Our own Matt Asay can’t talk about this (he’s an executive with one of the players) but Ingres and Alfresco think they can build a real competitor to SharePoint. (The original image lives at Wikimedia.) Matt has been writing about SharePoint “lock-in” for years. Partnering ...

Recently, a lot of new non-relational databases have cropped up both inside and outside the cloud. One key message this sends is, "if you want vast, on-demand scalability, you need a non-relational database". If that is true, then is this a sign that the once mighty relational database finally has a...

So it’s that time of year again when everyone puts out their predictions for the year ahead.  I think predictions are a bit of a waste of time because to be interesting predictions have to be big, but a year really isn’t all that long so actual changes over the course of 2009 are likely to be j...

Image via Wikipedia Recently I have seen several articles about Solid State Drives (SSD) and some articles are picking 2009 to be the year of the SSD.  While I agree SSD’s will bring some great benefits in the years to come, I wanted to clarify the current state of SSD’s in relation to usage in...

Think of a redwood forest after the fire. Great time to be a seed. Or imagine being an alligator after the peat in your swamp is burned out. Life is good. In that same way, now may be the best time to launch an open source company. Especially if, as in the case of Mark deVisser, CEO of Sonatype, you...

Once again the folks at Ingres are out with a version of their open source, enterprise-class database — Version 9.2 this time. It’s filled with nifty new features and buzzwords. Best of all you can download it right now. Ingres is based on an implementation of PostgreSQL, which itself wa...

Image via Wikipedia For the purpose of this article “A Data Platform� is what I use to describe an implementation of servers, database management software, a data model, and any surrounding classes that separate data from user facing application logic and functionality. I have noticed that somet...

This is my response to Billy Bosworth's question " should oracle have bought mysql? " I don’t think Oracle is going to be kicking themselves too hard here.  From memory in October 2005 Oracle announced it had acquired InnoDB (the most popular transaction storage engine for MySQL).  ...

Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect predicts the Sun-MySQL merger will have little impact on his company or on Linux. In an interview with the Linux Foundation, Edward Screven, who reports directly to Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison, maintains Sun’s patronage of its open source riv...

Will Red Hat be the only major pure play open source company to go public? That’s what observers are wondering as more and more open source stars are swallowed up by traditional proprietary giants, with Nokia’s purchase of Trolltech – announced yesterday - and Sun’s buy of MySQL earlier this...