamored with MySQL because it was free – but later found it wasn’t free for their commerical endeavors. Oracle certainly has an aggressive sales force, but the mindset is different. The sort of bait and switch mentality for licensing isn’t a part of the Oracle way of doing things – and I can see some of Michael’s fears coming true. Prices will very likely go up, up, up. The software license will probably not change for a while – at least until the worries of government probes are behind them.

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