PostgreSQL Database and Solaris

Sun has been shipping PostgreSQL with Solaris since last summer (Solaris 10 6/06) ["System News" articles 16661]. You can learn more about PostgreSQL in a recent SDNtv interview conducted by Simon Phipps. The database is free and support is available for a fee.

Simon's SDNtv episode also includes an interview with Rich Hillegas, Apache Derby Committer, and Francois Orsini , Java DB Evangelist. Simon sounds quite impressed with the fact that the pure-Java RDBMS takes about 2 megs of memory and can run in a web client.

Candidate Response to DTrace Community questions

Hi Bryan et. al.. As an OGB candidate I'd like to answer your questions.
I  have been heavily involved "in the field" with promoting and using
Solaris for many years. I am becoming more involved with OpenSolaris and
the OpenSolaris community because I think that I can make a difference
and complement the contributions of others.

Bryan Cantrill wrote:
> OGB Candidates,
>
> We in the DTrace Community have a couple of specific questions and
> concerns that will affect how our Core Contributors vote in the upcoming
> OGB elections.  To see where you stand on the issues that are important
> to us, we would like you to answer the following questions before
> campaigning ends on Sunday night.  Please cc: dtrace-discuss@opensolaris.org
> on your answers, and thanks in advance for helping us make an informed
> decision!
>
>       - Bryan
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Bryan Cantrill, Solaris Kernel Development.       http://blogs.sun.com/bmc
>
>
>
> Licensing Questions:
>
> - DTrace is one of only a small handful of OpenSolaris technologies that
>   has actually been incorporated into other operating systems.  Thus,
>   your position on dual-licensing is very important to us; what is your
>   position on dual-licensing in general?
>
>
I think the key point is to make great technology like DTrace and ZFS
available widely. That means helping and facilitating, legally and
technically,  others to implement. The intent is to share and we should
use the licensing mechanism that maximize sharing. I would want to see
DTrace as popular across O/S environments as NFS.

> - Do you agree with the conclusions and decrees of CAB/OGB Position
>   Paper # 20070207?
>
>
Yes. The community has to do a better jobs of communicating why people
should care one way or another. We want to attract as many people as
possible to OpenSolaris but we don't have to win them all.
> - The OGB is responsible for the representation of OpenSolaris to
>   third parties.  If a third party were to inquire about incorporating
>   DTrace into a GPL'd Program, what would be your response or position?
>
>
I'd say "great"! The more people use components of OpenSolaris
elsewhere, the easier it will be for them to adopt OpenSolaris later.

> Constitutional Questions:
>
> - DTrace is currently a Community Group, but some could argue that it would
>   make more sense for DTrace to be a Project in (say) the Observability
>   Community Group.  In your mind, what is (or should be) the difference
>   between a Community Group and a Project -- and where should DTrace fall?
>
>
No strong opinion here. If I had to choose, I would say stay as a CG.

> - The Draft Constitution says next-to-nothing about where the authority
>   lies to make or accept changes to OpenSolaris -- only that Projects
>   operate at the behest of Community Groups, and that Community Groups
>   can be "terminated" by the OGB.  In your opinion, where does or should
>   this authority lie?  And do you believe that the Constitution should
>   or should not make this explicit?  Finally, under what grounds do you
>   believe that a Community Group should be "terminated"?
>
>
CGs should have a clear scope and be self managed within that scope.

I suspect that inactivity would be the main grounds to terminate a CG.
> - The Draft Constitution says that Community Groups (and in particular,
>   the Community Groups' Facilitators) are responsible for "communicating
>   the Community Group's status to the OGB"; what does this mean to you?
>
>
Maintained project pages and mailing list postings
> - According to the Draft Constitution, "nominations to the office of
>   Facilitator shall be made by the Core Contributors of the Community
>   Group, but the OGB shall not be limited in their appointment to those
>   nominated."  Under what conditions do you believe that the selection of
>   a Facilitator would or could fall outside of the nominations made by
>   a Community Group's Core Contributors?
>
Only under very unusual conditions. Sounds like the language has been
included to provide flexibility for unimagined cases.
Sounds like there could be ugly situations where a person with the right
political connections could be forced on a CG over their proffered
candidate. I hope that we can  elect 7  reasonable people who operate
transparently and fairly.
> - According to the Draft Constitution, "non-public discussion related to
>   the Community Group, such as in-person meetings or private communication,
>   shall not be considered part of the Community Group activities unless or
>   until a record of such discussion is made available via the normal meeting
>   mechanism."  In your opinion, in the context of a Community Group like
>   DTrace -- where a majority of the Core Contributors spend eight to ten
>   hours together every work day -- what does this mean?  Specifically, what
>   does it mean to be (or not to be) "considered part of the Community
>   Group activities"?  And in your opinion, what role does the OGB have in
>   auditing a Community Group's activities?
>
>
As long as someone in the CG records the conclusions of those off-line
discussions, then there will be a record and it will be clear that the
CG is alive and well and making progress. The OGB's interest in auditing
should be minimal - along the lines of validating that the CG is still
active.
> Potpourri:
>
> - Historically, binary compatibility has been very important to Solaris,
>   having been viewed as a constraint on the evolution of technology.
>   However, some believe that OpenSolaris should not have such constraints,
>   and should be free to disregard binary compatibility.  What is your
>   opinion?
>
>
Breaking binary compatibility is a big deal is the commercial
Solaris/SPARC world. I don't see why it would not be just as big a deal
for OpenSolaris. There would have to be a very compelling reason to
break it.

