In a Financial Times report today about RedHat's quarterly earnings, Sam Ramji of Microsoft takes note of MySQL and its influence as a key component in the general move towards open-source software:

Larger deployments of open-source to firms that already run the technology in a small way might be the most that happens, due to the fact that recessions make IT managers worry about risk. For the same reasons, a recession is not the time to switch a workforce to a new technology.

Microsoft is counting on that, while accepting that every leading company will soon be running at least some open-source software.

“It’s a heterogeneous world,” said Microsoft’s Sam Ramji. While Microsoft continues to warn about the legal and economic perils of relying on Linux and similar systems, Mr Ramji’s role is to make sure …

In a Financial Times report today about RedHat's quarterly earnings, Sam Ramji of Microsoft takes note of MySQL and its influence as a key component in the general move towards open-source software:

Larger deployments of open-source to firms that already run the technology in a small way might be the most that happens, due to the fact that recessions make IT managers worry about risk. For the same reasons, a recession is not the time to switch a workforce to a new technology.

Microsoft is counting on that, while accepting that every leading company will soon be running at least some open-source software.

“It’s a heterogeneous world,” said Microsoft’s Sam Ramji. While Microsoft continues to warn about the legal and economic perils of relying on Linux and similar systems, Mr Ramji’s role is to make sure …

In a Financial Times report today about RedHat's quarterly earnings, Sam Ramji of Microsoft takes note of MySQL and its influence as a key component in the general move towards open-source software:

Larger deployments of open-source to firms that already run the technology in a small way might be the most that happens, due to the fact that recessions make IT managers worry about risk. For the same reasons, a recession is not the time to switch a workforce to a new technology.

Microsoft is counting on that, while accepting that every leading company will soon be running at least some open-source software.

“It’s a heterogeneous world,” said Microsoft’s Sam Ramji. While Microsoft continues to warn about the legal and economic perils of relying on Linux and similar systems, Mr Ramji’s role is to make sure …

The idea of storing data in a format that is specific to an application should be summarily rejected. It is a throw back to the earliest days of the computer industry when every application stored its data uniquely.

Once general purpose data processing applications came along in the form of database engines, and, in particular, SQL and many applications that could work on any data through SQL statements storing data in application unique formats was a no-no because doing so eliminated the value of all those applications.

However the MySQL structure that separates the database engine from the storage engine creates an opportunity to get the best of both worlds. The storage engine is responsible only for the physical storage and retrieval of the data, while the database engine provides most of the functions. Data that is stored using a custom storage engine works transparently as part of all the function that MySQL …

The idea of storing data in a format that is specific to an application should be summarily rejected. It is a throw back to the earliest days of the computer industry when every application stored its data uniquely.

Once general purpose data processing applications came along in the form of database engines, and, in particular, SQL and many applications that could work on any data through SQL statements storing data in application unique formats was a no-no because doing so eliminated the value of all those applications.

However the MySQL structure that separates the database engine from the storage engine creates an opportunity to get the best of both worlds. The storage engine is responsible only for the physical storage and retrieval of the data, while the database engine provides most of the functions. Data that is stored using a custom storage engine works transparently as part of all the function that MySQL …

IBM to acquire Sun? TomTom countersues Microsoft. Sun unveils Open Cloud Platform. Oracle’s contributions to the Linux kernel. SpringSource updates Tool Suite. And more.

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IBM to acquire Sun?
No prizes for guessing the big story this week as the Wall Street Journal reported that IBM was in talks to buy Sun for $6.5bn, according to “people familiar with the matter”. Raising the game, the New York Times reported that the purchase price was nearer $7bn citing “a person with knowledge of the negotiations”.

The media exploded with …

UPDATED - I had to update this post after a conversation with RightScale founder and CTO Thorsten von Eicken and for Sun’s Open Cloud announcement, which are both now included below.

There has been some substantial technology and news regarding open source software in cloud computing lately. More proof that open source is reaching into nearly all aspects of enterprise and broader IT, and also reinforcement of the idea that open source software will continue to have a pervasive and disruptive impact on the way organizations of all shapes and sizes do their computing and deal with their data.

First up is RightScale, which as detailed by 451 colleague and Principal Analyst William Fellows, is up and running across the pond on Amazon’s EU EC2. As WiF reports, RightScale started with …

Accumulating book industry sales information presents a difficult technical challenge: database tables with billions of rows of data, that are added added to many times per day, and which is typically searched for time sequenced data such as a lie-cycle analysis of a set of books.

"ColdStore" is software written by ColdLogic to specifically address this challenge - although it is applicable to a wide range of similar business data handling problems.

For the operations that matter to ColdLogic's analysis, ColdStore  performs orders of magnitude faster than the best available general purpose solution.

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