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.
Sun has a wide range of certifications to offer. Ever since java EE6 was released, changes have been made to the certification hierarchy and content to reflect the new specifications. Sun is also offering a discount of 10% to those that register for training / certification updates by Jan 31st 2010. Here is a comparison of the certification hierarchies
Old hierarchy:
New hierarchy:
The new hierarchy provides paths that are more specialized than the ones before. For example you can be a JSF expert. Web service + security is another specialization. Combining these certifications together can also earn you the title of a “Master“.
A few days ago the EU had approved the takeover of Sun microsystems by Oracle. This brings to an end the long awaited acquisition. There have been several blog entries about the fate of the open source projects that Sun currently supports. I have read some of the arguments put forward about why developers should move away from / use certain projects.
However I also find myself in a dilemma. I installed GlassFish and deployed a few apps on it recently. I found it interesting and was impressed with it within a few minutes of using it. MySql is also a great open source project. There are many tools built around the database and it competes well with PostGresql. Netbeans is also a great IDE and supports glassfish.
I have been a tad busy fixing some weird little bugs lately. They helped me appreciate the multitude of things that can go wrong in a live environment and served as a gentle reminder that you should always be on your heels.
Here they are
1. LDAP and the user
A web application product was configured to use an LDAP directory structure. The directory was segregated into roles / groups / OUs, the usual. One of the users had trouble logging into the product. This was weird because this person was a valid user and Outlook seemed to recognize him. Outlook uses the same LDAP tree. So I dug into it. The easiest way to check what is going on is to use a LDAP directory browser. I use the one provided by Novell for free. The LDAPs support is not great but it will do for basic lookups.