Planet of the Apes Meets Virtualization

I've always liked movies and books that have a what if scenario built into the story.  The most famous is probably the Planet of the Apes movies.  Charleton Heston plays an out of place and time human living in an upside down world where apes have evolved to control and own the world.  Humans are the the ones living in the jungle and being used as lab test subjects.  It asks the question - What if humans and apes switched places?

Here's a key scene from the movie where the apes find out that Charleton Heston's character can talk for first time.

The apes are all of the sudden faced with an entirely new set of facts that could potentially change their entire world. The result is stunned silence (at least initially).

As a fun exercise Kong and I considered the question "What if virtualization had never been invented?" in So Say SMEs episode 7.  We discussed some aspects of how technology would be different.  It's not a drastic as if apes were ruling the Earth, but still pretty interesting.

In order for virtualization to be added into an environement for the first time, somebody has to be Charleton Heston and bring the new way of thinking the forefront.  I know that a few years ago many virtualization advocates inside companies would get similar reactions as he got in the movie when suggesting to virtualize Exchange, SQL Server, or Oracle RAC.  What was different was it was the "server huggers" who would say "Get Your Stinking Paws Off My Servers!".  The other difference is that the virtualization guy doesn't end up on the beach looking at the ruined statue of liberty. Instead, he ends up with a better way to run and manage the data-center.

Todd

A Big Year for the DVD Store

Last year was really a big year for the open source DVD Store database test kit that I co-created and co-manage with Dave Jaffe.  We were talking about the DVD Store a couple of days ago and he pointed out that the DVD Store was a pretty busy place last year.

In December of 2010 (which was practically 2011) we released version 2.1 of the DVD Store which included lots of new features.  Some key features were the ability to create any size DVD Store database, a driver program that can put load against multiple DVD Store databases at the same time, and some wizards that make it easier to install and get running.

Dave also put together a couple of videos that show the complete process of getting the DVD Store up and running on SQL Server and MySQL.

In December we added support for PostgreSQL/vPostgres database type.  This means that the DVD store now supports four database types - SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL/vPostgres.

The DVD Store is a fun project to work on and it is great to continue to see it used across the industry by many different people in a variety of tests.  Let me know if you have any questions or requests for new features.

Todd