Oracle is now slowly beginning to re-brand Sun certifications. The certification hierarchy for EE 6 now aligns more with Oracle’s vision of certifications by introducing sub categories and clubbed certification packages ( you become a master when you complete all the certifications in a package ).
A detailed FAQ is now available on the Oracle blog about what changes are taking place and why. The things to look out for are
- The Sun brand of certification
- Procedure to buy exam vouchers
- Changes to certification objectives
- Changes to the procedure used to certify
The FAQ covers some of the points mentioned above. If you are preparing for an existing certification, there is no point waiting for changes. Like the fate of all Sun related projects, certifications will also evolve and time will tell what it looks like a few months from now.
Nautilus SVN, the SVN client for linux had moved to RabbitVCS a few months back. From what I have read so far, the new client, while plugging into the old Nautilus manager, performs much better and does not hang up when the number of files to manage is on the rise.
RabbitVCS differs from Nautilus by attempting to have a pluggable interface for many types of source control systems. So SVN is just the beginning. You can check out the screenshots and install it on your favorite linux distro. Here are a few teasers
RabbitVCS:
Commit with the Rabbit:
I logged into a gmail inbox today, surprised to find ‘Google Buzz’ asking me if I wanted in. I clearly said ‘No’. Not yet another social network. pfft. So after I said ‘No’ there it was sitting comfortably on the navigation bar and telling me people were following me and I could follow them.
There is a small link on the bottom of your Gmail page that says ‘turn off buzz‘. Click on that and you get disconnected from the social network. I wonder what google plans for Orkut.
After project owners were asked to move out of kenai.com, Oracle now admits that it did a poor job at communicating its plans for the project. An updated post from Oracle says that the future of kenai.com projects is secure. Those projects will be migrated to java.net and continued as is. Here is an extract from the post
We don’t believe it makes sense to continue investing in multiple hosted development sites that are basically doing the same thing. Our plan is to shut down kenai.com and focus our efforts on java.net as the hosted development community. We are in the process of migrating java.net to the kenai technology. This means that any project currently hosted on kenai.com will be able to continue as you are on java.net. We are still working out the technical details, but the goal is to make this migration as seamless as possible for the current kenai.com projects
I ran into a weird little error while trying to tune the performance of a query in the oracle database. A table had an index on a VARCHAR2 column. After a fair number of inserts were made the population of this table grew to 1.5 million records. A query that did an join on the VARCHAR2 column was talking ages to get the results. Well, it was taking 900ms actually but the SLA for the API call is way below that.
An “explain plan for QUERY” statement was run followed by a select from plan_details. It turns out the index is never used and a full table scan was used to get the data. Hence the problem.