Oracle Announced the Outline Strategy on Integration of Sun

Oracle has announced  the outline strategy and its commitment  on Sun Microsystems integration into Oracle. It was in a Webcast and for those who missed it, could get it from the website.

This is the link from Oracle website.

We already noticed some additions on links in the Oracle Technology Website (http://otn.oracle.com) which includes newly added Sun's technology portfolios.

EU Commission Approval of Sun Microsystems Acquisition by Oracle: Lesson Learned

Yesterday James A. Goosling, the founder of Java platform, put a picture in his blog: "So long, old friend...".
After the EU Commission approved Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) acquisition by Oracle Corp (NASDAQ: ORCL), Oracle expects that Russia and China will also accept it. The main foreseen obstacle to the agreement was the EU Commission approval. Now that it has been approved, the acquisition is expected to go smoothly.

Some people began speculating on the fate of open source projects, which nurtured by Sun, yet they don't believe that Oracle will give enough support for those open source projects. One high profile fear was from Monty Widenius, the founder of MySQL, which after selling the company to Sun left MySQL (the company), and forked a new database project: MariaDB. He campaigned to prevent the acquisition of MySQL by Oracle. Now we see the result, it seems that he lose the campaign. Some voices also speculate about the fate of OpenOffice, Glassfish, etc after the acquisition.

This matter once again prove: "a technology is good, but we also need to make money". Of course Sun Microsystems is not the first to go down, there were a lot of dead carcasses of open source companies ended up acquired by profitable commercial companies that sell their proprietary products.

Sun is highly respectable company, which produced a lot of very good products. All hail respect to the company that bred the Java technology and platform, which took over the world. Yet, after this high profile achievement, the company still need to make money to bring value to the shareholders.

Lesson Learned: Companies Need To Make Money In Order To Sustain the Business

I guess this serves as reminder for those people (including me) who wants to make a company based on sophisticated technology, either open source or closed source; take note, when we start a company, we also need to make money.

Now that Wikipedia site had grown that big, the non-profit model required it to campaign for more money to sustain its operation.

No INNER JOINs in Oracle 8i

Yesterday we encountered a problem when testing an already working version of our web application. The application works well in the development environment. When we move the application to hit the production database, it throws an exception.
The application uses Hibernate as its persistence manager. Our team has been hassled for quite some times, until one of our colleagues found out that the query produced by Hibernate was not runnable from Oracle's console. Digging further we found out that the database in production used an older version, the Oracle 8i. Oracle 8i does not support INNER JOIN syntax, therefore it rejects the query produced by Hibernate.
It came across my mind that we should change the dialect. If 8i does not support what is running on 9i, then the developer of Hibernate should have put different dialects for them. This is found out to be true. There is org.hibernate.dialect. Oracle9Dialect for Oracle 9i databases, and org.hibernate.dialect.OracleDialect for older Oracle 8i databases.
After we change it to the correct dialect, the problem somehow is still there. After browsing for a while I eventually found out that we also need to change the query translator to the older version, org.hibernate.class.ClassicQueryTranslator.
Then the application is working in the production database. Voila! It works!

Oracle Acquired Tangosol

Last year it was TimesTen and SleepyCat (BerkeleyDB).
This year it is Tangosol.
Who will be the next?

This database giant acquired Tangosol (vendor of Coherence data cache which has been used in many large financials), adding to its "Extreme Transaction Processing" initiative.

http://go.techtarget.com/r/1194471/5981609
http://www.oracle.com/tangosol/index.html