Latest News from Oracle Developer's Journal

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Plug-in for BIG-IP LTM Beta

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

If you’re an OEM user and an F5 customer, we’ve got an updated version of the OEM Grid Control Plug-in for BIG-IP in beta testing right now. It’s been in limited beta for a while, but we wanted to make certain that both TMOS 9.x and 10.x were supported before we talked about it publicly. The plug-in, jointly developed by F5 and Oracle, allows you to monitor your BIG-IP like any other infrastructure in the Oracle Enterprise Manager, and if you’re part of the beta program, you can download the source to see how the developers did it too! No, I wasn’t on the dev team for this one, there just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to play with all the toys. Though large pieces of it are based upon my Java Wrappers for iControl, so I can claim a little bit of the fun ;-).

How Can You Move Apps Between Private and Public Clouds?

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:00:00 EST

Three of the chattiest executives on God’s green earth were struck suddenly speechless when the Q&A segment of their VCE coalition announcement produced a straight forward question from customer Joseph Hooks. Question: “Will we be able to seamlessly move (applications) between in-house vblocks (private clouds) and service provider vblocks (public clouds)?”

Oracle Upgrades its Open Source Database

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:15:00 EST

Berkeley DB Java Edition is a transactional storage engine for key-value pairs written entirely in Java that can be deployed as an embedded or so-called edge database, so developers can build applications that don’t need any manual administration. It now includes new replication features for high availability and scalability and performance improvements for highly concurrent applications.

View Slide Deck to Oracle's Keynote at 4th Cloud Expo

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:00:00 EST

The reality is that technology CEOs - least of all flamboyant ones - aren't in the trenches getting things to work for customers, and Wang's nuts-and-bolts presentation was meant to re-assure anyone who was listening that the company will support all types of cloud initiatives. Meanwhile, Ellison updated his remarks a bit at the company's recent OracleWorld in San Francisco, discussing Fusion and how having a single cloud provider (such as Oracle) has its advantages.

News @ VordelWorld

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:51:00 EST

A full schedule today at VordelWorld with talks by Amazon, CA, Oracle, and others - not to mention Vordel product training.

ODTUG Down Under – More ACEs than a Pack of Cards

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:50:00 EST

Regular readers already know that ODTUG in conjunction with Oracle Technology Network has invited a number of Oracle ACEs and ACE Directors to present down under. ODTUG has teamed with AUSOUG to give these world recognized presenters (in fact in all cases world award winning speakers) full day slots at the conference that starts next week.

Zeus to Manage the Cloud

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EDT

Zeus Technology, the Anglo-American concern whose web server ran 3% of the world’s web sites back before the dot.com bubble burst, third in the race behind Apache and Microsoft, was asking around among CIOs, IT director and senior IT managers at large organizations and came to find out that although 75% of them, give or take, are either in the cloud or soon will be, only 27% have a solution in place to manage it and so are basically flying without a net.

Thanks Everyone

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:15:00 EDT

First, and friend par excellence, is Jeff Blackwell of SalesPractice.com. Even though we don’t know each other well, he fell in love with Buying Facilitation® and my decision facilitation model quite a while ago, believing that Buying Facilitation® completes the sales model – with integrity. He has been tirelessly, and obnoxiously (smile) pitching me and the new book daily for months. He humbles me. My friend Jill has been my sounding board, my mother, my friend, and my coach. Without her, I might have had a different book – certainly be a different person.

Contributing to FOSS: A Business Perspective

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:30:00 EDT

Although my presentation focused on individual contributions, these lessons also apply to how businesses benefit by contributing to FOSS. When a business approaches a project they should attempt to build a symbiotic relationship with the community. Such a relationship involves following the established community procedures so that your contributions can be easily adopted by the project. Useful scripts and code developments made within the company that can be useful to the greater public should be contributed back and packaging of popular software within the company can be submitted for inclusion and use by the greater community. Testing and bug reporting based on experience using FOSS on their production (or development) systems can provide important information for FOSS developers about the health and status of their projects.

Welcome to The Managing FOSS for Business Results Blog

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:15:00 EDT

This blog is part of a new educational initiative to foster a deeper understanding of the capabilities and issues involved with administering FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) to deliver concrete business benefits. Although our subject will sometimes become technical, we will strive to address the business benefits at the beginning of each and every post. Therefore, we are confident that this blog will prove interesting and understandable to a broad variety of leaders, managers, and technicians.

