ReadWriteWeb

Once upon a time, the default stack for a lot of developers consisted of the LAMP stack. Linux, Apache, MySQL and one of the P triumvirate: PHP, Python or Perl. Those days, however, are over. Sure, Linux is still powering a lot of servers. But above that, almost everything is up for grabs. Today at the Monki Gras conference in London, Simon Willison of held forth on the new Web stack.

Willison was part of the day's last talk, a conversation with Matt Biddulph, formerly Nokia's head of data strategy for location and commerce applications.

Years ago, Oracle's responses to reports of SQL injection attacks against its database servers literally were focused on media damage control - ensuring that not too many customers get scared by them. (To be fair, Microsoft had the same policy.) The basic concept of SQL injection is all too simple: Feed intentionally malformed instructions into the system in such a way that the server responds with clues that could enable you to obtain unprivileged data - or sometimes, with the data itself.

How hard could it be, security engineers and college professors argued for over a decade, for a company like Oracle to deploy a ZoneAlarm-like firewall that could independently analyze incoming SQL instructions, parse them, and only permit those that meet specific criteria? For years, well-minded engineers were told in response that yet another firewall would render networks too slow and inoperative. Then in May 2010, Oracle learned it could just simply acquire Secerno, an emerging database firewall company.

For a total of 17 years, Karen Padir was an executive at Sun Microsystems, and was present for that company's astounding transition to open source technologies. She was an advocate for MySQL when Sun acquired that project, and then later when Oracle acquired Sun, promising the "Dolphin" faithful that good times still lay ahead. But then she left, to lead the marketing effort for MySQL's principal key competition in open source-derived databases, EnterpriseDB - the commercial provider of Postgres Plus.

Now, Padir is seeing another new and astonishing transition in her field: the open source development community's move towards less structured, higher capacity databases. So last week, EnterpriseDB started building a bridge to Hadoop, the cloud-oriented database born from Yahoo, launching a private beta program for the innocuously-entitled Postgres Plus Connector for Hadoop.

The big story in the open source cloud these days is OpenStack. Rackspace's baby is sucking all the oxygen out of the room when it comes to attention, but what about the first, and production-ready, open source cloud computing platform? You might think that Eucalyptus is in dire straits with companies joining OpenStack en masse, but that's not the case. I spoke with Eucalyptus CEO Mårten Mickos at length yesterday, and he seems very sanguine about its prospects.

Jelastic.com, the Java PaaS similar to Heroku, has compiled an interesting market share analysis of their more than 1,000 developers. Since their service is built on standard application servers and databases, their developers can choose which of four major open source databases they want to use: MySQL, Postgres, MariaDB and MongoDB. Granted, this is just one company's view of things, but given that the numbers are still interesting, and there are some differences between the choices by North American and European developers.

Marten Mickos CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, formerly CEO of MySQL AB, echoed a common concern in his keynote at LinuxCon North America 2011. While celebrating the 20th anniversary of Linux and the past decade of accomplishments of open source, Mickos cautioned the audience gathered in Vancouver, BC that they need to be worried about protecting the "share and share alike" nature of open source in the cloud.

Continuing our series of business apps for the iPad, today we look at database clients, including ones for managing FileMaker, MySQL, Oracle and PostGres databases.

Previously we looked at personal database apps. We've also looked at several iPad apps for IT professionals.

Amazon has added Oracle to its lineup of Web-based database services in the cloud. Starting today, you can bring up Standard, Standard One or Enterprise Editions of Oracle 11g Release 2 databases, with a variety of licensing and pricing options. This is the first time that you can have a cloud-based fully licensed Oracle database.

You can now replicate data from MySQL data to MongoDB using Tungsten Replicator, an open source data replication engine for MySQL. It's sponsored by Continuent, makers of Tungsten Enterprise.

The new functionality was added by Continuent CTO Robert Hodges, Flavio Percoco Premoli of The Net Planet and Continuent employee Stephane Giron as part of a hackathon at the Open DB Camp in Sardinia.

Oracle released a technology preview this week a new version of MySQL that adds support for a Memcached plugin daemon for accessing InnoDB, MySQL's default storage engine. It's available from MySQL Labs. The plugin daemon is only available for Linux at this time.

Memcached stores key-value queries in memory to achieve NoSQL performance. Memcached has always worked with MySQL, but has run independently. This plugin should speed up the process considerably by allowing Memcached to access the InnoDB API directly.