If you introduce a change that broke binary compatibility, you should
also provide a compatibility mode - like the technology that allows old
SunOS 4.x apps to run on Solaris.

On the other hand, I like the idea of challenging scares cows!

> - If a third-party were to use and modify DTrace in a non-CDDL'd system,
>   whose responsibility is it to assure that those modifications are
>   made public?  To put it bluntly:  is enforcing the CDDL an OGB issue?
>
>
I guess we would need a legal opinion on that ...
> - Do you have an opinion on the patentability of software?  In particular,
>   what is the role of the OGB -- if any -- if Sun were to initiate legal
>   proceedings to protect a part of its software patent portfolio that
>   is represented in OpenSolaris?
>
>
I'm not a big fan of the patentability of software and I would hope that
the OGB would lobby Sun to not patent software
> - When you give public presentations, do you run OpenSolaris on your laptop?
>   Have you ever given a public demonstration of OpenSolaris technology?
>
>
dual boot and parallels
I have used OpenOffice for all my presentation for a fews years - on
Solaris, on XP and on Mac OS X.
The PDF versions of "System News" are produced on a Solaris 10 machine
with FrameMaker!
> - And an extra credit question:  Have you ever used DTrace?  When did you
>   most recently use it, and why?  The answers "just now" and "to answer
>   this question" will be awarded no points. ;)
>
Only trivially. Enough to appreciate its value and that it's a tool for
specialists. I did read a detail use case - Paul van den Bogaard's paper
"DTrace by Example: Solving a Real-World Problem" - and had it included
in "System News" to help people to position DTrace
http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/107/5/opt-sysadmin/17559

Year 10 of "System News for Sun Users"

With the start of the current volume, #109, "System News for Sun Users" has begun it's 10th year of production. For the first couple of years, "System News" was a monthly print newsletter, provided through Sun resellers. We converted to a monthly email PDF document to save on trees, postage and delivery time. In 2000, we developed a customization system and went to a weekly email eNewsletter in the subscriber's choice of PDF or text. A couple of years later, we added HTML and made that the default format.

I am very proud of the quality of the publication and the production standards. In the 6 years of weekly production, we have never missed a deadline - 52 issues a year. We're based in Florida, and we have had a few weather related challenges over the years. Our target is to have the newsletter delivered to the 45k+ subscribers by Monday morning.

Our business model has also evolved. In the beginning, Sun Resellers were our customers. Then we added certain Sun sales teams as customers - SunFlash is the Sun-branded version of "System News for Sun Users" (http://sunflash.sun.com)

As Sun has reduced the co-op marketing funds that it makes available to Resellers for sales/comunications/marketing systems like "System News" , we have been converting to a subscriber and advertiser funded business model .

We now offer a custom portal service that includes a sophisticated Open Source CMS, our newsletter content (1200 - 1500 articles/year) and our email newsletter service.

A couple of years ago, we conducted a survey and asked people how we were doing.
The feedback was quite encouraging!

"I have subscribed for many years. I look forward to each issue just like my Wall Street Journal."

"Concise summaries make it easy to find relevant articles/announcements."

"I manage a large team of software engineers who are developing, integrating, and testing on Sun environments. Our customers worldwide also deploy our products on Sun environments. System News provides me with just the right amount of detail to inform me of where I need to delve deeper. I am extremely busy, so I print it out and take it with me to the beach where I scan and mark the articles for further reading. It's perfect for my needs."

