LearnQuest blog

VMware Looking to Purchase Novell

Enterprise Operating Systems giant Novell is looking to divide up the company and sell off the separate pieces. Among the potential buyers is VMware, which is said to be in "advanced" negotiations. More from ComputerWorld:

VMware appears to be solely interested in acquiring Novell's SUSE Linux operating system and associated business. Novell's NetWare enterprise file sharing software may be purchased by Attachmate, a software firm specializing in supporting legacy applications, the Journal said.

The paper reported that up to 20 companies were interested in Novell, which put itself on the market in March, but that there are only a handful are serious contenders. Rumors have been flying around this week about the potential sale after an article in the New York Post said advanced acquisition talks were taking place between Novell and two unnamed companies.

Acquiring SUSE Linux would make sense for VMware, which has been actively acquiring companies to build a stack of software for running cloud services. Novell has partnered with VMware, making SUSE Linux the preferred OS for VMware-packaged virtual appliances. Novell has been building cloud services off its Linux base. Also, Red Hat has taken on VMware for the nascent cloud computing market, leveraging its own Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution.

For all things VMware, check out the selection of training courses LearnQuest offers!

IBM Acquiring OpenPages

IBM has announced that they have acquired the risk management software company, OpenPages. More from InfoWorld:

IBM is acquiring OpenPages, a privately held company that makes software designed to help companies simplify risk management and corporate compliance activities. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

OpenPages' software aggregates data pertaining to compliance and risk management (including operational risk, financial controls management, IT risk and internal audits) to create an enterprise-wide view of where a company is exposed and how risks might impact future performance.

The software can highlight inconsistencies in risk and performance goals. For example, a manufacturer with aggressive revenue goals for an emerging market may risk noncompliance with regional regulations or cost overruns associated with doing business in a remote location. The OpenPages software would give an aggregate view of the business opportunities and risks associated with the expansion, IBM says.

IBM's recent study of 1,900 global CFOs and senior finance leaders found that two out of three companies encountered material risk events within the past three years. Survey respondents indicated risk management has risen in priority by 93 percent since 2005.

OpenPages, based in Waltham, Mass., will become part of IBM's business analytics software portfolio. Over the past four years, IBM has invested more than $11 billion in its business analytics software and services business, which experienced 14 percent revenue growth in the second quarter of 2010. Among the companies it has acquired in this area are: Cognos, Coremetrics, Guardium, and Unica.

"Unforeseen risk can hurt a company's bottom line as well as its brand reputation,” said Rob Ashe, general manager for business analytics at IBM, in a statement. "Integrating risk management systems across once-divided units and functions is essential to seeing the bigger picture."

OpenPages has more than 200 customers, including Allianz, Barclays, Carnival Corporation, Duke Energy, and SunTrust.

For IBM training resources, please visit LearnQuest's website to browse our complete IBM course selections.

Google Code Allowing More Licenses

Google has announced on its Google Code blog that it will now accepting all open source licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative, much like open source project hosting sites such as SourceForge.  The hosting giant finally realized after five years that allowing more open source licenses might be better suited for supporting open source developers. More from the Google Code blog:

In our day-to-day work looking after open source licensing, we lamented the proliferation of licenses and decided that we would split the difference and only offer a very limited subset of the approved OSI licenses choices to our users as a stand against the proliferation of the same. You see, we felt then and still feel now that the excessive number of open source licenses presents a problem for open source developers and those that adopt that software. Thus when we launched project hosting on code.google.com, we only launched with a small subset of licenses.

This was hardly a barrier to adoption. While there were some complaints from some corners, in the intervening 5+ years since then, we've grown to become one of the largest hosts while allowing that ethic behind license choice to persist.

What's changing and why change now?

We've added an option to the license selector to allow any project to use an OSI approved license. Simply select “other open source” and indicate in your LICENSING, COPYING or similar file which license you are using.

Public domain projects are still only allowed on a case by case basis,as true public domain projects are quite rare and, in some countries, impossible. We encourage those that want to truly ship public domain to look at how D. Richard Hipp does things around SQLite and emulate his style. Email google-code-hosting@googlegroups.com if you’d like to request that license be applied to your project.

(Please note: we will continue to hunt down and kill non-open source projects or other projects using Google Code as a generic file-hosting service.)

