Ken Jacobs a great advocate of the database user communities

Ken Jacobs has been a fantastic advocate of the Oracle and MySQL user communites.  I met Ken on the board of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG).  While Ken was the board liasson on the IOUG board, he was always supporting the Oracle user groups and made very important contributions throughout his time on the board and afterwards.  After serving time on the board, Ken was still always available and continued to be a great resource to the user community.

Ken continued his important contributions in the open source community through his work with InnoDB and MySQL.

Ken thank you for always being there.  Your contributions made a big difference and continue to be felt today. I was very disappointed that Ken will no longer be serving in role with InnoDB, MySQL and Open Source.

Take care and thanks for all the great memories.  Your selfless efforts and friendship will always be appreciated.

Best wishes in all your future endeavors.

New Things to Look at: OEM Grid Control with MySQL Plug-in

My customers tell me Oracle is winning the war with the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) as the tool of choice for managing the Oracle Infrastructure across multiple tiers. With Oracle 11g, Oracle will be adding more RAC integration/functionality into the middle-tier with OEM. Part of the power of OEM is that it manages Oracle Database Servers, Application Servers, Services, Applications and the environment surrounding the Oracle Infrastructure.

OEM provides a number of plug-ins so I need to look into how having OEM monitor and manage MySQL with the OEM MySQL Plug-in. OEM also provides plug-ins for monitoring other database servers as well as other application servers. The capability to manage multiple tiers of heterogenous software is some very serious functionality. So seeing how well it manages MySQL is going to be fun.

New Things to Look at: InnoDB Plug-in

Just about every week I am asked by customers what storage engine they should be using. As well as, what storage engine should we be paying attention to in the future (i.e. Falcon, Maria, InnoDB, etc.).

It's finally time to start looking very seriously at the InnoDB plug-in. It's in the final beta releases while Maria and Falcon are still in alpha stage. The really nice thing about the InnoDB storage engine is it works very similar to how the Oracle works with a database buffer cache, redo log cache and undo data. It's always very easy for me to explain how InnoDB works to Oracle DBAs. There is also an InnoDB Hot Backup utility that I always hear positive things from customers using it.

I will be following with my thoughts and impressions of the Oracle InnoDB Plug-in.

New Things to Look: Oracle SQL Developer with MySQL

GUI Interfaces to use with MySQL

When meeting with MySQL customers I always get asked about GUI interfaces.

1. I am always asked, what GUI to you recommend with MySQL? Two of the most popular are SQLYog and Navicat for MySQL customers.

Looking at Oracle SQL Developer

I think it is time to see how well SQL Developer works with MySQL. Oracle's SQL Developer has matured into a very nice tool and its free. I also want to see how well it migrates objects between MySQL and Oracle databases. SQL Developer has a lot of very cool functionality and all the interfaces are well designed. SQL Developer is also a Java application so you have the same look and feel on Linux, Mac OS and Windows.

MySQL and Oracle: Top 10 things I love about them

Today's Competitive Global Economy Environment for DBAs
With today's competitive environments, the more marketable you are the better. Being flexible and being able to support different solutions is very important. Environments surrounding databases are getting more complex, so increasing your expertise in different areas is important. There are a lot of options with application servers, storage, data warehousing, high availability, etc. Another strong skill combination is Oracle and MySQL. Oracle is the largest database vendor and MySQL is the fastest growing so you are going to see both a lot in the future so why not be able to support both.

What I love about MySQL
I've spent the last two years working with open source and MySQL. It's been two of my coolest years in technology. My top ten things I love about MySQL:

1. In working with MySQL customers their is a lot of innovation and think out of the box mentality.
2. MySQL environments use a lot of different software and tools. Shell scripting, perl scripts, awk, sed all remind me of the Oracle 7 environments which were a lot of fun to work in. Being very strong with Linux/Unix and the tools makes you a more marketable MySQL DBA.
3. MySQL surrounding software such as Apache, JBoss, Memcache, Cacti, Nagios, Mon, phpMyAdmin, PHP, etc. makes it a fun environment for the technical junkie.
4. MySQL's ability to leverage the power of the Internet is incredible to be a part of.
5. The open software environment that is all about contribuing to the greater good, sharing knowledge so everybody grows and mass collaboration is incredible powerful. Its fun to be part of the wave.
6. The MySQL mentality has been one of the richest experiences of my life. Everybody being tied in virtually, knowing my peers in Germany, Sweden and all over the world as well as my peers in the US has make it fantastic to be part of a company that really understands how to function as a "team" in a global econony.
7. The MySQL environment of we are a team, we all work together, share and work to accomplish the goals of the team and the company. MySQL is one of the few companies that can really get everyone working together and motivated towards a common goal.
8. Learning the power of MySQL and why more new MySQL database servers are being created than all the proprietary vendors combined.
9. MySQL's empowering of the individual employee to accomplish great things. Where the emphasis is that the individual employee really does matter.
   
