Once again Sun has managed to miss the dead line for the SCJP Pus Beta certification. Last year Sun made an attempt to launch SCJP Plus but decided to delay it until JDK7 was launched. The SCJP plus BETA page has hence been changed to reflect the new BETA dates.
The new certification was supposed to change the way candidates took the exam by allowing them to code their way into earning their certificate. No more would the exam be served as one that has 100% multiple choice questions. Had the launch been a success candidates would have been confronted with coding problems, drag and drop questions and a reduced number of multiple choice questions.
The dead line to pick the candidates was February the 15th. That has been missed since none of the candidates were sent an email telling them about the status of their BETA exam. The exam was supposed to be launched by March 1st. This date has also been missed.
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.
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.
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.