Month: October 2006

Proto.in Create. Collaborate. Contribute

BlogCamp.in: Six months after the smashing success of BarCamp, Chennai came up with an event tagged as India’s Biggest Blog Unconference. True to the tag, the event attracted participants from around the globe and as many as 60 volunteers owned various parts of the unconference.

After BlogCamp.in: Two weeks later, the same team met again and thought of a DEMO like event for India and Indian products. After some heavy discussions, the event has been named as PROTO. It should be noted that Palm, Java and many other great products were launched at DEMO. Read the DEMOblog.

PROTO cannot be in unconference mode because it will become a bigger BarCamp. This event is one place where we get venture capitalists (VCs) and entrepreuners together so that some of the best brains and ideas in the Indian sphere can get funded. We are aiming for a one-on-one coordination between the entrepreuners and VCs. That is, number of VC companies will be greater than or equal to the number of teams presenting at the event. Ofcourse, there will be a lot of press coverage.

Teams who think they have innovative products will be asked to register at the website that is expected to come up shortly. After that, each team will be reviewed by an expert team from PROTO who have an eye for future trends and the ability to judge products which promise to be the next huge wave. Some teams will be shortlisted for presentation at the event. They will also have the opportunity to have a face-to-face meeting with interested VCs who will gather at the event. The place and time of the event will be announced shortly.

The main reason for coming up with such an event is that, even though there are a huge number of IT companies in India, there is not enough innovation happening on that front. It is like yet another government job where we get a good salary, pension, wife, 2 kids etc. This face of India should change. Entrepreuners should be encouraged. Events like PROTO are a step towards that. As DEMO had set the stage for entrepreuners world-wide, PROTO hopes to be India’s defacto platform for staging new products and technologies. With a pretty huge population and talent raising day-by-day, I think innovation shouldn’t be a problem. It is all in the mindset of the people.

Interested? Read the discussions we had during our first meeting. Our community tech blog says, “India has the potential to become a technological innovation hotspot. It must be noted that, it won’t be the IT majors who make this happen, but startups”. Vijay says, “We are the future of India. Either embrace us, or fear us :)”.

Thanks to Ashwin for the post

Difference between Truncate and Delete in SQL

All SQL Databases offer the DELETE Command. The purpose as anyone would know is to delete rows from a table in a database.

So whats TRUNCATE ?

Truncate as the name suggests empties a table completely. Logically, this is equivalent to a DELETE statement that deletes all rows, but there are practical differences under some circumstances.

Notable Differences

  • Truncate operations drop and re-create the table, which is much faster than deleting rows one by one.
  • The number of deleted rows is not returned.
  • TRUNCATE statement does not invoke ON DELETE triggers.

The above might be applicable for MySQL 5.0 upwards but overall .

Interestingly the TRUNCATE statement is not actually a part of the SQL standard, but many relational database management systems implement it.

In SQL Truncate statement doesn’t delete the content of a table which is to be truncated while it removes the address of the table from the list containing addresses to identify the table. That’s why Truncate statement is 300 times faster than Delete statement of SQL because Delete statement removes the content of table one-by-one.

Truncate will help you save a lot of time when deleting for example 1 Million Rows.

Are Political lie detectors coming ?

Do politicians really get the Internet? Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt doesn’t think so. Although they understand that it is an important vehicle for getting the message out and mobilizing voters, he believes that’s where it ends. “Many of the politicians don’t actually understand the phenomenon of the Internet very well,” Schmidt told the Financial Times.

Read

Denormalize or Normalize ?

I was working with MySQL during the weekend and suddenly I had to solve a most commonly faced problem – Storing Multiple values for a field in a foreign table and using them in the current table using indexes / foreign keys.

table1

id

post_title

table2

post_id

tag_id

table3

tag_id

tag_name

If i go on doing the same thing for my current mysql project requirement I might end up having so many tables (God knows how I will benefit from using the 3NF for my database schema)

I have some ways to reduce the no of tables by storing

CSV (Comma Seperated Values)
val1,val2,val3 or

Space Seperated Values

val1 val2 val3

Anyone ?