Macro Rant

I have become of the opinion that Sun Microsystems is an AWESOME company with AWESOME products. So what’s the problem? CONVOLUTION!

They have a ton of technologies, a ton of software, and a ton of great products with a ton of really creative names. This gets confusing! Making your way through their marketing talk up on each of their products/technologies and actually figuring out what they are, what they do, and how they work is a chore to say the least. I am of the belief that they are limiting their customer base because of this.

Quick example. A few weeks ago I finally decided to look into GlassFish. Sure there’s plenty of information for people who are already very familiar with Sun offerings and Java. However I am a PHP/MySQL kind of guy. I haven’t programmed in Java since my sophomore year of college! I want to know how to use GlassFish to help me achieve my goals without reading through 100 pages of white papers and sifting through marketing balony. Eventually I got the gist of it but I was very dedicated to sifting through the information and reading documentation. Most developers in my position would have said, “Screw it. I’ll stay with what I have.”, several days ago.

The same can be said for many of Sun’s products. Which is a tragedy because after reviewing a lot of their products I can see that they have a ton to offer the IT world.

Wake up SUN! Show the world what you have!

rdylina Uncategorized glass fish, glassfish, java, products, sun, sun microsystems

Well I was reviewing the table partitioning feature in the now GA MySQL 5.1 and to my dismay you may neither have a foreign key in a partitioned table nor can you have a foreign key in another table that refers to a key in a partitioned table. How lame is that! Good lord! One of the essential features of a relational database is that it be RELATIONAL. So now we’re left out in the cold if we want MySQL to enforce referential integrity with it’s existing provisions and use table partitioning at the same time.

I have already ran a scenario in my head to work around this problem. It’s should be as simple as setting up triggers to enforce database relations that should be either added, removed, or denied based on the relationship. Definitely NOT the preferred way to do this but another way to accomplish the same, without handling it in the application logic, escapes me at the moment.

rdylina Uncategorized MySQL 5.1 relational database foreign key table partitioning