Developer Week in Review: Lion drops pre-installed MySQL

MySQL is missing from Lion Server, and Apple gets a slap on the wrist from South Korea.

A busy week at Casa Turner, as the infamous Home Renovations of Doom wrap up, I finish the final chapters of “Developing Enterprise iOS Applications” (buy a copy for all your friends, it’s a real page turner!), pack for two weeks of vacation with the family in California (Palm Springs in August, 120 degrees, woohoo!), and celebrate both a birthday and an anniversary.

But never fear, WIR fans, I’ll continue to supply the news, even as my MacBook melts in the sun and the buzzards start to circle overhead.

The law of unintended consequences

Lion ServerIf you decide to install Lion Server, you may notice something missing from the included software: MySQL. Previous releases of OS X server offered pre-installed MySQL command line and GUI tools, but they are AWOL from Lion. Instead, the geek-loved but less widely used Postgres database is installed.

It seems pretty obvious to the casual observer why Apple would make this move. With Oracle suing Google over Java, and Oracle’s open source philosophy in doubt, I know I wouldn’t want to stake my bottom line on an Oracle package bundled with my premiere operating system. Apple could have used one of the non-Oracle forks of MySQL, but it appears they decided to skirt the issue entirely by going with Postgres, which has a clear history of non-litigiousness.

Meanwhile, Oracle had better be asking themselves if they can afford to play the games they’ve been playing without alienating their market base.

South Korea fines Apple 3 million won, which works out to …

Apple has bee been hit with a penalty from the South Korean government that’s a result of the iPhone location-tracking story that broke earlier this year. Now, Apple may have more money than the U.S. Treasury sitting in petty cash right now, but it will be difficult for them to recover from such a significant hit to their bottom line: a whopping 3 million won, which works out to a staggering … um … $2,830. Never mind.

Strata Conference New York 2011, being held Sept. 22-23, covers the latest and best tools and technologies for data science — from gathering, cleaning, analyzing, and storing data to communicating data intelligence effectively.

Save 30% on registration with the code STN11RAD

Java 7 and the risks of X.0 software

Java 7 was recently released to the world with great fanfare and todo. This week, we got a reminder why using an X.0 version of software is a risky endeavor. It turns out that the optimized compiler is really a pessimized compiler, and that programs compiled with it stand a chance of crashing. Even better, there’s a chance they’ll just go off and do the wrong thing.

Java 7 seems to be breaking new ground in non-deterministic programming, which will be very helpful for physics researchers working with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. What could be more appropriate for simulating the random behavior of particles than a randomly behaving compiler?

Got news?

Please send tips and leads here.

Related:

tags: , , , , , , ,