Objectivity Inc. Named “Silver Sponsor” of Cloud Computing Expo

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced that Objectivity, Inc., a provider of distributed, real-time data platforms, was named "Silver Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, which will take place on November 2 - 4, 2009 at the , Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California.

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 Is Done But the Challenge Begins!

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EDT

What can I say, Oracle OpenWorld 2009 was a great show all around. Professionally run, great companies, great exhibit areas, and exceptional presentations. The big surprise to me was seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger on stage with Larry. Which is a great segue into my first topic for my OOW09 notes on the show. The amazing Exadata 2 and the challenge presented to IBM. After Arnold left the stage, Larry made the comment "IBM, take the [Exadata challenge] and make our day. Oh, that is a different action hero, sorry."

Cloud Computing Is Two Things: Encapsulation and Abstraction

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:15:00 EDT

“Cloud Computing is two things: encapsulation and abstraction,” noted Barry X Lynn, CEO of 3Tera, at the 1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo. That is the main thing to remember he emphasized. After providing several definitions of Cloud Computing, he noted 3Tera’s – encapsulating applications into single entities and then abstracting them.

Oracle & Cloud Computing: Exclusive Q&A with SVP Richard Sarwal

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:15:00 EDT

"We believe that cloud is an important trend that we will support. We have two objectives. The first is to ensure that cloud computing is fully enterprise grade, meaning high performance, scalability, reliability, availability, security and standards-based for portability and interoperability. Second, we will support both public and private cloud computing in order to give customers choice," says Richard Sarwal, SVP Product Development for Oracle Enterprise Manager - and upcoming Keynote Speaker at SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Expo - in this Exclusive Q&A with Cloud Computing Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan.

Oracle’s Summit with EC Apparently Fails

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EDT

Oracle co-president Safra Catz met with the European Commission’s antitrust boss Neelie Kroes to try to negotiate Oracle’s way out from under the EC’s investigation into the anti-competitive issues of Oracle acquiring the European-created open source database MySQL if it takes over Sun. Apparently she failed.

Oracle Announces Oracle VM Storage Connect Program

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EDT

Continuing its commitment to work closely with partners to deliver complete, open, and integrated solutions to customers, Oracle today announced the Oracle VM Storage Connect Program and a preview of the planned Oracle® VM Storage Connect framework. The Oracle VM Storage Connect framework provides a storage discovery and provisioning Application Programming Interface (API) that is intended to greatly enhance the ease with which storage can be managed and provisioned in an Oracle VM environment.

Slides for JSF 2 Up on Slideshare

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:10:00 EDT

I've posted the slides for the talk that Andy Schwartz and I did at Oracle Open World up on Slideshare.

Check 'em out.

Oracle Announces Application Integration Architecture Release 2.5

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:00:00 EDT

Oracle today announced Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) Release 2.5, the most extensive Oracle AIA release to date with 10 new cross-industry Process Integration Packs (PIPs) and six new industry-specific PIPs, together with a growing library of more than 1,000 enterprise services and 100 enterprise objects.

Oracle Enhances Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:06:00 EDT

Extending the enterprise-wide Project Portfolio Management (PPM) capabilities of Oracle's Primavera product suite, Oracle today announced new releases of Oracle's Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management and Oracle's Primavera Contract Management. The new Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management 7.0 and Primavera Contract Management 13 releases provide significant usability, integration and collaboration enhancements.

Oracle Develops Trimble GeoManager Extension

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EDT

Trimble announced today that Oracle has developed an extension which allows Oracle Field Service Applications (part of Oracle E-Business Suite) users to add Trimble's GeoManager solution to create an enterprise-level intelligent scheduling and dispatching platform for field service organizations. The on-demand location-based features of GeoManager will allow organizations to improve fleet performance and the management of mobile workers and distributed assets.

Attunity Introduces ODR Solutions for Oracle Customers

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 EDT

Attunity Ltd., introduces today a set of solutions based on a new concept coined 'Operational Data Replication' (ODR), which is designed to enable the large market of Oracle customers to replicate data in real-time to and from Oracle databases, at an affordable price point.

MySQL’s Ex-CEO Goes to Bat for Oracle Deal

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:30:00 EDT

MySQL’s good-looking and now rich former CEO Marten Mickos asked the European Commission Thursday to rubberstamp Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, which is supposedly held up by EC concerns over MySQL’s destiny at the hands of Oracle. Mickos said in a letter to EC antitrust czarina Neelie Kroes that further delay and uncertainty will blunt MySQL’s competition edge, not to mention Sun’s.

