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.

The BETA page was updated since last year to include more details. The BETA exam contains 9 coding problems and several drag and drop questions sprinkled with some multiple choice questions. The time allocated to finish the entire thing is 6 hours Of course the real exam would not have 9 problems and allocate each candidate 6 hours. BETA exams try to drill candidates and then decide how easy / tough the exam is based on how much everyone scores. The pass % is also decided based on the BETA test.

Given that BETA exams are underway for some Oracle certifications it is unclear why Sun is lagging behind. Previous BETAs held by Sun have not dragged on for this long and the dates were always honored.

Whatever the reasons for the delay, I hope Sun / Oracle manage to launch the updated training / certification agenda successfully next time.

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

• Sun’s retake promotions

• The Sun brand of certification

• Procedure to buy exam vouchers

• Changes to certification objectives

• Changes to the procedure used to certify

• Contacts

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

Most developers seem to be moving out of kenai.com after being asked to leave. For those of you that do not want to move, there may still be hope

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.

So all I have to do is find out why the index is not being picked up. It probably has to do with statistics, and a rebuild on the index might help I thought. Or may be I need to analyze the index. So I went about trying to do some of these things. There were no DBAs around so I had to experiment a little.

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analyze INDEX YOUR_INDEX_NAME validate structure;
 
Error: ORA-01418: specified INDEX does NOT exist
 
SQLState:  72000
ErrorCode: 1418

This was totally weird. I knew that the index did exist and the name was correct. To double check I ran this query

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SELECT * FROM all_indexes WHERE INDEX_NAME='YOUR_INDEX_NAME'

And it did return my index correctly. After trying several other commands related to indexes they all returned the same thing. I tried to prefix the SCHEMA name and that did not help.

So it turns out, I do not have permissions to create indexes or do any operations related to them and that is what throws this error. The error is pretty misleading since there already exists an error code for insufficient prvileges for performing a given operation – Error: ORA-00990: missing or invalid privilege.

I passed the index related queries on to a DBA and the performance of my application queries were back on track. I hope this saves a developer the time I lost trying to find out why the index did not exist.

PS: Oracle 11 also has an index visibility option which can be verified with

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SELECT INDEX_NAME,VISIBILITY FROM USER_INDEXES WHERE INDEX_NAME='YOUR_INDEX_NAME';

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 am very tempted to continue using these projects for the development of new pet projects and to learn new specs. Right now I expect the support for these projects to continue for a few years, and I do not really expect to see great innovation of any sort. The best case scenario is that Oracle leverages the usefulness of these projects and decides to keep them alive while giving them healthy financial support. One is allowed to dream

So it boils down to the following question. “Will you as a developer / architect / <Insert technical position here> continue to use projects like GlassFish, Netbeans, MySql etc ?” Or are you looking to move away to other open source projects immediately ? Voice your thoughts through this poll

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.