databases

Sybase earnings sail past Street's expectations

Correction: Sybase reported a 13 percent increase in license revenue, based on constant currency.

Update at 7:49 a.m. PST, with comments from the conference call.

Sybase posted fourth-quarter results on Wednesday that sailed past Wall Street's earnings expectations.

With earnings driven by strong growth in its core database business, company shares jumped 7.8 percent to $27.87 in early-morning trading.

Revenues during the quarter rose to $305.1 million, up 3 percent over the same time a year ago. Wall Street was expecting the enterprise software company to make $300.3 million, according to Thomson Reuters. … Read more

FileMaker Pro 10 released

Probably the most popular pro-level database maker for the Mac, FileMaker Pro has just released a major update to coincide with Macworld 2009. Offering a sleek new interface that's as nice to look at as it is intuitive, FileMaker Pro's new Status Toolbar puts commonly used features right where you need them. Even if you're not happy with the default layout of the new toolbar, you can easily customize the available icons to improve the work flow for specific projects.

The new browse feature gives you a centralized location for navigating to different parts of your database … Read more

Mickos: a New Year of 'radical transparency' for MySQL

Marten Mickos, SVP of Sun's database group, could be forgiven for resting on his billion-dollar laurels, having sold MySQL to Sun in early 2008 for $1 billion (despite an S1 to go public in the works). But on New Year's Eve, Mickos sent out a missive to "customers, partners, users, colleagues, [and] friends," declaring MySQL's "radical transparency" a commencement and coda for how the open-source database leader does business, pre-Sun and post-Sun.

Importantly, as Mickos calls out, it was Sun's acquisition that brought to a furious boil all the somewhat private tensions … Read more

Oracle posts lower profits, revenue up 6 percent

Oracle reported Thursday a 6 percent rise in fiscal second-quarter revenue over last year, fueled by growth in software sales and its support and maintenance business.

Net income for the quarter, however, declined 1 percent to $1.3 billion, or 25 cents a share, for the period ending November 30, compared with the previous year. Excluding special items, Oracle posted non-GAAP net income of $1.7 billion, or 34 cents a share. That was below Oracle's September forecast of 35 cents to 36 cents a share.

Oracle was up less than 1 percent in after-hours trading to $16.70 … Read more

Gartner targets $1 billion in open-source database revenue by 2013

For those who wonder if Sun Microsystems overpaid for MySQL, consider the recent findings by Gartner, and encapsulated in its report "The Growing Maturity of Open-Source Database Management Systems":

Open-source database use grew 50 percent in 2008. Gartner found that 73 percent of enterprises it surveyed are using open-source databases, up from 49 percent the previous year; Open-source database revenue grew 42.4 percent in 2008; and The open-source database market will top $1 billion by 2013.

As Zack Urlocker points out on his blog, and as Gartner also finds, "express" editions from Oracle and others … Read more

Listen in to Database Radio

EnterpriseDB CTO Bob Zurek was kind enough to have me on the his Database Radio program, with the audio feed here and the transcript here (PDF), which proved to be fun to record and hopefully an enlightening listen.

Bob asked me to name the top trends in open source. Here's my answer:

There have been two big ones that I've noticed lately. One is the opening up of the Web. Traditionally the Web (infrastructure) was open, but increasingly we have things like applications moving to the Web, things like Facebook, that were proprietary--maybe built on open source, but … Read more

HanDBase app goes finger-based on iPhone

DDH Software has modified its HanDBase app to fit the iPhone, and it's currently available in the Apple App Store for $9.99.

HanDBase is a known application for other smartphone platforms that lets users create and edit databases on their mobile devices. DDH Software's major mods for the iPhone include finger-friendly navigation that enables users to easily move between fields and records by swiping left or right on the screen.

Also unique to this version is the ability to e-mail records and the integration of the HanDBase Gallery, an online repository of more than 2,000 database … Read more

Oracle's Beehive buzzes at OracleWorld

SAN FRANCISCO--Oracle on Monday unveiled a new open enterprise software application designed to improve the way users collaborate and communicate on projects.

Oracle's Beehive is a 3-year-old project that the acquisition-happy software giant built from scratch. The goal is to take a company's setup, in which various communication and collaboration software applications from a number of vendors are running on an army of servers, and integrate the offerings into one Beehive system, Charles Phillips, Oracle co-president, said during the company's annual Oracle OpenWorld developers conference here.

Beehive seeks to take communication software, from e-mail to instant messaging … Read more

QuickTime and iTunes DoS exploit released

A serious new flaw was disclosed on Thursday that affects the latest versions of Apple's QuickTime and iTunes applications.

The National Vulnerability Database entry CVE-2008-4116 describes a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability within Apple's QuickTime 7.5.5 and iTunes 8.0 programs.

To infect a computer, a maliciously coded long-type attribute within a QuickTime tag might be placed on a Web page, or within a .mp4 or .mov file. This could allow remote attackers to crash the applications (known as a denial of service) or possibly execute arbitrary code on a compromised computer.

The announcement comes one week … Read more

Oracle names new chief financial officer

Oracle named Jeffrey Epstein as its new chief financial officer on Wednesday, marking its fourth CFO since its long-time bean counter Jeff Henley retired from that post four years ago.

Epstein, the former CFO of Oberon Media, will join the database and enterprise software applications vendor on September 8. Epstein will replace Safra Catz, who will remain an Oracle co-president and board director.

Epstein will report to Catz and assume responsibility for finance, the controller's office, finance operations, tax, treasury, real estate, investor relations, audit, and customer leasing.

Catz is returning to the co-president's role full-time, after a … Read more