-johnj

Connect with me via LinkedIn.com

I have been a member of LinkedIn.com for a few years. I have created a hub of people involved with Sun:- employees, ex-employees, Sun Partners and users of Sun gear. With over 12,000 people directly connected to me, I am the 18th most-connected of the 9+ million members!

My philosophy for this type of network is to first help people; them, in the future, when I need help, it will be given.

See my profile at linkedin. Read about Linkedin.com

I noticed recently that www.linkedin.com is displaying a "powered by Sun" footer graphic.

Who am I?

I have been a UNIX user, developer, administrator and evangelist for 26 years.

Most recently, I started two Florida chapters of the OpenSolaris User group (Ft. Lauderdale and Tampa). I hope to start a third in Orlando next month.

I have been involved, as a volunteer, with user groups for many years. In 1986, I helped start the South Florida UNIX Users Group (SFUUG). I was involved with running SFUUG for many years. In the mid 90's I was VP then President of the Sun User Group (SUG) at a time when the User Group was "divorced" from Sun. From 1995 to 1997, I was the New Products editor for SunWorldOnline, an IDG publication and one of the first print publications to convert to Web and e-mail only.

I have just started my 10th year as Editor-in-Chief for the weekly newsletter, "System News for Sun users", http://sun.systemnews.com, where we have published over 17,000 articles of interest to the Sun/Solaris community. More than 50k people subscribe to "System News".

I was recruited from Scotland in '84; "come to America, come work at AT&T, the home of UNIX" was a compelling sales pitch! After a winter or two in New Jersey, an engineering job in sunny Florida was too hard to pass up. One of the key organizer for the SFUUG was the local Sun SE. We quickly became friends and within a year or so, I became the second Sun SE in South Florida.

That was a time when Sun, UNIX, TCP/IP and Ethernet were "the" Open alternatives to VAX/VMS, token ring, DECNET and other proprietary systems. We had to fight hard to win mind share then sales. As we started winning that war, the UNIX vendors postured to say who was more open and so began the UNIX wars (Sun vs OSF, OpenLook vs Motif, etc.).

It's ironic that as Sun/Solaris/SPARC became more successful, that Linux came along and charged Sun with being the legacy proprietary systems.

As I interact with enterprise customers today, it's clear that OpenSolaris (unlike OpenVMS) and cool technology - like coolthreads and galaxy servers - are making life more complicated and more competitive!

One of my biggest challenges in presenting the "Sun story" today is how rich are the product offerings from Sun. LDOMs or VMWare; SPARC CMT or SPARC multi-core; SPARC or AMD (and soon Intel); Blade or not blade; Disk or Tape .... Makes for more stories in the newsletter and more of a need for Systems Engineers (or Architects as we like to say these days!).


Here are some other pieces of my resume.

CTO/Editor-in-Chief at System News, Inc.

October 2002 - Present (4+ years)

• Supervise editorial staff in the production of 2,000 to 3,000 articles per year in 35 sections (News, Features, Servers, Storage, Software, Services, Security, Java Technology, Developer, SysAdmin, Oracle on Sun, Health care, Retail, etc.) for core news report, “System News for Sun Users”
  

• Led development/support of custom applications: content management, news portal, dynamic news report creation & distribution, web tool for subscriber management. (Sybase, MySQL, Perl, PHP, C, DHTML/CSS, Java, Shell)
  

• Direct technical operations to provide a weekly, custom PDF/Text/HTML news report for 65,000 subscribers. Support hosted service for subscriber management.
  

• Provide customer support, training and user level documentation

• Rolled out 40+ “private-label” editions of news report service http://sun.systemnews.com

Sun Solution Architect at Forsythe Solution Group

2006-present

• Pre-sales Sun specialists providing Sun-based solutions to enterprise accounts in FL and GA
  

Principal Consultant at Forsythe Solution Group

2004-2006 (1 year)

• Post-sales Sun specialists providing services to enterprise accounts

Senior Systems Engineer at Sun Microsystems

1987 – 2002 (15 years)

Technology Specialist

• Sun Servers, RISC/SPARC, SMP, MT/CMT, Clusters, SANs, Solaris, Commercial Computing, Performance, Optimization
  
• O/S Ambassador
  

Member of Visioneer Program

• Delivered Sun's corporate Vision talks to Customers, Resellers and at events; supported Sun/Java/Linux user groups
  

Channel Specialists (1994-2002)

• Supported sales in the recruitment and success of Resellers
• Provided Sun technical training and support for Resellers (e.g. with major opportunities, RFPs, benchmarks, non-disclosures
• Support Solaris "adoption" initiatives