FathomDB launches cloud database
FathomDB unveiled on Friday its database as a service platform for the cloud.
Speaking at a TechCrunch's "Whose Cloud is it Anyway?" roundtable event in Mountain View, Calif., on Friday afternoon, Justin Santa Barbara, CEO of FathomDB, revealed the company's intentions.
[ Last year, Microsoft launched its Windows Azure cloud computing platform. ]
"We're launching today as the only player offering standard relational databases in the cloud. We?re the easiest way to run your database," Santa Barbara said.
"FathomDB gives you a worry-free database," he stressed. Featuring a pay-as-you-go model, the Web-based service requires no application changes and no lock-in, Santa Barbara said. It is based in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and leverages the MySQL database, he said.
Low-level database tasks are tended to by FathomDB, and data safety is provided, said Santa Barbara. Analytics are offered to show what is happening in a customer's database, he said. Additional services are planned, such as reporting.
Open registration for beta began today, with general availability anticipated in a couple of months, Santa Barbara said. He encouraged attendees at the event to "sign up today and leave the database to us." ?
Microsoft also has big plans for cloud-based database services, readying its SQL Data Services, which will be based on the company's SQL Server database and run on the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform.
TechCrunch held its event at Microsoft's Silicon Valley offices.
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Oracle to release major Enterprise Manager upgrade
Oracle is set to unveil Enterprise Manager 10g Release 5 on Tuesday, framing the upgrade as a major step forward for the company's wide-ranging application management platform.
"This is a pretty important release," said Moe Fardoost, director of product marketing. "There's something in each tier."
[ Earlier this month, Oracle bought mValent so that it could use the company's technology to upgrade Enterprise Manager. ]
On the application level, the update adds support for Siebel CRM 8.1.1, as well as additional management tools for the Beehive collaboration platform and Oracle's billing and revenue management software.
Moving down the stack to middleware, Oracle has brought in deep management capabilities for WebLogic Server and Oracle Service Bus, he said.
The company has also added automation for Real Application Testing, which allows users to take a snapshot of real-life production workloads and apply them to test databases for assessing the effect of changes. RAT was never that complicated to use, but "what we're doing here is providing the automation to do it in one step," he said.
Automation has also been added for Oracle's Real Application Clusters, which allow users to deploy a single database across multiple servers for added reliability. In addition, Oracle's Automatic Database Diagnostics Monitor now has support for RAC environments.
Oracle VM is another major focus of the release, as Enterprise Manager's configuration, provisioning, and monitoring capabilities have been extended to virtual environments, he said. Previously Oracle had only basic capabilities in this area, he said.
Richard Sarwal, Oracle's senior vice president of systems management, is scheduled to deliver a webcast on Tuesday that will take a deeper look at the new release.
But Oracle's overall strategy behind Enterprise Manager is probably more interesting than any new features on their own, according to Forrester Research analyst Jean-Pierre Garbani.
That's because Oracle has taken "a totally different approach" from other IT management vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard and BMC, Garbani said. "They are all providing generic monitoring and management solutions that will adapt to everything."
Unlike those vendors, Oracle's core business is around applications, so for now it wants to provide customers with everything that helps deploy Oracle apps, he said.
Since the high cost of maintaining applications in the traditional manner is driving customers toward outsourcing and SaaS (software as a service), lowering the price tag of implementation and management is of huge importance for Oracle, according to Garbani.
In pursuit of this goal, Oracle has made a string of acquisitions to round out Enterprise Manager's capabilities, Garbani noted. Among them are ClearApp for its composite application management software and Moniforce for end-user monitoring.
It is certainly possible to integrate Enterprise Manager with third-party products, such as BMC's Remedy help-desk application.
But Oracle's ultimate goal is to give customers an "IKEA model" for building out their application environments, according to Garbani.
"At IKEA, when you buy it, you've got to put it together, but everything is pre-cut and arranged in one package," he said. "You can see how [Oracle] could evolve to the fully built model in time."
