As with all relational databases, MySQL can prove to be a complicated beast, one that can crawl to a halt at a moment's notice, leaving your applications in the lurch and your business on the line.

For many MySQL database admins, Amazon Web Services represents the brave new world of cloud computing -- one fraught with disappearing servers, disk I/O variability, and other shared resource challenges, not to mention questions regarding the security of data.

While many popular website applications (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.) are open source and therefore freely available, running these PHP-based apps on a Windows IIS web server requires a bit of retrofitting.

The NoSQL movement has spawned a slew of alternative data stores, all of which attempt to fill voids left by traditional relational database implementations. But while it's easy to fit the various relational databases (MySQL, Oracle, DB2, and so on) under a single categorical umbrella, the NoSQL world is much more diverse, and the NoSQL label is too general. NoSQL data stores such as MongoDB and Cassandra are so vastly different from each other that apples-to-apples comparisons are practically impossible. Thus, within the world of NoSQL, there are subcategories such as key-value stores, graph databases, and document-oriented stores.

A security researcher today criticized Oracle for neglecting to patch its core database products, noting that the massive update slated for later Tuesday will set a record for the fewest fixes.

People all over the world spend a total of eight billion minutes a day on Facebook. Some 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared every week, 400 billion Web pages are viewed every month and the site logs a staggering 25TB of data every day. David Recordon, senior open programs manager at Facebook, talks about how the social networking giant uses open source tools to achieve its massive app scalablilty.

SkyMapper, a newly-launched Australian observatory is playing a key role in the Southern Sky Survey project, a five-year initiative to map and study the observable universe from the southern hemisphere. Yet while Skymapper has the potential to find objects as large as Pluto drifting in our outer solar system and quasi-stellar objects on the far edge of the universe, scientists say the project is equally important because it heralds the arrival of a new era in astronomy -- one where researchers can draw on freely available online data about the universe instead of having to wait months, or even years, for a chance to observe the night sky through a billion-dollar physical telescope. The project is also powered by some serious IT and relies heavily on the open source community to run. It will also create one of Australia's largest databases at around 470 terabytes.