Ashish Patel

You may have read on the internet that IBM might be releasing a free version of its DB2 database next year. This comes as an answer to Oracle’s and Microsoft’s commitment to releasing “express” editions of their databases for free too.

I think its great that all these competitive products are releasing free editions for people to use. I say this because in the past when I developed applications I always stuck with one product until it just couldn’t do what I wanted to do. I started with MySQL then later moved to PostgreSQL, which I have stuck with for almost 3 years now. It has been hard to actually evaluate how commercial database products compare to the two open source databases that I have used because it just comes down to cost.

Having a mix of available databased from IBM, Oracle, Microsoft with the PostgreSQL, MySQL database systems will really help people determine what is good to use with their solutions.

One must not forget that IBM has made an opensource database called Cloudscape available for a while now. This database system is unique in the sense that there is a no-charge license with product support! Where in the world can you find something like this! You can “write once, deploy anywhere” and it only has a 20MB footprint - making it perfect for those light-weight portable solutions. Best of all, it integrates with Eclipse. IBM had great success with Cloudscape that they are even open sourcing it under the Apache Software Foundation (read here).

Wanna win an XBOX 360? For those of you at the University of Alberta, my sister’s denistry class is having a silent auction for their graduation. They got a smack load of really good things you can bid on, such as iPods, Gift Certificates, and even a date with a guy in their class! They are going to raffle off an XBOX 360 at the auction, which will be held at Boston Pizza on Whyte (in Edmonton).

My sister organized the event, which has a grande finale on November 18th. She asked me long ago to donate something, but I’m just a poor boy. So I decided to donate a website so they can do all their bidding online. If you want to bid you need a username and password, so if you want to participate e-mail me at patel.ashish@gmail.com.

The cool thing about the site is that it yet again uses the FinalFabric Framework that I’ve been using for a lot of sites. It only took me a weekend to setup and site (this includes settin gup the site, writing the code to do auctioning, and the management tools for my sister to control her content).

Its been a long journey, but its finally done. I’ve been volunteering my time helping the Kids with Cancer Society get a new website up and running. They really wanted a site where they can manage their own content, but they didn’t want anything “over-engineered” or “bloated” with features they didn’t need.

When this project began they choose to use a system called the FinalFabric Framework. The same system that powers my website! I was quite happy about their decision. This gave them the flexibility of putting their content up in a jiffy, using its simple workflow. When I showed them a demo of my website they were quite amazed at how easy it was to use the system. They were using Mambo CMS before they made the switch over. This software package is developed and maintained by a company called BlueShift Innovations, which is a company I founded back in 2003 - which became a stepping stone for my moving on to “bluer” pastures I may be bias in saying I like the system since I helped create it years ago, but if others say its good that’s not so biased now!

Anywho, I’d like to thank Jamie over at RedShark Marketing and Jason over at BlueShift Innovations for volunteering with me to get this site up and running.