Ingres Database 9.3 Aims at Competitors with Easy Migration Path

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 06:00:00 EDT

Ingres Corporation announced the availability of Ingres Database 9.3, the latest version of the company’s flagship open source database product. Ingres Database 9.3 offers easy migration from MySQL, as well as from proprietary databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and Sybase. Ingres Database 9.3 boasts a number of key features to help java application developers be more productive and is specifically designed to help meet the demands of a rapidly growing partner community with Liferay certification. Ingres Database 9.3 also highlights the importance community contributions play in the innovation of open source software by including features to the database engine that were added by its community members.

Cloud Computing Journal: Adobe to Deliver ColdFusion in the Cloud

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:30:00 EDT

Alagad announced it is collaborating with Adobe Systems to help develop a Cloud-based implementation of the Adobe ColdFusion software. The collaboration will enable customers to rapidly deploy and test ColdFusion 9 without installing or configuring the software on-premise. ColdFusion 9 is the latest release of the development technology for building dynamic websites and Internet applications. Alagad’s team worked with Adobe to create a private beta of ColdFusion 9 that can be deployed in minutes via Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Indiska Selects Oracle to Create Core Retail Platform

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:00:00 EDT

Swedish fashion and home furnishings retailer Indiska has selected a broad suite of Oracle Retail applications and Oracle Fusion Middleware components to create a core retail platform that will support its international expansion plans and long-term growth strategy. With over 80 stores in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, Indiska offers quality modern Bohemian-inspired women's fashion and home furnishings and remains committed to its founding principles of ethical and sustainable retailing.

Oracle to Buy HyperRoll Assets

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:45:00 EDT

Oracle says it’s going to acquire certain assets of HyperRoll, a developer of financial reporting acceleration software in Mountain View, California. HyperRoll’s software analyzes large quantities of financial data. Its customer base is largely retail and financial accounts. Oracle said the widgetry would let its customers report results quicker, with more confidence and lower compliance costs.

What’s Larry Gonna Do About This?

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EDT

Kickfire, the data warehouse start-up with its very own parallel-processing SQL chip – and the first low-end data warehouse play ever – has beefed up its MySQL Enterprise-based appliance so it’ll stretch to systems that are 5TB. Back in the spring when it started rolling its widgets out they were good for up to 3TB and started at $32,000, claiming to be the equivalent of a $250,000 proprietary system. The start-up has also beefed up its software with a 1.5 so-called “Photon” release that ups performance by running 95% of the queries through its SQL chip and makes its Data Manipulation Language (DML) 300% faster.

Zmanda Launches Cloud Backup Solution Optimized for the European Union

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EDT

ZCB is a simple GUI-based backup solution that allows Windows users to easily automate their backup and recovery process. This robust yet simple-to-use solution provides ongoing protection against disaster, user error and theft. Once ZCB is installed and the backup process is set using its simple scheduler, ZCB automatically backs up files, applications, databases, and networked devices to a storage cloud. The management console allows system administrators to schedule the extraction of backup data from live applications and the upload of backup archives to the storage cloud as independently scheduled operations, thus reducing the burden of backup operations on production applications and WAN bandwidth. ZCB can also be used to protect either physical or virtual machines. The backups are stored in a native format, giving users the option to access and reuse their files even without ZCB.

Omniture Measures First Retail Transaction on Facebook

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:00:00 EDT

Alvenda, which enables customers to shop inside Shoplets, or checkout-enabled storefronts, placed Shoplets on Facebook for a leading florist and gift retailer that allowed customers to shop without leaving the Facebook site. Using the Omniture solution for Facebook app measurement, Alvenda measured the retailer's transactions that occurred within Shoplets alongside all other online marketing data in a single dashboard. The integration between SiteCatalyst and Shoplets enables the leading florist and gift retailer to better understand Facebook users' engagement with the Shoplet application and to gain insight into the relationship between Facebook, site traffic and other online marketing campaigns such as traditional banner ads. The retailer can use that insight to make more informed, data-driven social media marketing decisions.

Oracle-Sun: IBM Reportedly Behind Delay

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:00:00 EDT

Well, well, well, a little bird points to IBM as gumming up the works with the European Commission so Oracle and Sun can’t close their deal. Oracle of course picked up Sun after IBM’s negotiations with Sun failed and Oracle made IBM the intended target of the proposed acquisition in an ad on the front page of the Wall Street Journal last week so the idea that IBM is whispering in the EC’s ear makes perfect sense. And IBM has plenty of practice using the European Commission to attack its enemies. Just ask Microsoft. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison claims the European Commission’s prolonged investigation of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun, which isn’t expected to finish much before the agency’s mid-January deadline, is costing Sun $100 million a month in revenues and a weakened revenue stream will impact how many employees Sun gets to keep if and when the acquisition is approved.