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Obama proposes spectrum license fee
Buried in U.S. President Barack Obama's budget blueprint for 2009 is a new-but-undefined spectrum license user fee that would increase from $50 million in 2009 to $550 million four years later.
The budget blueprint, released Thursday, provides no more details about the fee. Despite some speculation to the contrary, it may not, however, be a fee on wireless voice and data spectrum, but on spectrum used by U.S. radio and television stations.
[ See also: "Obama's budget blueprint increases tech spending" | Your source for the latest in government IT news and issues: Subscribe to InfoWorld's Government IT newsletter. ]
The proposed spectrum license user fee, which would be $200 million in 2010 and $300 million in 2011, takes up one line on page 126 of the 142-page budget blueprint.
A similar fee, proposed but not enacted in past federal budgets, has not been for wireless spectrum that companies have purchased in auctions from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, but on TV and radio spectrum that's been allocated to broadcasters, said a government source familiar with past FCC budgets.
The White House press office didn't immediately return a phone call seeking clarification on the proposed fee, which would bring in nearly $4.8 billion over 10 years.
Representatives of Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, contacted about the proposed fee, declined to comment. The CTIA, a trade group representing wireless carriers, said in a statement it was "currently reviewing the details of the proposal and look[ing] forward to participating in the next stages of this issue."
The National Association of Broadcasters is "unclear" about the impact of the proposal on broadcasters, said Dennis Wharton, executive vice president at the trade group. Similar fees have been proposed but rejected for about 15 years, Wharton said.
The spectrum fee is one of several proposed in the Obama budget overview. The budget would reinstate environmental superfund taxes at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, repeal some oil and gas company tax breaks, and raise taxes on married couples earning more than $250,000 a year and individuals earning more than $200,000 a year.
The Obama budget, which will likely be changed as it moves through the U.S. Congress, also reduces agriculture payments to some high-income farmers, authorizes the FCC to auction domestic satellite spectrum, and raises Department of Agriculture inspection fees.
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Microsoft converging programming languages
Microsoft will converge features of Visual Basic and C# languages with planned upgrades to the two platforms, a Microsoft official said this week.
Visual Basic 10 and C# 4 are both due concurrently with the Visual Studio 2010 IDE, which might ship at the end of the year.
The Visual Basic and C# teams "were merged last year, and it's called the Visual Studio managed languages team," said Beth Massi, senior program manager at Microsoft, during the VSLive conference in San Francisco. Also under the team's domain are the F# language, for functional programming, and Microsoft's DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime), supporting dynamic languages on the .Net platform.
[ In a related development, scripting languages are sparking a new programming era. ]
Visual Basic and C# developers build the same type of applications, such as Web and business applications, and the intention is to co-evolve the languages together, Massi said. .Net has unified how applications are written, she said. "It's much less focused on the language," Massi said
Visual Basic 10 and C# 4 will gain interoperability with dynamic languages. Programmers, for example, could tap into a JavaScript engine in an ASP.Net application, according to Massi. "In both of the languages, Visual Basic and C# are going to have interop with the DLR," for interaction with scripting languages such as Python, Massi said. The DLR has not yet been released.
Both Visual Basic 10 and C# 4 also are to get an array literals capability for inferring array types. The two languages also will gain collection initializers for initializing a list or dictionary with data using the new "from" keyword.
Multi-line and statement lambdas, another ease of use feature saving programmers from having to return values, also is due in both language upgrades. Compiling without primary interop assemblies also will be enabled in both.
A generic variance capability will be offered in the languages for widening or narrowing the scope of generic types, such as a list.
Visual Basic 10 also will include auto-implemented properties, an ease of use programming feature already in C# 3. Also, Visual Basic 10 will gain an implicit line continuation capability so developers do not have to write underscores in LINQ (Language Integrated Query).
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