For the week of July 6th, 2012:

• OEM Ops Center 12c Update 1 (OEM Ops Center 12cU1) Now Available
• Google submits $4 million bill for costs in Oracle lawsuit

“IOUG Podcast 06-JUL-2012 OEM Ops Center 12cU1 / Google sends $4 million bill to Larry”

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OEM Ops Center 12cU1

Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c update 1 (OEM Ops Center 12cU1) was announced this week. This is a bundled patch release for OEM Ops Center 12c – the latest version of the product line formerly known as 11g Grid Control.  The significant change for the 12c release was a change from being a paid-product under most support agreements to becoming a free-of-charge supported-release product under Oracle’s newer Premier Support agreements for Operating Systems and Engineered Systems.  Since the Ops Center 12c acts as the bridging application between Oracle Support and your deployed systems, including it for free was a natural evolution towards becoming a prerequisite installation for managed systems and those running Oracle Enterprise Linux.

The key features of OEM Ops Center 12cU1 are:

• Oracle VM SPARC Server Pool High Availability Policies
• Automatic Upgrades from Ops Center 11g Update 3 and Ops Center 12c
• Oracle Linux 5.8 and 6.x Support
• Oracle Virtual Datacenters for SPARC
• WANBoot Improvements with Open Boot Prompt Handling Enhancements
• SPARC SuperCluster Support
• A number of stability fixes

This new release contains significant enhancements in the update provisioning, bare metal OS provisioning, shared storage,  cloud, and networking management sections of the product.  Customers should experience better handling of Auto Service Request faults,  be able to more easily provision and allocate storage for virtual guests, better insight into their IP network multipathing and Virtual LAN configurations, achieve better LDAP integration,  access virtualization aware firmware patching, and observe improved product performance across the board. Also, Oracle VM SPARC and T4 deployments can now be managed through production status.

Visit oracle.com/technetwork for more details on the Update pack or to download it when it becomes available after July 9, 2012.

Oracle’s Patent and Copyright Lawsuit Against Google

From an article this week by Joe Mullen, a blogger specialist in technology law, on arstechnica.com, a digital Conde Nast publication site, Oracle’s patent and copyright lawsuit against Google back in April, cost the search engine giant more than $4 million, the company said in court documents filed yesterday, mostly to process the mountains of documents associated with the litigation. Those costs don’t include lawyers’ fees, which was probably the largest cost for both sides in the case.

Google’s costs fall into three categories: $2.9 million for processing and duplicating documents, approximately $1 million for paying one-half of fees for the court-appointed damages expert, and $143,000 for paying for transcripts needed for the case.

The documents reveal some other interesting numbers about the wide scope of this litigation, which culminated in a six-week trial that was a big loss for Oracle:

• In total, Google collected 97 million documents from more than 86 sources. An outside document vendor, FTI Inc., searched those documents for relevant terms and converted the relevant results to TIFF images for Oracle to examine, and for use at trial.
• Google handed over more than 3.3 million documents in response to Oracle’s requests, spanning more than 20 million pages.
• Sixty witnesses were deposed, with several deposed more than once.

In the landmark six-week legal battle completed earlier in May this year,  Judge William Alsup ruled that the structure of the Java APIs that Oracle was trying to assert, cannot be copyrighted. Only the program code itself—not the “how-to” instructions represented by APIs—can be the subject of a copyright claim. “So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API,” wrote the judge.

Alsup compared APIs to a library, with each package as a bookshelf in the library, each class a book on the shelf, and each method a chapter out of a how-to book. “As to the 37 packages, the Java and Android libraries are organized in the same basic way but all of the chapters in Android have been written with implementations different from Java but solving the same problems and providing the same functions.” The declarations, or headers, “must be identical to carry out the given function,” wrote Alsup.

Ninety-seven percent of the source code in the API packages is different; it’s only the three percent that overlaps that formed the heart of Oracle’s copyright claim. That three percent included packages, methods, and class names. But those declarations, such as starting a function with package java.lang, can only be used in certain ways. “In order to declare a particular functionality, the language demands that the method declaration take a particular form,” noted Alsup

The key takeaways from this lawsuit are related to Oracle’s decision to purchase an open source-based product line, such as Sun’s Java and attempt to protect it now as company-owned intellectual property. This clearly failed in this case. We would expect similar challenges in Oracle’s recent release of its NoSQL product, based upon a BerkeleyDB build, the OracleR products for Hadoop’s MapReduce statistical analysis functions, and even the Oracle Big Data Appliance powered by Cloudera’s Apache Hadoop distribution and toolset, both of which compete with similarly named and available open source packages.

You may read the entire analysis of the original decision at arstechnica.com or perhaps just Google(tm) it.  For a more detailed overview of how Oracle’s NoSQL stands up to the other NoSQL products visit dbmsmusings.blogspot.com for Daniel Abadi’s (@daniel_abadi) excellent analysis of the product. Information on OracleR is available from oracle.com/technetwork under Database  Database Options  Advanced Analytics and info on Cloudera and its Oracle R Connector for Hadoop (ORCH) is available at cloudera.com