Oracle XE production ready

Oracle just announced the first production release of Oracle XE for both Linux and Windows (no Solaris version yet).

Quick recap what Oracle XE is;
Small footprint Oracle database, RPM based installation, almost all the features of Oracle SE, does lack the JDK, comes with Application Express (formaly HTMLDB) pre-packaged and ready to use.
However limited to the use of 1 CPU, 1 Gb memory and 4Gb user tablespace.

Just installed it on my Fedora Core 4 workstation at work, works perfectly so far.
There is also an XE client rpm available, lets hope they package up the instant client as an RPM as well.

Update
Oracle XE doesn't have os auth enabled by default, to allow the use of the normal ops$ users issue this command in sqlplus

alter system set os_authent_prefix=ops$ scope=spfile;
shutdown immediate;
startup

Portable Solaris #2

Got around to updating my Dell laptop to the latest Nevada build of OpenSolaris (build 33).
Things have improved a lot since b27, things like improvements to make the installation process faster, wifisupport now included in the base distro and the usual general packet updates.
A few really annoying things though.

X (Xsun?) ran in widescreen mode during the installation but defaulted back to 640x480 (Xorg?) at first boot.

The Centrino wireless module is not included as default, this is probably due to a licensing issue.

The Broadcom BCF driver is not included as default, probably also a licensing issue.

MySQL is included. WHY? What happened to PostgreSQL?
Anyway, fixing these small hickups it runs great. It runs really great. Performance is terrific. Configured my ZFS pool... sweeet. :)

The history behind the Sun Enterprise 10000

Had a bit of an argument with a guy on IRC. He was claiming that Cray/SGI did all the research and RnD behind the Sun Enterprise 1000 and that Sun just OEM'd it.
Not exactly true, Sun did not create the starfire themselves tho.

Read the real story here.

Postgres by Sun

Sun have released PostgreSQL 8.1.2 beta packages for Solaris 10/sparc, compiled with their nifty compiler and probably got a few nice tweaks in it. I haven't had time to look at the package build scripts yet.
Would be interesting to compare Sun PG package against the plain gcc compiled tarball version.

Now where did I put my Fire 6900 with those fc-al arrays so I can test this properly :)

http://pgfoundry.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=643

And oh yes, seems like Oracle XE is getting closer to a production release. The Windows versions was just released as a "pre-production" release and they have renamed HTMLDB to "Application Express" or AE for short. It is a better name than HTMLDB, but far from good.

OpenBSD on the shoe box

Got bored the other day after work and decided to try out the latest release of OpenBSD on my old VIA C3 based ITX shoe box sized PC. PXE booted the install from my Solaris box. I must admit I do love the OpenBSD install process, very plain and simple shell script to do the obvious things. Partition/slice the disk, set root password etc. In one way I also like anaconda (the centos/fedora/etc installer) but compared to the simple process in OpenBSD anaconda tends to feel very bloated.
The obsd install process has been the same for as long as I can remember, nothing new added simply because nothing needs to be added. The default install without X is about 400Megs, isn't that cool. However to get a useful system you do need a handful more packages like a better ftp client, screen, some dev tools like autoconf/automake/bison and if you're not that comfortable with ksh you probably want to add bash. I stayed with ksh just for the heck of it :-)
After first bootup the system has about 15 processes running. Compare that to Solaris or CentOS, perhaps in way that is like comparing apples and pears. But I like it. Userland just feels right in some way, the obsd team has really managed to optimize things to the best without adding to much "bloat".
Although the obsd FAQ suggests against I of course recompiled the kernel (just so I could have my own "tag" when hitting 'uname -a' instead of the boring "GENERIC".

OpenBSD elmer.local. 3.8 ELMER#0 i386

Now I just need to drop by PC-World tomorrow to buy a quieter fan so I can stick the box under my desk and leave it on all the time as a torrent-slave or something.

Oh btw, the reason I finally was able to hook up the ITX box was because I bought a small ADSL router (Linksys WAG54GS, Linux based none the less) the other day. Didn't have a switch in the UK, probably have 5 of them stashed in storage in Sweden :/