Last week JDK 7 reached its Feature Complete milestone, and Oracle is confident they will ship the General Availability release in the summer of 2011. So what's new in Java 7?

JSR 203: More New I/O APIs (Asynchronous I/O) for the Java Platform ("NIO.

I just noticed today that Oracle has released a beta edition of Oracle Database 10g Express Edition. Oracle must be feeling the pressure from open source databases such as MySQL, and PostgreSQL, just like Microsoft has.

I have been hearing a bit of buzz about EnterpriseDB latley. I think the main reason is that they just secured $7 million in venture capital funding.

What is EnterpriseDB?

EnterpriseDB is based on the source code for the open source PostgreSQL database server.

There are lots of ways to select a random record or row from a database table. Here are some example SQL statements that don't require additional application logic, but each database server requires different SQL syntax.

Lets face it, unless you have a photographic memory, no developer can remember all the different functions, options, tags, etc. that exist. Documentation can be cumbersome at times, thats why I like cheat sheets.

Oracle has released a critical patch update for several of its products, (database server, enterprise manager, application server, e-business suite, workflow, forms, reports, JInitiator, developer suite, and express server).

I just whipped together a tool for checking for reserved sql words. The tool checks against SQL Server 2000, MySQL 5.0, PostgreSQL 8.0, Oracle 10g, ODBC, and SQL Server Future Keywords list.

Returning only the first N records in a SQL query differs quite a bit between database platforms.