Sun Microsystems To Acquire MySQL for $1B

Rai    Linux, News     acquisition, database, Linux, mysql, sun microsystem

cnn.com reports:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Sun Microsystems Inc. has agreed to buy open-source software maker MySQL AB for $1 billion, beefing up the server maker’s database offerings with a company whose technology is used by some of the world’s biggest Web sites.

Santa Clara-based Sun, in separate announcements before the market opened, said its second quarter revenue would narrowly exceed Wall Street estimates. It also said profit would fall at the high end of analysts’ expectations. The company revealed its preliminary results ahead of schedule.

The acquisition, expected to close in the third or fourth quarter, takes pressure off Sun to spend some of the cash it’s been accumulating. It also bolsters its software offerings with a well-known name in Internet data retrieval.

What will become of MySQL after the acquisition? In my super humble opinion, there are only two things that could happen: MySQL’s growth will surpass its previous records or MySQL will go down the drain. Fighting my inner pessimist, I hope that MySQL will continue to be what it is today or even better for the sake of this blog

Learning PHP

Rai    LAMP     LAMP, Linux, meralco, mysql, php, WAMP

Recently, I took a short PHP-MySQL course at Meralco Foundation and it was tough. Really. I have no professional experience with software development whatsoever and this course gave me a jumpstart. I was really glad I got through with the course and even managed to learn something from it (lolz). The course covered the basics of PHP programming, setting up databases and creating useful programs. Too bad that we used Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP combo, much to my disappointment. But nevertheless, it was the same banana. We were introduced to WAMP Server, an all-in-one package under Windows which provides Apache, PHP and MySQL in one installation. You can check out their website, http://www.wampserver.com, if you want to know more about WAMP.

I personally recommend WAMP to those who are heavy Windows user and want to learn PHP programming. Just install the program the traditonal Windows way (Click Next-Next-OK-Finish) and you are good to go. No fuss. On the other hand, I still recommend Linux-Apache-PHP-MySQL (LAMP) for advanced users. I do not have benchmark results for WAMP compared to LAMP on a live server but I believe that when it comes to performance, it all boils down to server configuration.

There are a lot of walkthroughs on the internet to guide you on setting up your own LAMP server. Like they always say, Google is your friend. I will also put up my personal guide in setting up a LAMP server to add up to those piles of guides on the net. As I am writing this, my imagination is running wild and I am beginning to see some newbie reading my post about LAMP (lolz).

Just for kicks, I put up my final exam here on my site so that you can see what a pathetic web developer I am. You can try out the exercises here. You may not send your violent reactions here.