Pythian Group

PYTHIAN NEWS UPDATE

For the second year in a row, Pythian is proud to be named to the prestigious Profit 200 Ranking of Canada’s Fastest Growing Companies.

Ranking Canada’s Fastest-Growing Companies by five-year revenue growth, the PROFIT 200 profiles the country’s most successful growth companies. Published in the Summer issue of PROFIT and online at PROFITguide.com, the PROFIT 200 is Canada’s largest annual celebration of entrepreneurial achievement.

Pythian is also happy to announce the official opening of our Toronto, Canada office and the expansion of our local GTA team to include Regional Sales Director, Colin Thompson (previously with Oracle).

Well the last busy day here in The Big Apple again a number of very good technical talks. It is not often that the developer of a key piece of a technology gives an intro talk so I grasped it when it came up. Robert Haas gave a very informative talk on the theory behind WAL (Write Ahead Logging) and how it is implemented on PostgreSQL as compared to other DBs. His talk never ventured into the neither world of techno-babel but gave just enough of the technical side to get the understanding out. In the second part of his talk Robert focused on a introduction of the ‘Buzz’ words of WAL that one might have to deal with. This was both very entertaining and armed one with a real understanding of WAL.

I next sat in on ‘Little Jim’ Mlodgenski’s ‘Scaling with GridSQL’ talk. Another great technical talk that did not get bogged down in little details. Jim illustrated how GridSQL leverages the Power of Nodes to create a scalable parallel query data ware-house by creating a controller that will split off most of a large query to the different nodes in a cluster take the results from these nodes and then applies the final touches. Jim clearly demonstrated that with simple aggregation queries one seen a linear gains in performance for each node added to the cluster. With more complex queries there was an exponential gain for the first few nodes but one sees a fall of after only 8. Jim was very open about the pitfalls of this form of scaling (eg backup can be problematic) but it a very good solution for quick scalable data-ware housing.

The final talk of the conference was Jake Luciani’s talk comparing Apache’s Casandra to PostgreSQL was a very good introduction to this rather novel No-SQL DB. Think of a ring of peer to peer hash tables that work together to scale, provide no single point of failure, automate replication and implement tunable consistency. Its basic concept is the opposite or the RDBMS ‘Store Many! Read Once’ which makes some sense when used in such situations as large blogs, photo libraries or even diverse catalogs. Jake also introduced us to something he called CQL a query language for thew No-SQL DB

The conference ended with one of the better open forums I have attended I am sure next year will be much better.

Hopefully I will be able to make it next year as well

I’m looking forward to traveling to San Jose for this year’s MySQL Conference. If there’s anything that can trump the drama of conf two years ago, where we observed how Sun would handle its new property, and then the drama of last year, where we observed how Oracle would handle the pending acquisition, it’s going to be the drama around this one — the first MySQLConf since the Oracle/Sun merger has been finalized and approved.

I think there is some finality to the changing of the guard this time, since there aren’t really that many companies that could conceivably swallow up Oracle itself! (Maybe I shouldn’t say that — next thing you know they’ll spin it off heh.) But regardless, I am looking forward to getting to know Edward Screven and getting a sense from the keynote and other communications exactly what he’s planning to … DO … with MySQL.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Here’s what Pythian is cooking up for MySQL Conference this year.

Monday, April 12

8:30am: Get out of bed lazy bones and head to Ballroom B

… because you’re going to want to attend Sheeri K. Cabral‘s tutorial in two parts:

MySQL Configuration Options and Files: Basic MySQL Variables (Part 1)

Read the rest of this entry . . .

The all new OPN Specialized Program was officially launched on the 2nd of December, 2009. The very next day, we became one of the first OPN Specialized Platinum level partners. Maybe the very first!

This achievement took us lots of efforts before the launch to get recognized as one of the first platinum level partners but we’ve made it through. Now, we are working on updating all of our specialization areas. It’s still a bit cloudy on how to navigate in the new OPN Specialized interface but I guess in these days of cloud computing cloudiness is becoming a norm, especially early on!

The OPN Specialized Program was designed as the result of numerous acquisitions completed recently and over time the old Oracle Partners Network structure couldn’t accommodate all the different kinds of partnerships that Oracle inherited. The Oracle/Sun merger was going to make a tough situation untenable, and as a result Oracle designed OPN Specialized to simplify the search of a partner for Oracle internal staff and Oracle customers on one hand while it also lets partners distinguish themselves amongst the rest by technical areas and types of services and products. Congratulations and good job to the OPN group at Oracle for what we at Pythian believe is a much improved vision and structure for partnering with the vibrant Oracle ecosystem.

Our VP, Biz Dev and Strategic Alliances, Peter Ling, should take all blame for this as he’s been working on this non-stop. Well done Pete — you are a rock star, indeed

More details to come as we go through available options and build our profile so stay tuned — lots to learn still.

Computer Associates has sold its Ingres database to a private equity firm, Garnett & Helfrich Capital. The new owners of the database have reaffirmed their committment to making Ingres open source, and are planning to earn revenue from support contracts and other related services.

Read more at Reuters.com.

Earlier this week, Oracle announced that it would release a free for production use version of its database product, limited to 4G in the database, 1G of ram and a single CPU. Today, the four major open source DBMS vendors (MySQL, Postgres, Firebird, and Sleepycat) unanimously rejected Oracle’s new free-to-use Express Edition beta, claiming that users will not accept the capacity limits of the new oracle product.

Read more at ZDNet.

MySQL AB,”developer of the world’s most popular open source database” has released today, the production versionof MySQL 5.0, its most important upgrade in ten years. The 5.0 version provides new enterprise database features such as stored procedures, triggers, views and cursors. More and more software vendors now want to certify their products with MySQL. MySQL 5.0 is already available for the major platforms (Linux, IBM AIX 5L,Solaris, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Windows).

Read more at the following :

ComputerWorld

mySQL.com

Oracle has now issued its latest quarterly security patch (Oct/2005) which is geared at packaging several security issues into one very large patch, thus making it easier for customers to keep track of where they are with respect to having their Oracle products secured. Oracle states that it plans to release them “on the Tuesday closest to the 15th day of January, April, July and October”.

These patches provide fixes not only to Oracle databases, but also to several other products (Reports, pL/SQL, etc.). Everyone must keep track of these very important patches.

As the Oracle products evolve, so does the tracking of bug fixes, which is a very good thing.

Read more at the following :

Media coverage at vnunet.com
Oracle Oct/2005 Security Patch
Oracle – Security Alerts

Oracle, currently in the process of acquiring the leading CRM (“Customer Relationship Management”) vendor, Siebel, is seeing some form of competition from SAP, who is offering to US companies running Siebel, a credit of up to 75% of their existing Siebel software licensing fees toward the licensing of SAP’s comparable CRM products.

SAP is offering a program called “Safe Passage Program” to Siebel customers who are uncertain about Oracle’s pending acquisition of Siebel. The program is aimed at providing, among other things, the 75% credit and also conversion tools, implementation methodologies and services from SAP and its partners to help ensure a smooth transition to my “SAP CRM”.

We’ll anxiously wait to see how many of Siebel customers went to Oracle and how many went to SAP…

Read more at the following:

SAP Safe Passage home
SAP – Press release
Media coverage at ZDNet