TNS stands for ?

Ever wondered what does TNS in the Oracle database world stand for ? Transparent Network Substrate (TNS). Hurray.

Octave instead of Matlab

Just learnt about GNU licensed Octave which could be a replacement for Matlab, atleast for students. Recently, my interest diverted back to machine learning, image processing re-inspired by two geeks working on an android app involving machine learning. So, started digging my neural network projects of my college days.

Talend ETL - Open studio version

A lovely opportunity landed in my way to try Talend Open studio. It was a breeze to adopt Talend Open studio. In specific, I used 4.0.3 version. The highlight is, it is built on top of eclipse platform, enabling any developer with fundamental knowledge of Java language to be easily extra productive. I cannot comment by comparing this with commercial tools in the market as I haven't used other tools before. One aspect I am sure is... the arrival of open source tools in the BI space will soon change the BI solution offerings are made. I am convinced Talend as a basic ETL tool and not sure if this can be used for "Heavy lifting".

Technology radar - Jan 2011 is available

http://tinyurl.com/2em9mnc contains the technology radar published in Jan 2011. Interesting !

Installing Oracle 11gR2 - Linux x86 - owb/external/oc4j_applications/applications/WFMLRSVCApp.ear not found

Installing Oracle 11gR2 on Linux x86.  It is deemed a simple task as long as we unlearn the way we install previous versions of Oracle and pick this up.

Both Disk1 and Disk2 should be unzipped in to same location .. what I mean is.. unzipping both will result in single directory named database. Launch installer from this location.

Otherwise, resolving kernel parameters and package dependencies are rather simple.

MySQL has the real syntax sugar

My first experience with MySQL is so wonderful. I never imagined that profiling queries can be this easy. Oracle profiling has a learning curve. SQL server is also somewhat simple and straightforward. Looking forward to see how it is implemented in PostgreSQL.

A little odd thing I see is the choice of storage engines. Otherwise, MySQL journey has been very smooth. One thing is sure, all relational databases architecture is kind of similar. Learn internals of one rdbms.. and believe me.. it is really  fun and adapt to work on others.