The Saviour, EnterpriseDB MySQL To PostgreSQL migration wizard

Having just experienced a week of extreme headaches and bad luck I thought it would be a good idea to rather reflect on the one huge positive that came out of it, the get out of jail free card I received. Throughout the week I had been experiencing some really painful random database issues that just made no sense, if your interested you can read more about the issue here http://www.nabble.com/Quartz-%2B-GORM-%2B-MySQL-gives-random-pain!-td24089307.html#a24089307.

The work around for this problem was to use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL. So I had to migrate my production database to reflect this change in all of my environments, oh dear...

Not to worry, YouTube had the answer! I found this video through a random Google search.



This DB migration application can be found on the EnterpriseDB download page. When you download this application you will actually be downloading the Java source code for it. After downloading the code I just imported it into my NetBeans IDE by creating a new project from existing sources. Then I simply ran the application from within my IDE and it all just worked!!! What a relief.

Download "MySQL to Postgres Migration Wizard by EnterpriseDB v1.1" http://www.enterprisedb.com/products/download.do

No browser for Windows 7!?!?

In an effort to avoid further fines (€1.7 billion so far) from European Union regulators, Microsoft has opted to ship its upcoming Windows 7 operating system in the EU with no web browser at all. Recently pressure was applied on Microsoft to bundle the FireFox browser produced by competing browser developer Mozilla with its Windows operating system. However it would now appear that Microsoft are more willing to deliver a web-less out of the box experience to its customers than share the desktop space with another browser producer.

It will be interesting to see how European customers navigate this hurdle when Windows 7 is release in October this year.

SpringSource, the leaders...

SpringSource are the stand out leader in the enterprise software development framework space, and they know it too.

http://blog.springsource.com/2009/06/03/red-hat-reacts-to-springsources-leadership/

In an industry plagued with complexity and standards police, they have remained steadfast and plotted their own course. If enterprise software development job postings are anything to go by they are head and shoulders above their competition, with several times more job listings requiring Spring development skills as opposed to competing technologies.

SpringSource can recognize innovation too. In late 2008 they acquired G2One, the company behind the popular Groovy and Grails technologies. SpringSources main goal is to "eliminate enterprise Java complexity" so it makes sense for them to have acquired G2One, a company with some of the most productive technologies currently in the Java space.

http://www.springsource.com/g2one

SpringSource really are an excellent company.

Spanish airline uses GNOME and Linux

So recently ive been jet setting around the world and have been lucky enough to sample various airline lounges. Airline lounges are the way to go people, there is nothing like free beer before teleporting yourself at 10,000m and 900 km/h+ to the other side of the world. My blissful amusement soared when I discovered while at Barcelona airport that the Spanair lounge had internet internals running some version of the GNOME desktop. Since this encounter ive also discovered that Spanair are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for various operations optimization applications.

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070910005053&newsLang=en

This makes total sense for an organisation that's operating in a market with such tight margins. Spanair IT, well done.

Google^2

A new Google labs project has been made public. Google Squared is a new search tool that gives users a new organized view of their search results.

Here is Googles brief explanation..

"Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. If you search for [roller coasters], Google Squared builds a square with rows for each of several specific roller coasters and columns for corresponding facts, such as image, height and maximum speed."

It looks pretty good, its quite fast and yields ok results (remember its an early release). Here's what the search "fruit" returns.


Google Squared can be found here
The official Google Squared release blog post is here