Announced on monday, Oracle VM is now available for download. Oracle VM is touted as three time faster than the competition, but this claim is taken with a grain of salt. With the availability of the software, performance tests are now possible. Oracle is heavily pushing its own virtualisation solution against competitors, only supporting its products running in virtualised environments if it is virtualised with Oracle VM.
Guest operating system supported by Oracle VM are several versions of Oracle Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows. Note however that Windows runs significantly slower than on a physical machine, and that Oracle is working on Windows drivers to improve the situation.

SymmetricDS reached version 1.0 early november. It is a "web-enabled, database independent, data synchronization software. It uses web and database technologies to replicate tables between relational databases in near real time. The software was designed to scale for a large number of databases, work across low-bandwidth connections, and withstand periods of network outage.". Database triggers can be used for synchronisation, garanteeing atomicity of operations, but push and pull of data at intervals is also possible. Advanced features such as data filtering and re-routing are also available. Mysql and Oracle are supported out of the box, but other adapters can be developed.

As seen on The Server Side.

Oracle announced that it has ported Yast, the setup tool originally found in SuSe's distribution, to its own linux distribution based on and compatible RedHat Enterprise Linux.