April 24, 2010 – Mark's IT Blog

FIT9018: Week 7

Andy presented another high paced lecture this week, the theme was Deadlock and Inter-Process Communication. This is a continuation of the Process Management topic from last week.

As a recap:

Deadlocks: Can occur on any multitasking O/S where a single process is given exclusive access to a file, device or resource. Detailed conditions:
- Mutual Exclusion – One process can hold a resource exclusively
- Hold and Wait – A process can request a new resource over time whilst still holding other resources.
- No pre-emption – resources can only be released by the program that is holding them
- Circular Wait – 2 or more processes waiting for resources held the other processes.

FIT9019 – Week 7

Manoj presented lecute number 7 this week, titled “SQL III”. True to the title, we churned through 2 hours of SQL definitions and examples. Interestingly there are a number of differences between Oracle and MySQL. To really get the hang of SQL I have just set up a MySQL server on my home PC and running over the commands show in the lectures/tutorials and in the Text book.

Interestingly in some I stumbled upon the following in a google search: ‘On its earnings call last night, Oracle president Charles Phillips crowed about IDC data showing Oracle’s database share at 44.3% vs. 21% for IBM vs. 18.5% for Microsoft.’ Source: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/channel-marker/database-market-share-war-resumes/

This makes me wonder why Oracle is a such a superior option over other (is the actual product better?). On some further investigation (of Oracle’s wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Database)there may be a couple of major reasons:

Oracle Corporation claims to have provided:

the first commercially-available SQL-based database (1979)^[38]
the first database to support symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) (1983)
the first distributed database (1986)
the first database product tested to comply with the ANSI SQL standard (1993)^[38]
the first 64-bit database (1995)
the first database to incorporate a native JRE (1998)
the first proprietary RDBMS to become available on Linux (1998)^[39]
the first database to support XML (1999)

The name Oracle comes from the code-name of a CIA-funded project… <- hah