10. The incredible vision of the leaders of MySQL and the absolutely fantastic people within the MySQL teams.
    

What I love about Oracle
I've spent spent the last 20 years working with Oracle (RAC, Data Guard, Streams, backup/recovery, performance tuning, Oracle Fusion Middleware (SOA, BPEL, Web Services, XML, Oracle Business Rules, JDeveloper). My top ten things I love about Oracle products:

1. The database server is an aircraft carrier solution with a task force. :) When you have complex problems to solve Oracle has powerful tools to solve them.
2. Oracle RAC is a very robust, scalable clustered solution that is great to work with.
3. Oracle Streams while complex allows you to solve tons of data sharing problems.
4. Oracle Fusion Middleware offers a great middle-tier enterprise solution for large companies. Working with BPEL, SOA, Web Services, XML, etc. is like being a kid in a candy store.
   
5. I've just flat out loved working with Oracle products and Oracle environments.
   
6. The fantastic people I've met in Oracle user groups, the list is endless.
7. The incredibly dedicated people I've met at Oracle that work in all the different product groups.
8. Oracle's done a great job of integrating organizations they've purchased and achieving their visions.
9. I've always had fun performance tuning Oracle multi-tiered architectures. Maybe this is an incurable disease (ha ha).
10. I've always found the more I've learned about Oracle products the more money I've been able to make (always a good thing). My personal investment in Oracle technology has always paid off.
    

Oracle and MySQL - A winning team

Oracle is definitely the Mercedes Benz of database servers. We can debate the merits of different databases but in terms of the most features, Oracle definitely stands alone. Excellent high availability features such as RAC, Data Guard and Streams offer excellent enterprise solutions. So for running enterprise business applications such as PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and the Oracle EBusiness Suite the Oracle Database Server is in a class by itself.

When you look at all the applications running in an organization, what percentage are enterprise class applications that require an Oracle database server. I would say the major percentage of applications running in an organization do not need an enterprise database server like Oracle. This is where MySQL plays nice. Heterogeneous environments running Oracle and MySQL will run at a fraction of the costs of running Oracle-SQL Server, Oracle -DB2 or SQL Server-DB2. Also MySQL being a friendly open source company does not bring in the religious issues Oracle DBAs would have with SQL Server or DB2. Some examples of how Oracle and MySQL would be a cost effective solution:

• Greatly reduced software costs. For example backup and recovery is free in Oracle (Recovery Manager - RMAN). In a heterogeneous environment, a company can buy a great online backup solution such as InnoDB Hot Backup that is roughly $1000 per server. If running Oracle with SQL Server or DB2 the 3rd party backup solutions or vendor add-ons can easily run into six figures.
• If an organization has already purchased Oracle Grid Control it would be very easy to have Oracle Grid Control monitor MySQL database servers.
• Oracle SQL Developer could easily support MySQL database environments. Someone told me they got Oracle's SQL Developer to hook into MySQL easily. I'll have to try and find time to test this.
  
• Oracle JDeveloper can deploy into JBoss environments and other open source application servers.
• Oracle's stored procedure language PL/SQL is very close in syntax to MySQL's stored routine language. You could easily write a parser in Perl that would address most of the syntax differences.
  

If I could ask Larry one question it would be if he regrets not trying to go after MySQL. I wonder if the Oracle acquisition team was so focused on the business applications market they did not look into the database market as closely as they should have. If Oracle had purchased MySQL could a strategy have been developed to use MySQL to keep SQL Server out of the lower end database market. Would the purchase price of MySQL have generated a significant ROI to justify the purchase by being able to help keep SQL Server out of Oracle's lower end market? Hmmm. Too bad, I guess we'll never know.