Why change now? The TL;DR version is that we think we've made our point and that this new way of doing things is a better fit to our goal of supporting open source software developers.

The longer form of the reason why is that we never really liked turning away projects that were under real, compatible licenses like the zlib or other permissive licenses, nor did we really like turning away projects under licenses that serve a truly new function, like the AGPL. We also think that there were inconsistencies in how we handled multi-licensed projects (for instance: a project that is under an Apache license, but has a zlib component.)

To rectify this, we decided to add an additional option to the license selector that would accommodate some flexibility around open source licenses. We hope you find it useful and look forward to seeing how you use the site!

For more information on Open Source training, please visit the LearnQuest website for our complete listing of Open Source courses!

Cisco and Citrix Teaming on Enterprise Desktop Virtualization

Citrix and Cisco Systems are teaming up to offer a package for running large numbers of virtual desktops across an organization, in an attempt to ease any painstaking deployment processes. Cisco vice president Jackie Ross states that the idea behind the joint offering is to "bring simplicity to the desktop market." More from InfoWorld:

The package includes Citrix's XenDesktop, which is VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) software that downloads an operating system to a desktop computer from a centralized pool of servers. The package also includesCisco's Unified Computing System, an integrated assemblage of blade servers, switches, storage adapters, and networking fabric.

By teaming with Cisco, Citrix is hoping to distinguish its offering in the increasingly crowdedVDI space, which also includes products such as VMware View and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

The basic starter kit will provide remote access for up to 300 users. The companies will provide "expansion packs," as Ross described them, for an additional 400 users per pack. The system should be able to scale to "tens of thousands of users," Ross said.

The package benefits from engineering customization, which should cut the costs of deployment, executives from both companies said during a press conference. For instance, it will include extended-memory B250blade servers from Cisco. The memory extensions should boost the number of desktops each blade server can maintain by 20 percent, or up to 100 users of high-memory applications.

"We can offer up to four times more memory in a two-socket blade," Ross said, adding that, "More often than not, memory becomes the bottleneck, not the CPUs. So customers will require [fewer] blades to support the same number of virtual desktops."

The system will run 10 Gigabit Ethernet, with connections to storage using either FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) or Fibre Channel. Each switch should accommodate up to 320 blade servers.

Because XenDesktop uses Citrix's HDX(High-Definition User Experience), a set of streaming protocols, users should be able to access desktops over great distances by way of a WAN (Wide Area Network), said Citrix vice president Sumit Dhawan.

The software was built with an "open architecture," Dhawan said. It will be able to support multiple client devices, storage back-ends and hypervisors. This package can use either XenServer or VMware's ESX Server, and will support Microsoft's Hyper-V in the near future, Dhawan said.

The companies are not providing storage with the package, but they do offer profiles to help customers hook their systems to their NetApp products and other brands of back-end storage.

The package is available now, though Cisco and Citrix representatives declined to provide the price of the product to the press. The companies will provide a single support telephone line for both installation and post-installation issues arising from either company's products.

While VDI has been around for several years, Microsoft's release of Windows 7 was widely seen as a catalyst for greater adoption, even if enterprise deployment remains sluggish.

LearnQuest offers a great variety of Windows Server Training courses, which can be found here on our website.

HTML 5 May Give Webpages the Ability to Talk and Listen

Well here's an interesting, if not somewhat creepy, development: HTML5 may give wesites the ability to communicate and hold conversations. A new activity group in the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is investigating the possibility of incorporating voice recognition and speech synthesis interfaces within Web pages. In a year from now, the new incubator group plans to file a report summarizing the feasibility of adding voice and speech features into HTML. More from ComputerWorld:

The human voice and the Web are not strangers: Google includes a voice-based Web search app in its Android smartphone operating system and Microsoft promises robust voice-driven features in its upcoming Windows Phone 7.

The HTML Speech Incubator Group is studying the feasibility of developing a standard Web interface for both speech recognition and synthesis, said group chair Dan Burnett, who is also director of speech technologies and standards at voice response system provider Voxeo.

Such an interface could be used across multiple browsers. Using built-in or plug-in voice recognition and speech synthesis engines, browsers could read pages aloud or permit users to audibly fill out Web forms.

