Oracle Donates Data Integrity Code to Linux

Some interesting news just came over the wires: Oracle, that really big database company you may have heard of, and Emulex, a smaller host bus adapter vendor you may not have heard about yet, just announced that donation of block I/O data integrity infrastructure code to the Linux kernel.

In fact, the code is already in Linux 2.6.27.

According to Oracle, the new code enables Linux to provide additional check points and helps eliminate silent data corruption by reducing the potential for incorrect data to be written to the disk, decreasing application and database errors and system down-time.

This is a pretty good deal, because the reduction of data corruption on the I/O level is potentially a big problem. What's even nicer is to see Oracle playing nice with the community with the contribution of this code. Oracle has a rep for not playing well with others, so some open source goodness will help counter this perception.

For more details on the topic, visit Enterprise Storage Forum.