CAST has announced Appamarq which is claimed to be the software industry’s first application quality benchmarking repository. Designed to help organizations manage their application software quality to reach both operational and business goals, the Appmarq database contains software quality statistics, trend data and best practices collected from a number of industry sectors and geographies.

Oracle has released Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition 4.0 including new features for high availability, scalability and performance. The Oracle press release also says that this demonstrates Oracle’s continuing commitment to open source, Java and the developer community.

When it comes to open source databases the two most obvious choices for the past few years have been MySQL and PostgreSQL. MySQL has been the more prominent one, with far higher adoption than PostgreSQL.

Following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun (who owns MySQL), most analysts expected to see a new fork or similar reactions from the MySQL open source database community. MySQL’s founder Monty Widenius has now initiated The Open Database Alliance, a vendor-neutral consortium designed to become the industry hub for the MySQL open source database.