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Adding to the Library Collection

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I took the chance today to order some books from Amazon today to add to the library. Of course I’m still reading 2 current books Spring in Action and the MySQL Certification Study Guide in order to site the second MySQL Professional Certification Exam.

As with most things, you start off looking or reading on the web for something and you end up completely somewhere else. In this case, it was looking at Linux Software Labs (Australia) at the price of their Linux Distribution CD’s, which lead me to the book Beyond Java listed on their site. Called my local computer book store, but not being open (Boxing Day Public Holiday), lead me to go, “well I’ve been meaning to order some books from Amazon”, what were they again. So this lead me to coming up with a whole new list, and I figured for the cost of freight to Australia, I may as well order a few. So here is what I got.

Better, Faster, Lighter Java, MySQL (3rd Edition) (Developer’s Library) , High Performance MySQL,and of course Beyond Java.

The hard part now being the waiting 6-10 days.

Speaking at MySQL Users Group

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I’m preparing to speak at the next MySQL Brisbane Users Group in Febraury 2006. My topic will be Know your competitor – A MySQL Developers Guide to Using Oracle Express Edition. You can get a full copy of my presentation slides at my Articles Page.

Having a strong background in Oracle, and having been using MySQL for the past 5 years, the release of Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (XE) as a Free offering (with limitations of 1 CPU, 1GB Ram, and 4GB disk) is an interesting move by Oracle.

I’ve written a number of recent comments on various Oracle/MySQL things including Responses to some Oracle v’s MySQL Questions, How can Oracle 10g Express Edition target MySQL?, Oracle 10g Express Edition Target Audience. Is it MySQL?, Oracle 10g Express, Free v’s Open Source and OFA.

The question could be posed, what relevence does this have to MySQL developers? Well, in some respects very little, but in others, both knowing about your competitor a little more, being able to see their offering, and in particular in comparision to MySQL can help in a level of understanding in Database differences. I am hoping that from the discussions, people will consider some approaches to design and development that is more “database compatible”, regardless of which database.

Will Oracle 10g Express Edition take off, well difficult question, there are many target markets, will it compete with MySQL in Open Source, hopefully my talk will sporn some discussion of peoples experiences in the various organisations and businesses represented in our meetings.

Review of Database Magazine Article – "The Usual Suspects"

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In the “Australian Technology and Business Magazine” – December 2005 edition there was an article on comparing database products. Here are my comments, which I also plan to forward to the editor.

BTW: I’ve since also found this articles content on another site here. It seems that most if not all is the same.

In response to your cover story article “The Usual Suspects Four databases we suspect your business could be quite interested in.” which appeared in the December 2005 edition, I would have to sum up your article in one word “Disappointing”. Let me provide some feedback from my perspective.

You start by defining a scenario, which is the only approach you can take for a suitable comparision of database products due to diversity of features available in todays products. A good start, necessary to limit the discussion of features and functionality. However, you then specify some additional business requirements, for example “relatively small e-commerce” and “cost of the initial server and database software is certainly an issue.” Now, having worked for a number of small internet and e-commerce companies, you don’t have the budget for a Dell Quad Xeon processor machine, nor then the requirements for co-located hosting or dedicate networking bandwidth for your fancy new hardware as well as the additional staffing support costs. So immediately your scenario is more unrealistic.

The major sticking point I have is your 4 processor requirement. The most efficient and cost effective initial implementation is to lease dedicated servers, there are numerous reasons including cost savings, better hardware support, larger bandwidth capacity and easy growth path to start. You can also easily monitor growth and more quickly change needs then having a large initial hardware cost. I could continue regarding hosting, however this alone changes the requirements to using single or dual processor machines given your scenario. With this in mind the playing field is now completely different but a better reflection of the scenario. Your argument for “scale up to a small server farm”, also does not hold, because you can easily get economy of scale in splitting application server and database server, splitting OLTP and batch database requirements and other common practices, not to mention additional benefits such as redundancy.

My final comments on your hardware, specifically in relation to MySQL (including using Version 3), you can get significant performance from hardware given your small size requirements and even with modest growth on single and dual processor equipment. Other then opening remarks your article makes no further references to performance requirements or indeed any level of performance analysis of the products reviewed in this article.

You make scant reference to other database products, mentioning only one ‘Sybase’ in half a sentence in your opening and once again. In 8 pages, surely rounding the article to give a clearer perspective of the marketplace with even one paragraph to mention that there are many different database products both commercial and open source that service differing business needs. Other major products not compared at this time include Sybase, Informix, Ingres, PostgreSQL, MaxDB and Berley DB as well as many more.

