MacLochlainns Weblog

In prior years a daily update from Open World was possible, but this year my schedule was too full to support it. This is my compendium of thoughts about MySQL Connect, JavaOne, and Open World 2012.

MySQL Connect was great – good sessions re-enforcing the positive investments Oracle is making in the product. I’ll leave to others to qualify changes in what elements of technology are opened or closed along the road to a better MySQL. The announcement of Connector/Python 1.0 GA on Saturday was great news and as a community we owe a lot to Greet Vanderkelen.

NoSQL is a hot topic along with using JSON objects and it was interesting hearing of some unequal testing paradigms to position non-Oracle solutions to be “better” than Oracle solutions. Naturally, the MongoDB was the elephant in the room during those conversations. Some of the discussions seemed more like political rants than technical dialog. A great spot to start with NoSQL and JSON would be downloading Oracle’s MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate.

There were also more PostgreSQL conversations this year and fairly accurate comparisons between it and Oracle or MySQL from folks. It certainly looks like it may gain more ground.

Java 7 is awesome, and my favorite feature is clearly NIO2, reinforced at JavaOne. NIO2 brings static methods to interactions with external directory and file sources. It removes directories from the files class, which is long overdue. The nature of those static methods also happen to fit within the definition of Java code that lives inside the Oracle database and gives me a whole host of thoughts about potential in Oracle Database 12c.

Larry Ellison’s keynote was impressive because it gives us a clear vision of Oracle’s direction and Duncan Davies captured the keynote well in his blog. The continued presence of Red Hat and VMWare offers interesting reality checks to their key contributions to world wide implementation of the Oracle technical stack.

Issues that seem most critical to those I’ve chatted with are storage, security, tools, and development languages. A nice update on security can be found in the new edition of Hacking Exposed 7: Network Security Secrets & Solutions (7^th Edition).

On the forthcoming Oracle 12c release, Information Week just released a good summary view. The introduction of the R programming language on the Exadata Server leads me to wonder about what uses may magically appears in Oracle Enterprise Manager down the road. The TIOBE Index for September 2012 doesn’t list the R language in the top 20 programming languages but there’s always the future. No mention of Erlang programming language at any of the conferences that I caught but it’s inevitably on the horizon as application servers evolve.

Now we wait for the Oracle Database 12c release, which looks like something in the very short term. Perhaps right after the holidays …