A very innovative tool...

Steve send a mail to the group about a cool online tool - Dropbox.


If you install DropBox on your desktop, it gives you a 'folder' which you can drop files into. The files are actually stored on the DropBox server.
When you get home, just click on the folder to access all your 'dropped' files. Much easier than emailing files to yourself and more convenient than Google docs.

If you use this link https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTgxMjE0NDQ5 (demo video and signup form)


You will get free 250MB of storage. I find it very handy.
No credit card details asked for - its free!

What caused me surprise this afteroon??

Today afternoon, I went to Mysql page to download the latest version of Mysql. I was a bit perplexed, the way the welcome page behaved. It was asking for username/password to proceed or else to register. I was unable to find the download link. I thought for a while and clicked on the customer link. I was totally surprised on seeing the list of customers. More than the numbers its the companies which is using this database.

To name a few :

NASA
Google
AT&T Wireless
British Telecommunications plc
Suzuki
BBC News
Lloyds TSB Bank
Reuters
Lufthansa Systems
Toyota France

More..

How to Start VNC From A Remote Machine

Today I wanted to install 10.1.2.0.2 JBoss Bpel to my Integration test machine. I was wondering how to do that, because the server didn't had a monitor. I didn't even know if vnc was present in the machine.

First using the locate vnc, I was able to find the vnc was present in teh machine.

So after some struggling over the man pages, I found how to start the vnc in a machine.

Just type vncserver in the command line. If the vnc server is successfully started, then you get a similar message:


New 'myhost.com:4 ' desktop is myhost.com:4

Starting applications specified in /home/oracle/.vnc/xstartup
Log file is /home/oracle/.vnc/integration-pc:4.log

So here the new port for the vnc server is "4"
The next step is setting the password for the first time.

Just type vncpasswd
You give passowrd of your chice and the system will again ask for verification.

From your remote machine, open the vncviewer. Enter the host name and the new port number.

EG: myhost.com:4
In the password prompt, give the password you have supplied earlier. Thats it, you are successfully connected to the vnc server.

Oracle & Open Source

Oracle is in sync with the Open Source community. InnoDB followed by ADF Faces, which was contributed to Apache, by Oracle and others like BPEL Process manger Plug in for Eclipse, to name a few.

A couple of months before, I passed through an article in OTN, Oracle Technology website, regarding the acquisitions of Innobase, the company which makes a very powerful DB engine called InnoDB. To make things clearer, let me just talk about InnoDB for a while.

I am not sure of the version, when MySQL made InnoDB the default engine. But earlier in MySQL versions of 3.x, it was a pain working with MYSQL and the basic MyISAM engine, where there was not foreign key constrains available, and the performance was snail. The INODB, which comes with the MYSQL, has a bunch of excellent features, which made MySQL the best open source database. To name a few, they are:

Transaction-safe

Oracle-styles, non-locking read

Multi-user concurrency

Constraint support-foreign keys

Maximum performance, with large volumes of data

Moreover, fully integrated with MySQL Server, the InnoDB storage engine maintains its own buffer pool for caching data and indexes in main memory. InnoDB stores its tables and indexes in a tablespace, which may consist of several files (or raw disk partitions). This is different from, for example, MyISAM tables where each table is stored using separate files. InnoDB tables can be of any size even on operating systems where file size is limited to 2GB.

J, Not Sure of what will be the fate of MYSQL. But I feel this is one of the intelligent acquisitions Oracle has made. Literally speaking MYSQL, is/was definitely a competitor for Oracle Database, for customers who look for both Economy and a bit of performance. The Oracle policy: “BUY IT IF YOU CANT BEAT IT” is slowly and consistently making waves.

Well, one more thing to add, MYSQL is not free, for people who think that way:

http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/faq.html