AP - Kathy Melkey stands astride some of the fault lines between Barack Obama and John McCain.

Reuters - Republican John McCain made a surprise choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate on Friday, adding a political unknown to the presidential ticket who could help him appeal to women voters.

Oracle's technical forums have been racked with performance issues all week since the vendor upgraded the system.

Forums.oracle.com underwent a "long, long overdue" upgrade last weekend to Jive Forums 5.5, according to a blog post by Justin Kestelyn, editor in chief of Oracle Technology Network.

But apparently, some Oracle users have had to wait a long, long time to access the system, receiving error messages and experiencing slow performance overall.

The situation has users who did manage to get into the forums sounding off in colorful fashion.

"I do not care whether or not this forum has loads of funky new features -- if no one can get to the site and/or post anything, what's the point?," wrote one poster, "ATD," on Thursday.

"I would also like to register my disgust at what's been happening for several days and my sheer disappointment that Oracle, of all companies, would allow an application to go live without thorough testing or, if it was thoroughly tested in UAT, without rolling back immediately when it was obvious that there were problems in the production environment," ATD added.

Oracle teams have been scrambling to resolve the issues all week, according to Kestelyn, and uptime reached 80 percent by Wednesday, compared to 7 percent on Monday.

"Uptime is still not where it should be of course; forums.oracle.com is business-critical for a lot of folks (as well as for Oracle), and I'm glad they consider it so," he wrote.

"We made a conscious decision early in this process to stick with the upgrade; to fight through the problems instead of run from them," he added. "Regardless, I do want to apologize for the downtime you've suffered through thus far."

It is possible the company will change course platform-wise, he said. "Stability is our top priority - much more so than features. If we have to trade the latter for the former, we will."

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Open-source middleware maker Continuent has launched a database scale-out stack called Tungsten, which supports open-source databases like MySQL as well as proprietary ones from the likes of Oracle.

On Thursday, the company published code for Tungsten Replicator, a master-slave replication tool for MySQL, wrote Continuent CTO Robert Hodges in a blog post. Master-slave replication sees a "master" database sync up with a number of "slaves," allowing a workload to be scaled out.

"We started with master/slave replication on MySQL for a very simple reason: We know it well. And we know that while MySQL replication has many wonderful features like simple set-up, it also has many deficiencies that have persisted for a long time," Hodges wrote. Support for Oracle, PostgreSQL, and "many other databases" will follow, he added.

"The code is in the early stages but will mature very rapidly," he added. "We are looking forward to creating something that brings powerful replication within the reach of every database user."

Tungsten Replicator is part of the overall Tungsten stack.

The stack's capabilities include a failure protection function that keeps extra database replicas in the event the master fails and can automatically promote a slave to master status when needed. It also enables users to maintain and replicate database copies at a number of locations to aid disaster recovery, according to a statement.

The Tungsten project's site is located at community.continuent.com.

Continuent isn't trying to supplant high-end products like Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett said.

It instead hopes to provide "a potential incremental scale-out offering for customers using low-end databases and hardware that either can't afford or don't want to buy into the whole Oracle RAC architecture," he said.

"This is an interesting long-term opportunity, but in the near-term the most significant opportunities for Tungsten probably lie in improving the replication and high availability features for MySQL," Aslett added.