While this work may overlap with another voice-based W3C effort, VoiceXML, the two efforts are somewhat different, Burnett said. VoiceXML wouldn't work very well for the Web, given that it was primarily designed for voice-driven applications, such as telephone-based voice response systems, where it is used widely. Like HTML itself, the voice capabilities of HTML would be stateless, or not require a dedicated session with the user.

Burnett noted that while the report would discuss the feasibility of establishing a set of interfaces, the work of developing the interfaces themselves, should they be warranted, would be taken on by another W3C group, such as the HTML Working Group.

The W3C has been busy with speech technologies on a number of other fronts as well. The organization also recently released version 3.0 of VoiceXML. In this new version, the working group added semantic descriptions of the features, and organized the functionality into modules.

The W3C also plans to shortly release version 1.1 of SSML (the Speech Synthesis Markup Language) -- often used in conjunction with VoiceXML -- that will incorporate Asian languages, and provide developers more flexibility with voice selection and handling of content in unexpected languages.

Maybe in a couple of years from now, we here at LearnQuest will be offering HTML courses on how to make web pages communicative. But for now you'll just have to stick to our regular catalog of web design and HTML training!

Silverlight Will Exceed HTML5 Capabilities, According to Microsoft

Microsoft said this week that Silverlight is going to broaden web capabilities in ways that HTML5 is in no way able to provide. Although they say that they don't expect or intend for Silverlight to replace HTML5, rather enhance it. From InfoWorld:

While acknowledging the importance of HTML5, Microsoft stressed this week that its Silverlight rich Internet technology extends the Web beyond what HTML5 allows.

Standards-based multimedia features offered by HTML5 have taken the spotlight lately from proprietary technologies, such as Silverlight and Adobe's Flash. But Silverlight still has a purpose in the wake of HTML5's emergence, said Microsoft's Brad Becker, director of product management for Developer Platforms, in a blog entry entitled "The Future of Silverlight."

"On the Web, the purpose of Silverlight has never been to replace HTML; it's to do the things that HTML (and other technologies) couldn't in a way that was easy for developers to tap into. Microsoft remains committed to using Silverlight to extend the Web by enabling scenarios that HTML doesn't cover," Becker said. "From simple 'islands of richness' in HTML pages to full desktop-like applications in the browser and beyond, Silverlight enables applications that deliver the kinds of rich experiences users want."

Silverlight is valuable for business/enterprise applications, premium media experiences, and consumer applications and games, Becker said.

"The media features of Silverlight are far beyond what HTML5 will provide and work consistently in users' current and future browsers," Becker said. Silverlight offers advantages in such areas as high-definition video, content protection, 3-D video, and smooth streaming, said Becker.

Microsoft, Becker said, is participating in more than 400 standards engagements, including the development of HTML.

"It's not just idle talk. Microsoft has many investments based on or around HTML, such as SharePoint, Internet Explorer, and ASP.Net. We believe HTML5 will become ubiquitous just like HTML 4.01 is today," Becker said. Microsoft has committed to backing HTML5 in its upcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser and has partially leveraged it in Internet Explorer 8 as well.

The company is working on donating test suites to help improve consistency between implementations of HTML5 and CSS (Cascading Styles Sheets) 3, Becker said. But these technologies have had issues with variations between browsers.

"HTML5 and CSS 3 are going to make this worse for a while as the specs are new and increase the surface area of features that may be implemented differently. In contrast, since we develop all implementations of Silverlight, we can ensure that it renders the same everywhere," said Becker.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has shipped four major versions of Silverlight in about half the time that HTML5 has been under design, he said. Silverlight 4 shipped in April, making it the fourth release in two-and-a-half years. Silverlight also is more than a browser technology, with Microsoft investing in desktop, mobile and living room capabilities for the technology.

"For HTML5 to be really targetable, the spec has to stabilize, browsers have to all implement the specs in the same way and over a billion people have to install a new browser or buy a new device or machine. That's going to take a while. And by the time HTML5 is broadly targetable, Silverlight will have evolved significantly. Meanwhile, Silverlight is here now and works in all popular browsers and operating systems," Becker said. 

Stay tuned for Silverlight 4 and HTML5 training, but in the meantime you can brush up on your web design skills with LearnQuest's extensive list of course offerings!

