It’s been quite awhile since I last wrote a blog entry. For that, I apologize. I’ve been extremely busy at work and haven’t been able to spend much time on Oracle stuff lately. Regardless, this is what I’ve been up to and what you can expect to see soon.

SibylNet & Unofficial Specification of the Oracle Network Protocol

Oracle has given me permission to proceed with releasing my open source client software for Oracle, SibylNet. As such, I’ve been combining all of my past research into a single protocol specification and client library which I hope to release in Q1 2009.

Oracle vs. Postgres Benchmark

To end a long-running dispute I’ve had with the Postgres community regarding over-reliance on the operating system to achieve good database performance, I’ve performed a comparison benchmark between Oracle8i Standard Edition (circa 1999) and Postgres 8.3/8.4-dev (the latest version) on the exact same hardware. The results may or may not surprise you.

A Fast Password Cracker for Oracle

Years ago I had written a password cracker for Oracle8i/9i, but had given up on it. Though, after playing with Laszlo Toth’s woraauthbf awhile back, I decided to update mine to take full advantage of newer multi-core systems. After a bit of redesign, it now makes use of multi-threaded parallel processing, lock-free/nearly-wait-free cache-optimized hash tables, and atomic locking. I now believe I have the world’s fastest password cracker for Oracle… but I’ll leave that to others to test. I’m currently getting this re-ported to Windows and after letting a few select people test it, will release it as open source.

A three-part series of articles pertaining to database frontends for custom storage engines

In today’s business environment, most companies prefer to buy software rather than build it. However, over the past year and a half, I’ve been approached by three different companies looking for a good database frontend with which they could integrate their own internally-developed storage engines. As each of these companies ran into several of the same issues, I thought that this topic would make for a good series of articles not only for those generally interested in databases, but specifically those who may find themselves in the same situation. The three articles (and products mentioned) are as follows:

• Just What the Doctor Ordered (Dr. DeeBee Driver Kit)
• Swimming with the Dolphin (MySQL)
• An Elephant in the Room (Postgres)