Trend Micro Endorses New 'Live Testing' Methodology Program

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:00:00 EDT

In a group test of industry-leading consumer and corporate security products' effectiveness against socially engineered malware, Trend Micro scored the best, proving again that the cloud-client layered-protection approach powered by the Trend Micro(TM) Smart Protection Network(TM) infrastructure out-performs competing solutions and provides the best possible malware protection available. The non-commissioned tests were independently conducted by NSS labs - no vendor sponsorship was involved.

EC Costing Sun $100M a Month: Ellison

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:00:00 EDT

The European Commission’s prolonged investigation of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun, which isn’t expected to finish much before the agency’s mid-January deadline, is costing Sun $100 million a month in revenues, according to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Ellison, who was interviewed on-stage after a Churchill Club dinner Monday evening by former Sun president and COO Ed Zander of all people, told the crowd, “The longer this takes, the more money Sun is going to lose, and that’s not good for anybody. We want to get this done to save as many jobs as possible.”

Oracle Named “Platinum Sponsor” of Cloud Computing Expo

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that Oracle, the world's leading supplier of software for information management and the world's second largest independent software company, was named "Platinum Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.cloudcomputingexpo.com), which will take place on November 2 - 4, 2009, Santa Clara, California. The event is expected to attract over 1,200 developers, engineers, architects, IT managers, and hardware and software professionals of every stripe.

Upgrading Oracle WebLogic Servers from 10.3 to 10.3.1

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:15:00 EDT

Recently we upgraded our Oracle WebLogic Servers from 10.3 to 10.3.1, and coincidentally migrated a JDeveloper ADF application 11g to 11gR1. ADF applications require a set of libraries that must be deployed to WLS before the ADF application can run, of which we completed successfully, or so we thought. This post documents a little trap for new players when configuring WLS and deployed applications.

On deploying our upgraded ADF 11gR1 application to our WLS 10.3.1 server with the updated ADF libraries, we hit an error on deployment from JDev. The logs showed the following results:

[08:54:26 AM] ----  Deployment started.  ----
[08:54:26 AM] Target platform is  (Weblogic 10.3).
[08:54:39 AM] Entering Target Selection Dialog
[08:54:55 AM] Retrieving existing application information
[08:54:55 AM] Running dependency analysis...
[08:54:55 AM] Building...
[08:54:59 AM] Deploying 4 profiles...
[08:54:59 AM] Wrote Archive Module to C:\JDeveloper\mywork\CR123\trunk\CommonViewController\deploy\CommonViewController.jar
[08:54:59 AM] Wrote Archive Module to C:\JDeveloper\mywork\CR123\trunk\CommonModel\deploy\CommonModel.jar
[08:54:59 AM] Wrote Web Application Module to C:\JDeveloper\mywork\CR123\trunk\ViewController\deploy\App_ViewController.war
[08:55:00 AM] Wrote Enterprise Application Module to C:\JDeveloper\mywork\CR123\trunk\deploy\App_application1.ear
[08:55:04 AM] Deploying Application...
[08:55:06 AM] [Deployer:149191]Operation 'deploy' on application 'App_application1' is initializing on 'ADFServer'
[08:55:06 AM] [Deployer:149193]Operation 'deploy' on application 'App_application1' has failed on 'ADFServer'
[08:55:06 AM] [Deployer:149034]An exception occurred for task [Deployer:149026]deploy application App_application1 on ADFServer.: [J2EE:160149]Error while processing library references. Unresolved application library references, defined in weblogic-application.xml: [Extension-Name: adf.oracle.domain, exact-match: false], [Extension-Name: oracle.jsp.next, exact-match: false]..
[08:55:06 AM] Weblogic Server Exception: weblogic.management.DeploymentException: [J2EE:160149]Error while processing library references. Unresolved application library references, defined in weblogic-application.xml: [Extension-Name: adf.oracle.domain, exact-match: false], [Extension-Name: oracle.jsp.next, exact-match: false].
[08:55:06 AM]   See server logs or server console for more details.
[08:55:06 AM] weblogic.management.DeploymentException: [J2EE:160149]Error while processing library references. Unresolved application library references, defined in weblogic-application.xml: [Extension-Name: adf.oracle.domain, exact-match: false], [Extension-Name: oracle.jsp.next, exact-match: false].
[08:55:06 AM] ####  Deployment incomplete.  ####
[08:55:06 AM] Deployment Failed