Your choice of products is also not consistent or reflective of your scenerio. I’ll provide a few specific reasons. Firstly, you compare beta products against production products, if your criteria was current production products you should have compared using MS SQL Server 2000, however that would clearly provide a poor reflection in Microsoft due to it’s clearly dated product. If you allowed one beta product, why then did you not use MySQL 5.0 beta which was available at the time. While you have taken the effort to adjust your article to include references to MySQL 5.0, and you in turn choose MySQL as your editor’s choice, you should have been consistent throughout the article as you give mixed comparising referencing two versions of one product. Futher to this, you choose to use a dated Oracle product in 10g Release 1. 10g Release 2 has been available for a number of months. I would also question your decision to choose the more expensive Standard Edition over Standard Edition One, but this again could be soley due to your overspecd hardware.

If your rationale for including beta was cost based, then you did Oracle a clear injustice. You make again, only a half sentence reference to Oracle’s new released free product in the opening section. You mix more recent MySQL 5.0 information within your review of MySQL 4.1.14, yet you mention nothing of Oracle 10g Express Edition, for example it’s a free product much like Microsoft SQL Server Express, but also has similar limitation in 1 CPU, 1GB RAM and 4GB of disk but all the power and functionality of other Oracle Products, as well as default inclusion of web based administration tools with HTMLDB.

Your quick product summary (4 columns of information) suffers from a number of already mentioned points, however in relation to the only commercial product with a free offering, MS SQL Server Express, you clearly gloss over the limitations. 1 CPU, 1GB Ram and 4GB of disk is critical information, this should have been included in the product summary, you only go part the way. Regarding MySQL, should have clearly stated reference to $0 under GPL license. On that note, and mentioned in your detailed review, there are limitations in the distribution of MySQL within a commercial product and this is not in your summary.

Your article places no emphasis on performance or efficiency. Given your need to mention your testing on quad processor hardware, you make references to various limits of CPU across products, memory and hardware requirements as well as some generic maximum sizings, but nothing on performance, throughput and then growth potential, as this was part of your opening scenario.

It’s not possible to clearly date when this review of products was performed, granted the marketplace has changed rapidly in recent months, the fact that your article references Oracle 10g Express edition clearly includes changes were possible to the article in early November.

In an 8 page article, as mentioned you could have allocated one column to mention that the Database marketplace contains many more products. In particular considering you have included an Open Source product, and you selected this as product of choice, I feel this gives even more justification to at least giving credit to the emerging Open Source Database market. You actually place I recall only one mention to “Open Source” which is signifcant in the context of your choice. Other products would include PostgreSQL, Berkley DB, Apache Derby and even Ingres. While your article should clearly not need to analyse these at this time, by leading into this topic you provide clear opportunity for further discussion.

At the end of the day, while you provided a concise one page breakdown of features and certain limits, this technical information does not provide a clear benefit to an IT manager, or even a technical person.

Responses to some Oracle v's MySQL Questions

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I was asked a few questions by a reporter thru a collegue, here is an extract of the discussion.

1) Based on your initial experience with Oracle Database Express Edition, what are your initial thoughts on the product in terms of meeting developer needs?

Installing Oracle 10g Express Edition was a breeze. (Article). In the past Oracle products have been more difficult to install, however this has gradually improved with the more recent version releases of 8i, 9i and 10g. This easy installation via rpm under Linux, in particular the inclusion of HTMLDB provides an ideal database environment that is functional in just a few minutes. This is an important first step in gaining initial developer support.

With the database installation, the Web Based HTMLDB Interface and a sound amount of developer articles online at the Oracle Technology Network ( http://otn.oracle.com), there is a lot of information to meet a developers need. In particular, HTMLDB which offers Database Administration, general SQL tools, easy data management and a complete web forms development environment. There is a learning curve in understanding this functionality, however it is an extensive and powerful tool for developers, and requires a minimum of syntax specific knowledge. With the release of Raptor in December, Oracle will have a visual tool for development, which will complement this offering in meeting developer needs.

2) As a mySQL developer, do you think it is on par with proprietary database offerings?

MySQL celebrated it’s 10 anniversary this year, and with the Release of MySQL 5.0, gave the open source community a product to match the strengths of others products with new functionality including views, stored procedures, triggers and a data dictionary. Oracle provided these features with Oracle Version 7, released in 1992, long before MySQL was even a company. In a commercial world, MySQL now offers the strengths of an Oracle Database Product, however Oracle has grown extensively and offers not only a commercial database product but an entire suite of products. MySQL is on par in a great number of areas. Granted they are catching up quickly, and the Open Source community offers features that commercial companies cannot. This includes the ability for open source companies to change, adapt and correct more quickly, bringing features and functionality to the marketplace more often, and more open support and knowledge bases enabling users to gain easier and open access. These two points offer downsides that commercial product offerings in turn offer back, including more commercial strength functionality, and more consistent and managed knowledge management, particularly in support.

