Srirangan

Putting an end to IBM’s quest for Sun Microsys­tems, Ora­cle has announced the acqui­si­tion of The Java Com­pany Sun Microsys­tems priced at USD 9.50 per share. For us who’ve worked exten­sively on the LAMP plat­form, Sun’s acqui­si­tion of MySQL last year was promis­ing for it strength­ened the future of MySQL. MySQL is the most pop­u­lar Data­base Man­age­ment Sys­tem lead­ing its near­est com­peti­tor Ora­cle by a steady mar­gin. But Ora­cle, through its acqui­si­tion of Sun, now also owns its biggest com­peti­tor — MySQL.

The acqui­si­tion gives Ora­cle a mas­sive 55% (approx.) mar­ket share as far as Data­base Man­age­ment Sys­tems are con­cerned. The acqui­si­tion also raises doubts of the future via­bil­ity or growth of MySQL as a plat­form for obvi­ous reasons.

Some could argue that there is space for two vari­ants of DBMS’s in today’s mar­ket. MySQL being Open Source has a huge fol­low­ing and a very attrac­tive adop­tion rate among small to medium busi­ness, per­sonal and not for profit oper­a­tions. While Ora­cle is gen­er­ally pre­ferred for mis­sion crit­i­cal, enter­prise or other high end requirements.

One thing is cer­tain — MySQL with a 30% (approx.) mar­ket share isn’t going to dis­ap­pear in a hurry. In fact MySQL could con­tinue to sur­vive as a com­mu­nity, open source project but the chances of MySQL Enter­prise Edition’s sur­vival look bleak.

Could the forth­com­ing demise of MySQL be the open­ing Post­greSQL needs? Time will tell.

I plan to get the Adobe Flex 3 with AIR cer­ti­fi­ca­tion this sum­mer. Over the week­end I jot­ted down all the study mate­r­ial I could find. That makes for use­ful a blog post I recon.  This is what I could find grouped by source.

Adobe resources

• Adobe Flex 3 with AIR Exam Prepa­ra­tion Guide
• Adobe Devnet Tutorial
• Flex 3: Intro­duc­ing Cairngorm
• Flex 3: Archi­tect­ing Appli­ca­tions with Cairngorm
• Flex 3: Using Action­Script 3
• Flex 3: Devel­op­ing Rich Client Applications
• Flex 3 and Live­Cy­cle Data Ser­vices: Inte­grat­ing with Data and Messaging
• Flex 3 and Live­Cy­cle Data Ser­vices: Inte­grat­ing with ColdFusion
• Flex 3: Build­ing Chart­ing and Dash­board Applications
• Flex 3: Extend­ing and Styling Components
• Flex 3: Devel­op­ing Rich Inter­net Applications
• Flex in a week (Video)

Third-party resources

• Get­ting Started with Flex 3 (O’Reilly, June 2008)
  Down­load the PDF ver­sion of the book (PDF, 1.44M)
• Flex 3 Cook­book (O’Reilly, June 2008)
• Learn­ing Flex 3 (O’Reilly, June 2008)
• Attest — a stand­alone Adobe AIR appli­ca­tion that allows you to take your mock exam, view results and help­ful tips, and refer to the Flex 3 live­docs web­site in real time.

Feel free to sug­gest more resources to add to the list above.