One of the perennial programmer debates can be caricatured as a threeway fight between adherents of MySQL , PostgreSQL , and Oracle (or the big irondatabase of your choice). As an example, you can see a recent roundstarting itself up here and here (both arguing what could be called the MySQL side).

Some time back it struck me that one way to think about how programsrelate to SQL databases is that they can be doing it at threedifferent conceptual levels. (And now that I have a

As with Fedora Core 4 , I haven't beenusing Solaris 9 long enough to have given it a fair shake. So insteadof any sort of review, this is just a collection of things that haveirritated me about it on first exposure.

I'll start with a nice simple one:

# useradd -m -c 'Chris Siebenmann' cks
UX: useradd: ERROR: Unable to create the home directory: Operation not applicable.

This is on a default configured Solaris 9 machine, straight out of

The next time a salesman tells you that a server needs redundant powersupplies for reliability, ask him if the server also has redundant CPUfans.

By now, most everyone understands that extended warranties on consumerelectronics are just overpriced insurance (hence why the salescrittertries to get you to buy them, as they're great profit for the store).Redundant power supplies are getting to be a standard option in serverconfigurations, and while they're not necessarily pointless I have tofeel that a fair number of people