bdbafh <bdbafh (AT) gmail (DOT) com> writes:

The "> dev/null" was flipp'n hilarious.

--
Galen Boyer

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On Sun, 05 Sep 2010 15:12:00 -0700, bdbafh wrote:


This is hilarious, I was laughing to tears. If only that clip wasn't so
realistic! I've had a run in with NoSQL proponents and the debate ended
when we figured out that in order to use NoSQL, ACID rules should be
abandoned, too.



--
http://mgogala.byethost5.com

bdbafh wrote,on my timestamp of 6/09/2010 8:12 AM:

Yegawds! And the scary thing is that it is absolute reality!
In fact, I'm surprised Stonebraker wasn't mentioned in there somewhere...

On Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:29:57 -0700, Noons wrote:

As a matter of fact, I tried pushing for DB2 because I am still
suspicious of open source databases, especially after the MySQL story.
MySQL was turned into a Cinderella of the database world, bought out by
the evil stepmother. Unless a beautiful prince comes by, MySQL is f**ed.
So far, there are new forks of MySQL, which can be translated into
kissing frogs, without much to show for.
Unfortunately, some people that have more sway than me are avid magazine
readers and believe that open source is the way of the future. What I
like about commercial databases is that there is someone to call and yell
at when something bad happens. From what I read, DB2 looks as solid as
they come. Unfortunately, I was overridden. So, Postgres it is.



--
http://mgogala.byethost5.com

(This is mostly about corporate politics, i.e.. off topic, please bear with me.)

On 09/09/10 18:32, Mladen Gogala wrote:
.....
On the other hand licensing is such that you may use your existing DBs
forever and most of the support is community driven anyway (applies, in
reality, to MS or Oracle, too), so the impact of the owner changes aren't so
major as in the case of a commercial product. If MySQL were a commercial
product (actually: closed source), I'd be really worried and new projects
would search alternatives.

Also, if the product is good, there will be maintainers/upgraders as long as
there are users. Of course, the quality of maintainers is unknown until they
produce something.

I've nothing against DB2 and current IBM as a company seems at least
palatable compared to the old one (they also seem to like open source quite
a lot). DB2 is a solid product and I think I'd also choose it rather than
Postgress for a new big project. Maybe it's just me.

On the other hand, as a DBA I'm slightly suspicious of _all_ DB-products:
Shoddy mock-ups put together before deadline as release dates are always
defined by marketing, i.e.. people who have no idea of quality nor how to
make it.

Oracle as a company is (IMHO) on the slippery path, there are many signs of
marketing-driven company (loud mouthed CEO is one of those) and that's
always bad for the programming quality and eventually the users.

Also old programming rule: "Every program grows until it exceeds the
abilities of the people developing it". So far there haven't been many
exceptions from this rule.

MySQL as a product seems to be doomed, yes. I couldn't imagine anything else
than slaughtering at the moment. Especially when Ellison decided to kill
many other open source projects going on also.

Many (almost all of the key persons) of the original developers (before Sun
bought them) left Sun/Oracle as soon as Oracle bought Sun, so they are free
to develop new forks.

These guys made MySQL because they didn't like Oracle at all (as a company),
so I'm quite sure that there will be new product fairly soon, of course
called something else.

Also Ellison seems to lose contact with reality, his latest comments on
Hurd/HP-hassle were quite weird (even if Hurd is his personal friend) and
even weirder was the decision to hire Hurd, a person who didn't get anything
done in HP, except that all the qualified personnel left, very bad thing for
a technology company. Not something that you or me would put in our CVs.

Is Ellison going down the same path as Ballmer?:
"When there is criticism inside the company, kick the critics out, hire only
yes-men instead and do not change anything, because you know that you are
always right!"

I do know that Ellison is a greedy man, licensing prices for small
installations is absurd and even more absurd for development tools and that
means that there are very small amount of new Oracle users (or none) at any
given time. No new users -> no future in the long term (10-30 years).

Is Ellison in the "steal everything you can and run"-phase in Oracle? Long
term policy seems to be non-existent.

Well, we live interesting times.

I'd see it as a sliding scale of solutions for some problems and some
situations. The company I work for, uses open source whenever we can and we
have been mostly happy of this decision. Immediate major impact on license
administration: We haven't one. Or license fees.

On the other hand, the amount of experience and knowledge needed to operate
is somewhat higher than commercial products, many products do the job but
aren't very user friendly or fine-tuned. That's a major cost sometimes,
fortunately not too often. Most of this is internal, our clients have no
idea what tools we are using and we are not advertising those either, unless
someone asks.

We use often Apache, PHP, Tomcat and some DB, often MySQL as databases
mostly are very small, combination that's easy to apply on whatever platform
you like to use.

But I do agree on that that most PHBs read too many magazines without any
source criticism. Especially if those are glossy high profile magazines for
"top management".

Unfortunately, more often than not, that's the only thing that happens.

It helps anyway, I have to admit that.

--
Tuomas - VWs: '63 typ14, '65 typ34 & '61 typ2

On Sep 10, 3:28*am, Tuomas <ho... (AT) lut (DOT) fi> wrote:
What do you do when the community goes away?

