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Computer world has witnessed Microsoft competing against many vendors across the market segments - from packaged softwares like web browser, OS & Office to these days hottest internet business. Now, it is entering into new race with Amazon by launching SSDS [SQL Server Data Service].

SSDS is in line to Amazon’s SimpleDB. Although as of now both services are offered as beta, but Amazon has visible advantage being first in the fray.

IMO, below will decide the WINNER -

• Availability of Service
• Data Security & Manageability
• Performance
• Data Access Model

I’m still wondering why DB giant - Oracle is keeping the distance? I think IBM too can join this race anytime! Please excuse me if I have missed their announcements.

Surely, couple of next quarters would be very interesting to watch in these space.

SaaS - Software as a Service. If you have anything to do with information technology, you must have heard this buzzword. Industry leaders are talking about it for a while and there are some success stories as well.

I heard about it for the first time when I was with Oracle, way back in 2004-05. They have coined Oracle On Demand. Wherein, Oracle used to host & manage database instances for their customers. But it wasn’t ideal implementation of SaaS as customers need to shell out license cost for instances irrespective of its hosting environment and usage.

But, Amazon has given new paradigm to it with its SimpleDB. It’s a web service for executing queries on structured data stored in Amazon hosted environment. What amuse me is not executing query by invoking web service, but innovation they brought in for storage structure. The data will be stored in domains, like excel spread-sheets. This will yield more flexibility as you need not pre-define all data points. You can easily add new attributes as and when it is required. The newly added attributes will be automatically indexed in real time.

You can read more on it and host of related services at AWS

All the years I learned that DDL statements in RDBMS world are irrevocable. Once you drop a table it’s just gone; you can’t get that data back easily!

But that isn’t true anymore. “Flashback Tables” in Oracle 10g is at our rescue. Oracle 10g has got similar idea of our recycle-bin. When you execute a drop table statement it drops a table and moves it to recycle-bin, giving you a second chance to survive by restoring it if you have accidentally dropped it. Isn’t that really fantastic!

You can read more on that here. Now execute “drop table” statement without any sweat.

I was not able to store user input [with Japanese characters] in database using Hibernate properly. All other data except the field that store data in Japanese format was getting populated fine.

As per the first doubt - did I declare that column to accept data in UTF-8 format? Yes, I have that column mapped for UTF-8 input. In fact, when I entered data using MySQL Query Browser, it is getting stored right.

Second thought was - am I getting uncorrupted data across the layers i.e. from presentation layer -> business layer -> data access layer. That too was correct.

That left me with only one possibility [may not be, but I was under such impression] - when hibernate is trying to persist data into database, it is corrupting it and I am getting garbled values. I’ve got some hint from hibernate tutorial. According that I can specify hibernate.connection.charSet as property in hibernate configuration file. I tried that but no help.

My further search led me to a blog where a solution was suggested by extending MySQLDialect. But if I understood correctly, his/her problem was bit different that what I was facing. I got another hint from the comments on the same blog [though the person who left the comment said it didn’t work for him :-(]. It was a suggestion to supply character encoding to connection URL i.e. jdbc:mysql://localhost/pas?characterEncoding=UTF-8. Lucky enough, it works for me!

After appending character encoding to my connection URL, now I am able to persist data properly!