The last set of errors reveals that the server can't find the libraries that the deployed application are dependent on. To highlight them:

[08:55:06 AM] Weblogic Server Exception: weblogic.management.DeploymentException: [J2EE:160149]Error while processing library references. Unresolved application library references, defined in weblogic-application.xml: [Extension-Name: adf.oracle.domain, exact-match: false], [Extension-Name: oracle.jsp.next, exact-match: false].
[08:55:06 AM]   See server logs or server console for more details.
[08:55:06 AM] weblogic.management.DeploymentException: [J2EE:160149]Error while processing library references. Unresolved application library references, defined in weblogic-application.xml: [Extension-Name: adf.oracle.domain, exact-match: false], [Extension-Name: oracle.jsp.next, exact-match: false].

Note how WLS is stating it can't find adf.oracle.domain nor oracle.jsp.next.

This confused us because we could actually see them installed under the deployments tab in the WLS console. However the error in the end was a simple one on our part.

On installing the updated ADF libraries we installed them into the WLS AdminServer managed server. Yet on deploying our application, we chose to deploy the application to a separate WLS managed server called ADFServer (seen in the logs). For the application to find the ADF libraries, they needed to be installed into the ADFServer as well.

To fix this, one option is to head to the WLS console, locate the libraries in the Deployment node, and on selecting each library, under the Targets tab, ensure to allocate the libraries to the correct managed server. Alternatively your other option is to deploy your application to the WLS managed server where the libraries are targeted/installed.

Has Oracle Put Teradata in Play?

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:00:00 EDT

Teradata, NCR’s discarded data warehousing operation, has been M&A poison since it floated off two years ago because any potential acquirer would have had to pay back hundreds of millions of tax credits for the privilege of taking it over. That string is soon to expire and Oracle’s move Tuesday with its new Sun-based Exadata machine may inspire one of its rivals to move in on Teradata. HP’s NeoView data warehousing adventure has been a flop and HP CEO Mark Hurd used to run Teradata so it would be old home week.

Oracle Enhances Berkeley DB

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:00:00 EDT

Oracle, whose takeover of Sun has been delayed because the European Commission suspects it of harboring foul intentions toward MySQL, the popular open source database Sun bought, has enhanced the performance of its Berkeley DB embeddable databases (née SugarCat). There are new releases of both Oracle Berkeley DB and the more feature-rich Oracle Berkeley DB XML that offer faster processing with less expensive hardware.

Oracle To Jump Merger Gun with Sun-based Database Machine

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:15:00 EDT

Oracle is supposed today to announce “the world’s first” OLTP Database Machine based on what it calls FlashFire technology from Sun. Reportedly FlashFire is solid-state disk (SSD) technology. It’s Oracle’s way of thumbing its nose at the European Commission, whose investigation of the MySQL side of the proposed Oracle-Sun merger is holding up Oracle’s acquisition schedule and giving Sun rivals a bigger opportunity to run off more of Sun’s business. There’s a revelatory webcast set for Tuesday afternoon starring Oracle’s frustrated CEO Larry Ellison and Sun’s hardware chief John Fowler according to an invitation sent to the press on Sunday.

Oracle Announces New Financial Services Analytical Applications

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:00:00 EDT

Demonstrating its commitment to help financial services institutions grow profitably and optimize risk-adjusted performance, Oracle today announced a comprehensive and integrated suite of financial services analytical applications for enterprise performance management (EPM). Now more than ever, financial institutions and regulators are focused on the need to measure and meet performance objectives adjusted for risk, price products to reflect their true risk, and better understand how performance is impacted by threats to liquidity and capital adequacy.

Wipro Harnesses Oracle for SaaS Platform

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:15:00 EDT

Wipro Technologies, the global IT services arm of Wipro Ltd, says it’s going into the SaaS business with w-SaaS, a platform for rapid Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enablement of business applications using Oracle Grid Computing and Oracle application grid middleware. The platform is supposed to help ISVs enable their existing business applications to operate in an SaaS model with minimal re-implementation, and enable traditional single-tenant apps to operate in multi-tenant mode.

