On January 27, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will share his vision for the Oracle-Sun Microsystems business combination. But before the Oracle webcast kicks off, industry rivals and partners are offering a key piece of advice to Ellison: Don’t mess up Sun’s Java programming language. Here’s the scoop — including perspectives from Red Hat’s middleware team.

Now, this could be a very good opportunity for all of the other open source database servers particularly the most popular ones like Firebird and PostgreSQL. I’m particularly fond of Firebird (the InterBase offspring) and use it in many projects and did a lot of consulting to Delphi developers using it. Can this be the rise of Firebird?

Under Oracle's new stewardship, Java will be expanded to more application types while the public process for amending Java will be made more participatory, an Oracle official said Wednesday at a company briefing on Oracle's Sun integration plans.

"Tim Bunce points me to this post about Perl being faster than Ruby in Tim Bray's Wide Finder code competition..."

Looking for a mature, open source database that’s not owned by Oracle? Whether you’re already a fan or are looking for alternatives, now might be a good time to take a look PostgreSQL.

Perl has been around since 1987 and became an early darling of web developers. These days, however, you don’t hear much about Perl. Everyone seems to be talking about trendier languages like PHP, Python and Ruby, with Perl left in the back as a neglected, not-so-hip cousin.

How to install and configure DBI-Link to join Oracle tables from PostgreSQL on Debian GNU/Linux

If you want to join Oracle tables from PostgreSQL on Debian GNU/Linux, you can use DBI-Link.

Also, you can use PostgreSQL queries to access Oracle tables as local schemas.

On the Oracle v. Google litigation announcement, here's something that I don't see anyone else mentioning yet. On the Oracle patents, in a post-Bilski world, the right question would seem to be: Are *any* of the asserted Oracle patents tied to a specific machine?

Oracle – the gigantic database corporation that up swallowed Sun Microsystems – has made a wide-ranging patent and copyright infringement complaint (pdf) against the mighty Google Inc. that may or may not indicate that the world will soon end.