Finally Oracle discovered how powerfull Python is. See this blogpost or the complete article in pdf-format by Catherine Devlin about it. It does not explain Python, but it demonstrates what you can do with it when combined with Oracle. To connect to Oracle, she uses Computronix’ Python extension module, but if you can live with an ODBC connection, you won’t be needing that.
Read more about Python db-extensions in Linux Journal.
Way ahead of Microsoft’s initiative to “give” us an online version of Office, the people at Linspire (Linux looking like Windows) give us ajaxWrite, an online word-processing application. Written with (you guessed it) the latest web-hype…erm…technology Ajax.
Their intention is to release a whole office-suite over the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye on their site (or mine). Best of all (you guessed it again): it’s free to use.
Okay, short version. Try to add a connection to a MySQL database in Oracle’s JDeveloper. I’m no expert in JDeveloper, nor JDBC to MySQL, so it took me a couple of (non-working) tries before I reverted to the Fine Material (as in: RTFM) and Google to discover that adding a JDBC driver/connection to MySQL is not a very intuitive task. It took me 20 minutes.
After playing around with the new (working) connection, I decided to try the same in Netbeans 5.0. I saved on the download and the extraction of the MySQL Connector/J archive, so let’s try to complete the task in 19 minutes. Well, actually it took me 30 seconds to add a working connection to MySQL and another 20 to my Oracle instance. Why? When you want to add a connection to a database, I want to do that in the databases-branch. I don’t want to Maintain Libraries, look for the correct syntax of an MySQL-jdbc connection, and finally repeat half of the process when defining the actual connection. Click to Add driver, Click to add connection, Click to logon. That’s how it should work. Netbeans passed with flying colors.
I just entered a rather big rant about JDeveloper and Netbeans. B2Evolutions complains about “host” (yes I used that word), so I press “back to post editing”. Gone. Thanks B2E. Thanks a lot.
My goodness, these SQL Developer developers are fast! Get the production v1.0 version (no more beta or EA) here.
I’m not a Debian user myself, but there is a Debian package of Oracle XE now. Get it here, and choose between the Western-European (single byte Latin1) or Universal (multibyte unicode) version. There’s an express client as well.
The SQL Developer team released Early Adopter version 6. But…they should put that on the main OTN page too. Last time they forgot that as well.