News and Views of a Technical Nomad

Jan

28

I meant to mention this a few days ago, but as usual, Real Life TM caught up with me in the shape of my current Siebel project in the form of weekend work!

The ecosystem of the IT World is constantly evolving and on the same day that it was announced that Sun Microsystems was to purchase MySQL AB, it was also announced on 16th January that Oracle had agreed to purchase Middle-Tier vendor BEA for 7.2 Billion USD.

This is a further development in the recent saga in which the big fish of the IT World are swallowing their smaller more-specialised  brethren.

According to Forrester Research Senior Analyst James Kobielus, enterprise service oriented architecture (SOA) will be the big winner in this transaction. He explained in an interview today that the current SOA market is consolidating into “SOA masterbrands,” and the combination of Oracle and BEA will ensure its position as a major player.  

“BI [business intelligence] is the crown jewel of SOA,” he said. “BEA doesn’t have much [in the way of] BI” — but, if you add Oracle’s own branded BI products plus Hyperion and Seibold, “it’s a perfect fit.”

That’s just one example: “If you actually match up the vendors in their strengths and weaknesses in SOA, there’s more that’s complementary than meets the eye.”

The acquisition may also help Oracle finally step fully into the .NET arena — if it wants to — according to Forrester Senior Vice President Merv Adrian. “BEA has a lot to bring to the [.NET] party,” he commented. “Whether or not [Oracle] chooses to treat this as an opportunity to open the door for interop or whether it chooses not to will be one of the most interesting things to watch for in the upcoming months.”

Others are not quite so enthusiastic however…

Dave Rosenberg, CEO of MuleSource, an open source company competing with Oracle and BEA in the SOA space, said in a statement e-mailed to reporters today that the merger will be an opportunity for companies like his. “It’s great news for anyone who competes with BEA,” he said. “The company has not had its eye on the ball for months now, and the fact that the software will be swallowed up by the Oracle machine means there is a very real opportunity with their customer base…”

Well, he would say that wouldn’t he?

Source: Redmond Developer News

Jan

28

Microsoft said this week that the release of the upcoming SQL Server 2008 would be pushed back to sometime in Q3.

It will still be launched officially on 27 February 2008 however.

Source: The Data Platform Insider

Jan

17

Well, the big news of the evening for me was this item in Redmond Developer News.

Sun Microsystems today said it will acquire MySQL, the leading supplier of open source database software, for $1 billion.

MySQL’s 2007 revenues were approximately $75 million, according to Gartner analyst Donald Feinberg. “It’s by far the most widely used in production of the open source DBMSes,” he said.

The platform is a fast growing open source database, boasting customers including Facebook, Google, China Telecom, Toyota and others. MySQL entered the enterprise database market two years ago with MySQL 5.0.

Observers say Sun’s acquisition of MySQL should have little bearing on the overall database landscape. However, it will position Sun in the growing data warehouse and business intelligence appliance market.

While this deal is part of the ongoing trend that we have seen in recent years of the big fish of the IT Pond snapping up their smaller rivals and is not unexpected; I am not sure whether I am happy or sad with this news.

On the one hand, a company like Sun with a huge salesforce can put a lot more resources into selling MySQL into all sorts of corporate clients who might not have considered MySQL in the past and Sun’s product development skills are pretty stellar as well; on the other hand, is MySQL open-source any more and what does this mean for the wider MySQL “community”.

I like MySQL and I have been quite impressed with it running both my Wordpress weblogs on it as well as my Adsense reporting database (Asrep); but I run it on Windows and not Linux or Solaris. I have even been considering using it as a client database in my ordersofbattle system.

So, where does this acquisition leave MySQL’s Windows users?

Sun, under Scott McNealy, was well known for having a very hard-line anti-Microsoft attitude - so much so that Scott McNealy would not allow the clerical staff at Sun Microsystems to even use MS Office. Will Sun continue to support and develop MySQL under Windows or will this acquisition drive such people back to SQL Server.

I sincerely hope that MySQL continues to flourish under Windows, but we will have to wait and see.

Source: Redmond Developer News

Jan

17

Dr Dobbs Journal has a pretty interesting article today about an extension to LINQ called Continuous LINQ (or CLINQ) which allows developers to create datasets through LINQ in which the data contents are “dynamic” in the sense that they detect changes to the underlying data in the database and update the dataset to reflect the changes so that the user does not have to manually requery the database.

On its own, LINQ is a fantastic addition to the arsenal of any developer writing virtually any kind of application. The true power of the .NET Framework 3.5 comes with your ability to enhance the functionality of LINQ using language extensions. Language extensions let you create your own overridden implementations for Where, OrderBy, GroupBy, and the like. Continuous LINQ (CLINQ) is just one sample of such an extension to LINQ that was created using this facility.

Continuous LINQ works by attaching listeners, or adapters, to the source collection when the Where, OrderBy, and GroupBy language extensions are invoked. At some point in the future, it might support other extensions as well, but these were the most important. The adapter’s job is to listen to changes to the source collection, including all items in the source collection, and decide if that change needs to be propagated to the destination collection.

This sounds like a clever idea, although sadly I cannot at this point see a major use for it in my ordersofbattle database.

Source: Dr. Dobb’s Portal

Jan

17

The big news of the day for me is that the .NET Framework source libraries are now available to developers to help them debug .NET applications.

ScottGu has the low-down on how to use the source code from VS 2008.

Source: ScottGu

Jan

11

Back at work!

January 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Well, the New Year is here and I have been pretty bad at updating this site in recent weeks so this is an attempt to redress this.

I am now back in Europe and while still somewhat jetlagged I am hard at work trying to fix issues so that the Siebel project I am on can go live in the next few weeks; what that means is that there is no rest for the wicked as I have to fix Siebel Integration bugs this weekend.

One of the enjoyable things about integration work is the sheer variety of technologies that one comes into contact with: XML, Web Services, SOAP, Workflow, Scripting (both inside Siebel and outside), Business Components and Business Services, SQL, SQL Server, Oracle, HTML, COM, MQ Series, Middleware technologies, Integration Objects, Datamaps etc - the list goes on and on. Every integration is different.

Of course, what this means is that one can never “know” everything and that one is always learning something new.

I have been doing Siebel since 2000 (and I had 17 years experience in IT before that) and I learn something new on every project; which is a good thing as life would be pretty boring if I knew everything in my job.

On the home front, the new Mini-ITX box is working very well and I am now developing in Visual Studio 2005 on it which is a far more pleasant experience than on my laptop. I have also got Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 up and running and I hope to start using it in earnest soon. I have the box with me in Europe and access via Remote Desktop from my laptop works a treat. I expect to be using as my main Order of Battle data input client very soon and I have now got replication running between it and my server in Canada. It is also extremely portable and I had no problem bringing it and two laptops over the Atlantic with me in my computer backpack.

Currently, I am rewriting a lot of my VB.NET code to take advantage of some new controls that came in in .NET Framework 2.0 in order to make my Order of Battle Windows Client more user friendly on a small screen. I have also created new User Controls which are composite controls which include labels as this makes it easier to create forms that are easily resizable.

Still no sign of the HTC Touch Cruise however, Expansys are still expecting on 23rd January but of course I am now in Europe so I don’t expect to see it in person for a while.

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