3) Do you think the efforts of vendors like Microsoft and Oracle to gain mindshare with entry level versions of their products would entice mySQL developers like you to consider their higher-end database products?

I think that Oracle 10g Express Edition caters to different markets. For existing users and developers with Oracle, the opportunity to provide their products for resale at a reduced cost, with a zero cost Oracle license is a definite market and opportunity for these Oracle Partners. I think the education sector, including universities is another potential market, where a genuine free product can be used in teaching, and then practical application, and lead into usage within the professional employment. The third sector, the competitor market, which includes MySQL and Microsoft is more complicated. Oracle will need to go further to bridge the gap in convenience for MySQL developers. To sight a few examples, MySQL is generally available now in online hosting packages, on Linux Distros. It’s quick, easy and convinient to access, and is gaining significant popularity in the open source community, a good barometer in success in a developer driven environment. When Oracle can provide it’s products within a Linux Distro and you can see Online Hosting providers offering packages including the Oracle 10g Express Edition database, gaining market share will at least be more convenient.
One other strength, is MySQL being part of LAMP, and the significant wealth of open source products developed with MySQL, makes it hard for Oracle to ever gain ground in these continued product offerings. Perhaps if Oracle considered a bounty system, much like Ubuntu, and enticed developers to ensure Open Source products were Oracle compatible, would further entice MySQL developers. (Article)
The downside of these two examples, is there is no return in investment to Oracle, so it will depend on which markets are ultimately intended for Oracle 10g Express Edition. (Article)

4) Among the proprietary database vendors, who do you think has the best offering in your opinion, and where would mySQL fit in?

In this marketplace, there is a platitude of Database Offerings (can provide a list if you want), Oracle has always been the market leader in the commercial space, and there still is no other offering to match this. Historically, software development with databases was undertaken by IT professionals and there were a small number of commercial products available. Oracle gained a large market share in the past 20 years and has kept up with technology advancement. In the past 10 years, the Open Source community has changed the shape of the product offerings, and has also change the type of developers. There is a divide between the professional developers with qualifications and specific experience in software development in a structured development environment, and the new age of developers that have easy access to tools and information, and can easily contributed to an open source project that may have hundreds or thousands of developers worldwide, but they do at times lack solid grounding, and this can lead to bad habits. Depending on your requirements, a large commercial organisation, or a small webstore and blog, there are different needs, and you can’t therefore compare database products based solely on features. You need to include the customer requirements, as well as the ability for a database product to grow and adapt to your business in the ever changing environment.

I think in this day and age, there needs to be a tolerance between multiple database offerings within organisations. As the CIO or CTO of a large organisation, I would hope that different needs within the organisation would lead to two database products in use and synergy, both Oracle and MySQL.

How can Oracle 10g Express Edition target MySQL?

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As I mentioned earlier, is MySQL a target of the new Oracle 10g Express Edition. Maybe not specifically, but let’s assume it’s on the radar screen. What can Oracle do to woe MySQL users and developers?

I see distinct marketing will be required for Oracle 10g Express Edition, marketing for example to existing partners must be different to “Competitor Marketing”. While I’m sure Oracle will now be able to get benefits from Parters trying to sell their products, now being able to reduce costs to customers (at least initially). Other partners that never considered selling developed applications due to the license cost may now reconsider.

But back onto MySQL. Oracle needs to target specific information to MySQL. OTN Technical Articles for Developers and Architects has nothing on MySQL. I can see the need for a Cookbook to attract MySQL users. The Oracle 10g Express Edition page has some information on developer docs, but not on Conversion, Migration and comparison. Some more opportunity here!

While on Migration, I attempted using the Oracle Migration Workbench to migrate my Version 5 database, without success. MySQL would be low on the agenda if a Version 5 migration was not available for a product that’s been in a pre-production release for most of 2005.

So, there is a clear need for some documentation, Quick Start Guides and How To’s for the MySQL community. Obviously being able to do a database migration also very high. But again this is not a practical application, it’s just the icing.
Until some Open Source projects actively engage in Oracle 10g Express Edition, it will always be a novelty to the MySQL community that won’t get off the ground.

I can see one way to jump start the process. Oracle could offer bounties, much like Ubuntu, to get some of the large open source projects Oracle 10g Express Edition compatible.
For example, http://www.phpbb.com, http://www.oscommerce.com, http://www.phpwebsite.appstate.edu, http://www.dotproject.net.

Now offering $200 per project, that would shake some things up!

Oracle 10g Express Edition Target Audience. Is it MySQL?

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Just where is Oracle planning on targeting the new Oracle 10g Express Edition?
The obvious answer would be to counter the arch nemesis Microsoft, and the low end product offerings, like the MS SQL Server and the low end free engine MSDE. I didn’t realise to recently, that Microsoft have finally released the next version of MS SQL Server, being 2005, and at the same time provide a free cut down offering, strangely enough called “Express Edition”. It’s taken Microsoft 5 years. Makes you wonder if Database Technology is a high priority!

