June 3 - 11:50am EDT   Oracle chief Larry Ellison late Tuesday said (registration required) his company may jump into the netbook field in the aftermath of its buyout of Sun. While referenced casually at the JavaOne conference, the expansion into computers is considered a logical offshoot by Ellison given Sun's experience in hardware and other fields outside of Oracle's preferred database apps. [full story]

April 28 - 11:20am EDT   AquaFold has posted the v7.5 update to its database administration tool, Aqua Data Studio. The software supports Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server, among other platforms. The latest version offers a new file search tool that searches the complete contents of files, and two added editors for Java and JavaScript. Also present are additional charts, enhanced performance, and more languages to choose from. Performance improvements emphasize a 40 percent reduction in memory consumption when retrieving sizable text and grid results. [full story]

April 20 - 8:25am EDT   Oracle today said it would buy Sun for about $7.4 billion, or $9.50 per share. The move gives Oracle both a significantly stronger position in databases, letting it produce the servers that run its apps, as well as access to Sun's software. Oracle will have access to Java as well as Sun's Solaris operating system and promises to invest heavily in both. [full story]

April 15 - 3:40pm EDT   Microsoft today said it had been given a second extension by the European Commission to prepare a response against antitrust charges that it has unfairly controlled web browsers. Having already been given a first extension that gave it until April 21st, the American firm has until April 28th to provide its own stance and early defense against the claims. Why the added time is required hasn't been formally explained. [full story]

April 3 - 8:25pm EDT   IBM's rumored deal to take over Sun may close as soon as the start of next week, multiple sources indicate. Initially thought by sources of both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal (one, two) to be worth as much as $7 billion, the Financial Times now says negotiations and the market have tentatively pushed that number down to $6 billion but that a deal could be made public as early as Monday. Discussions are characterized as hectic and have the price changing from moment to moment. [full story]

November 20 - 11:40am EST   PremiumSoft has introduced the first Mac version of Navicat for Oracle, its Oracle administration tool. Users are able to produce and edit databases, generate reports and SQL queries, and connect to multiple databases as well as remote ones. Its interface is primarily graphical, and users are provided with tools for related tasks such as SSH tunneling or data and structure sync. [full story]

October 14 - 1:00pm EDT   AquaFold has released Aqua Data Studio 7.0, updating the database administration tool (for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and others) with a new Entity Relationship (ER) Modeler. The Modeler allows users to create, save and modify diagrams, and extract diagrams from databases. The contents of ER diagrams, once edited or created, are scriptable and can be converted into schema objects, allowing both forward and reverse engineering of database structures. [full story]

September 22 - 3:20pm EDT   Oracle has announced Oracle Business Approvals, Mobile Sales Assistant and Mobile Sales Forecast for the iPhone, coming in November. Oracle Business Approvals includes Oracle Business Approvals for Managers and Oracle Business Approvals for Sales Managers, each providing actionable intelligence for on the go decisions, including info on expenses, purchase requisitions, HR vacancies and job offers for managers and sales info such as pending sales quotes. [full story]