Radware Achieves Validated Integration with Oracle E-Business Suite 12.0

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:00:00 EDT

Radware announces completion of validation testing with Oracle

EC May Not Clear Oracle-Sun Merger: Reuters

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:00:00 EDT

As the clock ticks and the September 3 deadline nears, speculation is rising that the European Commission may throw a spanner into the Oracle-Sun merger and delay things another four months. Reuters said late Tuesday that EC regulators were fretting over the competitive implications of Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL and debating whether to open a full-scale investigation.

Cloud Opportunity Missed?

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:30:00 EDT

The wildly popular "Cash for Clunkers" auto program is so successful that the government spokesperson suggested that the computer system was overrun and crashed due to high demand.

The Delicate Balancing Act of SOA

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:15:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that JP Morgenthal, Senior Principal Analyst for QinetiQ North America, will be presenting at the upcoming Government IT Conference & Expo (www.GovITExpo.com) this coming October 6th in Washington, DC. His session will be entitled “Protect Your Government Agency with Backend IT Controls." SOA may be a popular buzzword and talk of actively practicing SOA is spoken of in the same vein as teenage frivolity ("everyone is doing it"), but SOA is actually a delicate

NetApp Heads Deeper into the Cloud

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:45:00 EDT

NetApp’s got itself a cloud platform. It’s updated its Data ONTAP 7G operating system, which hasn’t been revved since 2005, blended it with Data ONTAP GX scale-out clustering operating system, technology it got with its acquisition of Spinnaker Networks years back, and leavened it with new scaling, performance and cost-saving technologies to create Data ONTAP 8, the foundation of an enterprise cloud infrastructure to enable IT-as-a-service.

Oracle Budgets Remain Healthy Despite Economic Pressure

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:30:00 EDT

Research conducted by Fujitsu, a leading IT systems, services and products company, in conjunction with UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) reveals the effect that the recession is having on Oracle budgets. It also provides insight into the attitudes of Oracle users towards key technology trends and purchasing plans for 2009. The research canvassed the opinions of UKOUG members across the UK and Ireland.

Oh, Look, SpringSource Has Got an Enterprise Java Cloud

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:45:00 EDT

SpringSource Wednesday trotted out an Enterprise Java Cloud, an announcement that’s supposed to shed some light on the synergies between SpringSource and the cloud-smitten VMware, which said last week that it’s buying SpringSource for upwards of $400 million. Seems the acquisitive SpringSource, in turn, recently bought Platform-as-a-Service start-up Cloud Foundry Inc, the source of its shiny new Enterprise Java Cloud, which at the moment is called SpringSource Cloud Foundry. No price was mentioned

The Beauty of the Cloud

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:15:00 EDT

Cloud computing (the convergence of many of these pre-existing technologies), through its service providers, makes these technologies accessible to small and medium business in a simple, cost effective manner, without the need to have a deep understanding of these technologies. So how is this distinguishable from the Internet? If you ask lay people to describe the Internet as best as they can, they'll likely mention Google (though probably not the app engine), Amazon (though probably not AWS), YouTube, Yahoo, eBay, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, etc. - mainly consumer services. In short, B2C (or C2C / peer to peer) applications, or if you prefer, Consumer Service Provider to consumer - whether transactional as in Amazon and eBay, or ad supported as in Google, Yahoo, etc. the focus is consumers.

XPath Support in Oracle JDeveloper 11g

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 07:45:00 EDT

XML documents can be used to transfer data. The data in an XML document can be retrieved either with the JAXP (Java API for XML Processing) DOM and SAX APIs, or with the JAXP XPath API. Addressing an XML document with XPath has the advantage of selecting a single node directly without iterating over a node set. In this article, we’ll explore XPath support in Oracle JDeveloper-XDK 11g.

Oracle’s Date with Sun Dicey

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 09:30:00 EDT

The Wall Street Journal doesn’t think Oracle can make its end-of-August schedule for closing its Sun acquisition because of the regulators on both sides of the pond. The paper’s also talked to legal experts that say Oracle may be required to divest something or accept licensing conditions to get the deal through. The European Commission has been soliciting opinions about whether the level of competition or pricing in databases, middleware or Java is threatened by the combine.

Cloud Computing Proves a Natural for Offloading Development Processes

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:45:00 EDT

Our latest podcast discussion centers on using cloud computing technologies and models to improve the test and development stages of applications' creation and refinement. One area of cloud computing that has really taken off and generated a lot of interest is the development test and performance proofing of applications -- all from an elastic cloud services fabric.