Is Oracle also now threatened in anyway by MySQL? I think not, however the continued growth of MySQL, it’s availability on any Linux server and in many distros, and now with the MySQL 5.0 GA release with features like Views, Triggers, Stored Procedures, Information Schema and ANSI SQL compliance allows MySQL to compare itself in features with Oracle. Certainly from our local MySQL Users Group, the inside MySQL news is it’s targeted against Microsoft.

Of course Oracle has been around for quite some time, and when I started working with Oracle 7 and Oracle Designer 1.2 back in 1996, these features were already available.

Oracle 10g Express Edition is a specialist database product from a database company, and with the wealth of knowledge that has lead the lasted version 10, everybody else has a long way to go to match this strength. From MySQL, the feature set even in Version 3 and 4, was adequate for application development in many areas, and the community is driving additional features to match other database product offerings.

I think it will be interesting to see what additional information Oracle releases targeted against the MySQL community. I’ve got a number of thoughts here, will post more details soon.

Oracle 10g Express, Free v's Open Source and OFA

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In lunching with an old Oracle Friend, the topic turned to Oracle 10g Express Edition, and we discussed the pros and cons for organisations. The first thing he asked me was, “Have you tried loading the database larger then the 4G limit yet”. Some People?

In general the consensus seemed that it was viable for a small organisation, good for a startup company to get into a no cost entry solution, but appealing to those venture capitalists as you have a definite growth pattern.

I’m warming to more actively pursing Oracle 10g Express Edition, especially with HTMLDB, and at present while preparing to submit a paper for an upcoming Open Source conference which I hope is accepted, I’ve allocated some time on the significant topic of Open Source Verses Free. Stay tuned.

It dawned on me later in the day to more closely investigate the Oracle RPM installation and where exactly everything went in the FileSystem. I was surprised that it was not OFA compliant.

What if an existing Oracle customer with licenses was trialling Oracle 10g Express Edition and using the same staff.
Or more importantly, what if a new Oracle person picked up some bad habits from the Oracle 10g Express Edition, and when placed in a more commercial Oracle DBA environment got caught out?

I’m a Database Modeler, I’ve studied it, and I’ve practiced it, I’ve applied it and I’ve learnt some things from time to time of other “experts”, but nowadays, you put a database in somebody’s hands, like MySQL which is readily available, and all of a sudden you have people claiming to know and understand database design. Food for thought.

I hope from this new Oracle 10g Express product, also comes some good support from the Oracle Community to ensure a high standard in all things databases.

MySQL 5 differences

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Just a note, while MySQL provide a list of Version 5 Features (Official Data Sheet), I’ve so far found a few small things.

mysql> DESC [table], the Null column now shows NO when it was blank

When you grant ALL to a user, it’s gets CREATE VIEW privilege, but when upgrading, you have to manually specify the privilege for previous users that had grant ALL>

Some OUTER JOINS no longer work

MySQL 5 Production Release

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MySQL has offically released Version 5 (5.0.15).

Just installed over the RC (5.0.13) and restarted had my development machine working fine, however now I need to more closely investigate 2 complicated queries with Outer Joins that no longer work between 4 and 5, and 2 update queries that have crashed my 5.0.13 install.

The following steps were used to upgrade from 4 to 5.0.13

MYSQL=mysql-standard-5.0.13-rc-linux-i686
cp $MYSQL.tar.gz /opt
cd /opt
tar xvfz $MYSQL.tar.gz
/etc/rc.d/init.d/mysql stop
ps -ef | grep mysql
rm -f mysql
ln -s $MYSQL mysql
cp -r $OLD/data/ mysql

du mysql/data

chown -R root /opt/mysql
chown -R mysql /opt/mysql/data
chgrp -R mysql /opt/mysql
chown -R root /opt/mysql/bin
/etc/rc.d/init.d/mysql start
ps -ef | grep mysql

/opt/mysql/bin/mysql_fix_privilege_tables –basedir=/opt/mysql –password=******

mysql -uroot -p mysql
show tables;

Brisbane MySQL Users Group

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By accident I came across a MySQL Users Group in Brisbane .http://mysql.meetup.com/84/. I guess I should have thought about it sooner, I go to the QLD Java Users Group, I spent a long time going to the Oracle Users Group, and have been involved in an XP Users group.

Anyway, it was great to meet with other MySQL users, meet some local MySQL staff, get some inside news of events and products.
There was also a presentation on Ruby, yet another scripting language. The software creator had however introduced some nice features including build-in Unit Tests with the release, easy inspection of class methods, easy extensibility of system classes. The langauge architecture was very inteperative, based in C, however all system functions are provided and run from Ruby source.