Comments for The Invisible Database

Comment on How to Interface Proprietary Code with GPL Code by Chris Kleisath, Senior Director of Engineering

Chris Kleisath, Senior Director of Engineering — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:25:26 +0000

@Clark: As I have stated previously in this thread, the GPL is a complex agreement, and is made even more so because of statements such as this than are open to a variety of interpretations.

That said, my own interpretation of this section of the GPL (Section 5) is somewhat different. In our own case, we created a new standard interface (DBCAPI) to allow a broader range of application tools easier access to the SQL Anywhere database server. This forms part of the SQL Anywhere “program”.

Anyone is free to use this interface from any tool that would like to interface to the database server. As an example of how to use this interface from various tools, we implemented an add-on for Ruby that interfaces through the new generic interface. The Ruby driver is released under the GPL because it becomes part of Ruby.

The fact that we make the Ruby driver available in an easy way to SQL Anywhere customers is an “aggregate”.

Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.

Comment on How to Interface Proprietary Code with GPL Code by Clark C. Evans

Clark C. Evans — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:51:14 +0000

While this mode of reasoning may work with GPLv2, this loophole seems to be closed in the GPLv3 which requires that you license “the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged”.

Comment on Multi-Tenant Database Architecture – Part 3 by Challenges with Shared Schema Database Model for Multiple Tenants in the Cloud | The Invisible Database

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:12:18 +0000

[...] I described in Part 5 of my series on Multi-Tenant Database Architectures published in 2009 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). The important thing I would like to ensure you realize is that there ARE other options. [...]

Comment on Multi-Tenant Database Architecture – Part 5 by Challenges with Shared Schema Database Model for Multiple Tenants in the Cloud | The Invisible Database

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:11:53 +0000

[...] used by other vendors to refer to the “Shared Schema” approach I described in Part 5 of my series on Multi-Tenant Database Architectures published in 2009 (1, 2, 3, 4, [...]

Comment on Behind Every “Cloud” There are Real People by Chris Kleisath, Senior Director of Engineering

Chris Kleisath, Senior Director of Engineering — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:50:37 +0000

@Randall: It is unclear if the multi-tenant capabilities of SQL Anywhere OnDemand Edition are what you require. If you do require the multi-tenant support that we are offering, then I would encourage you to at least have a look at what we are offering. As an example, the short video demonstration on our Fuji Beta Web site may give you a better idea if SQL Anywhere OnDemand may be an alternative option. Also, while we have not yet released pricing details, we certainly do plan to offer what I will call "cloud appropriate" pricing models.

Comment on Behind Every “Cloud” There are Real People by Randall Jordan

Randall Jordan — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 22:03:35 +0000

The only trouble is, you are years late to the party. I’m in the middle of converting a major Sybase ASE installation into MySQL, that is already in the Amazon RDS cloud. Using a stepping stone of Sybase ASE running on an Amazon EC2 instance (elastic Computing) Cloud. A place Sybase should have been back in 2009 when they announced ‘Cloud’ support.

Comment on Behind Every “Cloud” There are Real People by Chris Kleisath, Senior Director of Engineering

Chris Kleisath, Senior Director of Engineering — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:59:34 +0000

@Randall: SQL Anywhere OnDemand is being developed primarily to enable Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to more easily manage and deploy multi-tenant, hosted applications. It is based on SQL Anywhere Server, one of the leading databases for ISV applications today. It is being developed FOR the ISVs that are looking to host databases in a cloud environment. Certainly, Sybase ASE could be used by customers looking to implement a more traditional Shared Schema type of cloud offering.

Comment on Behind Every “Cloud” There are Real People by Randall Jordan

Randall Jordan — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:40:51 +0000

So where is Sybase ASE? Why isn’t Sybase in the Cloud?

Comment on Fuji is Released to Beta! by Chris Kleisath, Senior Director of Engineering

Chris Kleisath, Senior Director of Engineering — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:47:01 +0000

@Ming Lei: The quote you refer to from Larry Ellison (of Oracle) can be found here, on the TechWorld site. Larry was specifically referring to the Salesforce.com multi-tenant model, where everyone's data is intermingled with everyone else's data. This model (which I called the "Shared Schema" model in part 5 of my series on various architectures for multi-tenant databases) relies on the application to enforce security, hence the "bad security model" comment from Larry. The quote from Larry Ellison is confirming that SQL Anywhere OnDemand Edition is a great model! SQL Anywhere OnDemand uses a separate database for EACH tenant. This could easily be called virtualization. We plan to write more about the great security aspects of SQL Anywhere OnDemand Edition over the next couple months. Thank you for your comment.

Comment on Fuji is Released to Beta! by Ming lei

Ming lei — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 07:25:20 +0000

Get one comment from CEO of Oracle about multi-tenancy :

Larry Ellison’s comments on the subject:

That’s a very bad security model. It’s called multi-tenancy and it was state of the art 15 years ago. This is 2011. All the modern compute clouds use virtualisation as part of their security model. You get a separate virtual machine, your data’s in a separate database because it’s virtualised. They put your data at risk by commingling it with others.”
So,what’s the difference between multi-tenancy and virtulization,what’s sweet point use case for our Sql anywhere cloud?