DataWebTect

We are planning for an online application and were knocked down by the decision of which database to use as both have their own set of advantages and disadvantages.

MySQL:

* Open source and unlimited licensing
* Most hosting companies support it without any additional cost
* Administration is trivial and most hosting companies do it.
* Integrates tightly with PHP as that is what we have decided for the front end
* Challenging if not impossible to write stored procedures/functions for the business logic layer in the application. This is a gray area as we are not all that familiar with MySQL.
* Learning curve as we are new to learning MySQL although we have rich experience in Oracle.
* No limitation on storage support.

Oracle XE:

* Free for a single license.
* Not many hosting companies support it and if they do they might charge extra.
*  Administration is involved and many hosting companies shy away from Oracle for its complications.
* The XE has some support to the  PHP
* We have around 15 years of combined experience which makes writing the procedures/functions for business logic trivial task.
* No learning curve.
* Limited storage support 1GB.

Given the above we are exploring the information for making our decision. Called our hosting company and they said that they do not support ORACLE because they run on Linux. Although there is an Oracle for Linux, the hosting company just shied away. There are others that we can pursue but the single most important decision for us is the hosting cost. We are just starting up and we do not have much leverage on the spending. We are still in the initial stage and the cost is limited when we move either way but if we go down far enough then the cost could be exorbitant because of the changes we need to make going back and the time that it delays the project. We need help and will be thankful if the experts out there throw some light for making our decision.

Currently reading the “Whole New Mind” by Daniel Pink.

A wonderful book that makes you feel as if you are reading fiction. He discusses about the important requirements for succeeding in the Conceptual age. Design. Story. Symphony. Empathy. Play. Meaning. A must read for anyone wishing to succeed in the new millennium.

Testing this post to see everything works the same.

I am almost there still trying to get back to my original condition.

Tell you what do not ever think about moving your hosting!!!!

A very insightful post “Developers are from Mars, Programmers are from Venus” from Hacknot. Very clear distinction has been made about the programmers and developers, a debate that existed since long time. This post tries to clarify some thoughts. From my personal perspective I believe most of the community starts as programmers at some point and they graduate to become developers. But some stay back because of their passion to new languages,technologies etc., So what are you a programmer or a developer?

Steve Rubel points us to Blog Juice calculator, where based on your popularity you would get your blog ranked. Here is my juice in the scale of 10. Not what I like but it is what it is. Check your juice.

As usual Tom Kyte blogs about a feature in PL/SQL that many people are not aware of. It is a challenge to deal with the global variables and on top of that if a thing like Tom pointed out happens you would be scratching your head to find the answer. In order keep your globals straight he suggests,

The other approach, when FORCED to use globals, assign them to another variable OR cause a temporary to be created (|| ‘’ for strings, +0 for dates, numbers…)

Check out his post for more detailed information.

Intel has started blogging with the first post about the Information Overload, identified via Scobleizer. A really impressive must read and subsequent posts are also interesting but could not subscribe as I could not find the feed.

Regarding information overload, Nathan Zeldes talks about the E-mail and other distractions that reduce the knowledge workers productivity. It is true and the distractions really take their toll and you get lost. For example you might be working on some deliverable and a email pops up saying that something is wrong with other product and you go to put out the fires and by the time you are done you wont know where you left and it would take long time to make up your mind to finish off the task that you were doing before the interruption. Somedays you completely forget until, in shower or sleep, you remember that you forgot an important deliverable. Immediatly scramble up to fix in your laptop.

You can get some breather by organizing and just shutting down your outlook when you are working on an important task but there is no respite from the phone. You will get interrupted and even if you ignore your office phone the cell phone monster would make you answer the call . Let us wait for Nathan Zeldes to give us some pointers to reduce this stress.

Update: The feed is found here and I have misspelled Nathan’s name and my apologies. Thanks for pointing out Josh.

I do not know what happened but for some reason October was not motivating or something I did not post a single post untill now. I might have thought that I have already posted or something. Anyway here are few blurbs:

• Attended a thought provoking and interesting seminar in IEEE titled Cryptography 101 outling the history of Enigma. There is part II which Cryptography 102 in Nov and this is going to cover PGP and other latest technologies. FYI this is happening in the Phoenix chapter.
• Added the Text link ads as you can see in the blog. It is another way of making  money for the blog besides adsense. Check it out. They also have rss ads, pretty cool.
• Stumbled across the Skype developer network and listened to the presentations in the tutorial area and was hooked to it. Looks like te Tellme Studio and limitless voice application possibilities are going to be the future.
• The community brouhaha about the Google You tube Rumor form Hitwise, Techcrunch. My take on this would be it would create a monopoly monster that could deprive the  other players  a level playing ground.
• Reading John Baettle’s Search
• Trying to think of a mashup among other things.