Nine Database Object Tips You Need to Know for Your Next PLSQL Job Interview

Via DBA Support, here is a handy list of the Top 9 Database Object Tips You Need to Know for Your Next PLSQL Job Interview:

Interviewing for a PL/SQL developer position ultimately will turn towards talking about database structures and objects. But most of us will begin to fall asleep if we have to answer some of the more basic questions about what a table is, what a column is, what an index is, etc. Moreover, I don't want to bore you with having to read through the more basic questions and answers. Instead, I thought it would be much more beneficial if I took from my experiences as a DBA / Developer those pieces of information I actually used and thought could help you spice up your studying for that next job interview.

Again, as you read these, especially if you're getting ready for an interview, remember that these questions are not hard and fast, many of them beg for further investigation and many of them you should try within your own sandbox if you've not ever encountered them before. Good luck. I hope these questions get you started down the right path.

Jump on in for the full list!

SharePoint 2010 Will Take Business Intelligence to the Next Level

Microsoft is debuting their new SharePoint 2010 and it's going to do amazing things for business intelligence. The good people over at InfoWorld have a complete breakdown of the new SharePoint compenents and what you can expect from them:

In SharePoint 2010, the BI tools are Microsoft Excel, the PowerPivot Add-in for Excel, Excel Services, Visio and Visio Service, PerformancePoint Services, Report Builder, and Reporting Services, all running off SQL Server, which includes SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services), Integration Services, and Analysis Services.

Combining SharePoint with Excel or Visio allows users to create workbooks or diagrams and share that information with others easily. However, the Excel and Visio services also allow data to be updated and refreshed by pulling the latest data from various data sources. So, building your workbooks or Visio diagrams from dynamic data does not require manual adjustments on your part.

IBM Unleashes Whopping 256-Core Unix Server

IBM is securing their position in Unix business with new several new servers based on its Power7 processors, which include a 256 core server for large enterprises. The 256 core server -- their biggest to date! -- is called The Power 795, aimed at companies that run large-scale database applications or want to consolidate multiple Unix or Linux workloads onto a single system using IBM's PowerVM virtualization software.

Additionally, IBM has also released a range of low-end Power7 servers that are equipped with one or two processors. Add that to the mid-range systems IBM launched earlier this year, IBM now boasts a complete Power7 lineup. Here's more on the story via InfoWorld:

All the new systems are offered with Linux or IBM's AIX or i operating systems (i is the new name for IBM's i5/OS). They'll compete with Unix servers from Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, which acquired Sun's hardware business when it bought the company earlier this year.

Teradata Purchases Analytics Vendor

Teradata has bought out Kickfire, the small startup known for open-source MySQL database and a SQL processing chip to boost query performance, amid rumors that the analytics vendor was going out of business. From InfoWorld:

The "tuck-in" deal provides Teradata with "another set of intellectual property that allows us to start looking at things like advanced pipelining," said Darryl McDonald, executive vice president of business development and marketing, during the call. "It's been leveraged all the way from supercomputers all the way down to gaming devices. It really allows you to put super performance of different things into chips and or the software for acceleration and super performance."

Kickfire's technology has received good marks, but its market strategy was met with some criticism.

"Building a propriety [sic] database stack of hardware and software around a MySQL codebase that attributes much of its success to being open and free is a poor cultural match," wrote Daniel Abadi, an assistant professor of computer science at Yale, in a recent blog post.

Trying to gain a foothold in a crowded market for analytic database systems, Kickfire aimed at customers that had smaller-sized data stores and a desire to analyze that information, but no appetite for the price tags of products from larger vendors.

But Kickfire lacked MPP (massively parallel processing) capabilities, which was "a recipe for disaster ... in the 'Big Data Era,'" Abadi said.

"It is well known that more than 95 percent of data warehouses are smaller than 5TB, and that MPP is not strictly necessary for less than 5TB," he wrote. "So it is easy to get into the trap of Kickfire's thinking that the mass market is addressable without building an MPP product. However, businesses are looking forward, and seeing much more data in their future ... and can often be reluctant to select a product with known scalability limits."

MPP databases partition workloads over an array of nodes that run in parallel. Teradata's database uses this approach.

 

The Kickfire aquisition will give Teradata a "a richer hardware assist at the point of retrieving data from disk, potentially turning the performance crank another notch," according to Merv Adrian of IT Market Strategy. Teradata is not planning to sell Kickfire's existing product -- only hiring the company's engineers and acquiring its IP.

For the complete listing of Teradata courses LearnQuest offers, please click here to visit our website!