The product may be good, but the developers and support staff who put
out products based on it may not be.

I was at a social event recently, and a dentist asked me if I could
help him back up his application data (his office was next door).
Pretty cool app, image processing of dental x-rays. I poked around,
and eventually found a user screen for backups, which included some
simple examples like c:\mysql\data (or whatever). The dentist was
convinced there should be some image files around somewhere, but I
ventured a guess that they must be in the db somewhere, since the only
image files seemed to be from his previous app, which is also running
on this laptop. Yes, two image processing apps concurrent on this
laptop. Anyways, not remembering what little I've seen about mysql, I
eventually figured out where on the network the database was, and
showed him how to use the app to back it up, and helped him make some
redundancy there - hadn't been backed up since April. Now, I'm sure
the support people he talked to before this were competent enough, and
the backup seemed helpful enough as programmed, but only if you have a
certain techie viewpoint - I'm guessing the idea of a network involved
didn't make it to the support person. A couple years down the road?
I have severe doubts.

I have the idea that for this size product, there is just a continuous
effort, and since the deadline is arbitrary, stuff either makes it or
doesn't. The shoddiness comes in by giving cross-platform testing
short shrift, and perhaps an inbuilt issue of the least experienced
developers given the most pedestrian work.

True enough.

This cuts in all directions, of course.

The big question for me is, why wasn't this obvious from the
beginning? I know I've expressed doubts across century boundaries
over the longevity of any open source project.

And be loudmouths too.

In a land of forks, the man with the knife is king.

A CEO's idea of a bad thing, a shareholder's idea of a bad thing, and
a techies idea of a bad thing... make a Venn diagram, the first two
will overlap quite a bit.

This is true, can't help but wonder if it is unavoidable for companies
of that size. If you don't have a strong leader, you lurch around and
fall down.

True enough for SMB, but look at the shareholder docs, and share
prices - yes, that is short term, but there is plenty of growth for
the forseeable future, and even with the current economy, Oracle has
chugged along. Exadata? $300K to start, riiiiight. But, what if 18
months along the price falls by an order of magnitude? What db2
could compete with a sparxadata?

Here, I think you are waaaaaaay underestimating Larry. All along, if
he's made mistakes (aside from the purely greedy and pee-pee ones),
they've been for being too far ahead of the curve.

Yes, we do.

Maybe my view is too skewed, but I see an order of magnitude greater
costs.

Nothing new, ancient when Scott Adams started to make fun of it.

Yeah, glad I don't have one of those yellee jobs. Bad enough being in
earshot of a yeller.

That's impressive. Any ghia pix online? At one point I had '68 and
'78 transporters, and my neighbor had a crew-cab, made for
entertaining parking in front of my house.

jg
--
@home.com is bogus.
"You're killing us Larry!" - Screaming bedbugs in mattress comercial.

Mladen Gogala <no (AT) email (DOT) here.invalid> writes:

Only if you are big enough that yelling means the company will act.
--
Galen Boyer

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On Fri, 10 Sep 2010 15:42:58 -0400, galen_boyer wrote:

No, I just feel better after yelling a someone. It's sort of a therapy.



--
http://mgogala.byethost5.com

On Sep 13, 1:36*am, Tuomas <ho... (AT) lut (DOT) fi> wrote:

Can't say as I agree with this. The further back you go, the worse
the hype. The worst I saw was late-'80s, I was with a company that
lost out to Oracle at a site - but Oracle was so much worse than RMS
files in numeric storage, they severely underestimated the increased
hardware requirements, so Oracle wound up having to buy more disk for
the customer. And disk for VAX was very expensive then. Wasn't too
long after that I decided their marketing is a machine, adapt to it or
die. Can't say as I've heard of Oracle buying anything for a
dissatisfied customer in the last 20 years.

Every OpenWorld (or equivalent) some people say they won't go because
they saw too much hype at the last one - I specifically remember
people I worked with saying that 15 and 10 years ago. Even with Oak
Table presentations now, can you believe it? Revel in the hype there,
it's fun! Teri Nunn, woo-hoo!

jg
--
@home.com is bogus.
http://infoworld.com/t/intellectual-...ious-evils-359

On 10/09/10 20:19, joel garry wrote:
Even then you have the option to learn it yourself, i.e. increase knowledge.
It's a real PITA, I have admit that. But it's possible.

Regarding to MySQL (or forks of it), I don't find it very probable option,
the developers have already started a new product, MariaDB and it seems that
it will replace MySQL in many distributions as Oracle isn't considered as
reliable partner.

Currently it also seems that it will be a drop-in replacement of MySQL, so
it sholdn't generate any problems.

We'll see, this is a topic which generates a lot of discussion everywhere,
also here. (Sorry, but I didn't find c.d.o.s.discussion -group, does one exist?)

--snipp--

From the experience or as a vision?

Our company is now about 10 years old (most people have much longer
experience) and we haven't had such yet. Maybe it will come, who knows.

--
Tuomas - '63 typ14, '65 typ34 & '61 typ2