jOOQ Newsletter: January 21, 2015 – Groovy and Open Source – jOOQ and the strong Swiss Franc

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Tweet of the Day

Today, we’re very happy to have “spied” on our users as we can now show you a whole Tweet Conversation of the Day

RxJooq, or reactive jOOQ. How does that sound!? Yes, jOOQ is growing to become a hype among SQL and fluent API aficionados. A recent discussion on reddit already puts jOOQ on the same level with Hibernate with more than 10 mentions in answers to the question “Java: What ORM to use”. Our goal has always been for a Java developer to ask themselves at the beginning of a project:

Is this a jOOQ project, or is this a Hibernate project (or both)?

It is too early to announce anything, but at Data Geekery, we’re very interested and thus putting efforts into collaborating with Red Hat to make the jOOQ / Hibernate integration work more seamlessly, so stay tuned for more goodness in that area.

Groovy and Open Source – What it means for us

You may have heard of Pivotal’s recent announcement about their withdrawing sponsorship from the Groovy and Grails ecosystem. This isn’t exactly a surprise to many people as Pivotal’s main focus has shifted towards their PaaS business quite some time ago. The interesting aspect from our perspective is the fact that a whole ecosystem seems to have relied on the benevolence of a single sponsor. Quite a risk!

We think that Open Source should work differently. Open Source is a fine means of offering freemium and (legally) riskless software to potential customers in order to help customers start engaging with a brand. The ultimate vendor goal with Open Source is always upselling. As our valued jOOQ users and jOOQ newsletter and blog readers, we obviously hope that you will eventually understand all the combined SQL value put into jOOQ, and thus upgrade to a commercial jOOQ subscription.

This wasn’t necessarily the case at Pivotal. There is no obvious path from using Groovy (or Grails) to buying Pivotal’s cloud platform solutions. To make things worse, in order to survive, the Groovy platform now depends on a new, arbitrary sponsor whose incentive to sponsor Groovy might be 100% different from Pivotal’s. For the end user, this will not be the same Groovy any more – so it is hard to believe that Groovy will not suffer heavily from any future transition.

We believe that vendors shouldn’t depend on benevolence. We believe that vendors should have a very clear strategy why they’re creating a product, and do everything necessary to satisfy real customer’s needs. So we want to take the opportunity and thank you for being with us, and for making jOOQ (both the Open Source Edition and the Commercial Editions) what it is: A platform valued by both users of Open Source and commercial databases.

More information about our take on Pivotal and Groovy can be found on our blog:

It’s jOONuary! Profit from our 20% Discount Promotion

Speaking of our customers, there has never been a better time to become one!

Your budget for 2015 has been set in stone? You spent too much money on geeky infrastructure during the Holiday Season? Not a problem for your planned jOOQ integration! If you purchase new jOOQ licenses in jOONuary (January 2015), we will offer you a limited-time 20% discount on all price plans. Act quickly!

https://www.jooq.org/joonuary

jOOQ and the Strong Swiss Franc

We’re a Switzerland-based company, and as such are heavily influenced by recent events on the currency exchange markets. The EUR (which is our sale currency) has plummeted almost 20% compared to the CHF (which is our accounting currency).

This affects all of the Swiss export industry, and many companies are starting to take measures. We will not take any measures thus far and continue with our existing EUR-based price model. For our international customers, nothing will change. For our Swiss customers, this means that in addition to the above jOONuary discount, you will now also benefit from a “Euro discount”! Did we say there has never been a better time to become our customer?

jOOQ 3.6 Outlook

The upcoming jOOQ 3.6 will not be less exciting than the previous versions in the least bit. Here is a quick outline of what we’re going to be doing in the upcoming release:

  • SAP HANA support. We’ve been talking to database vendors in the past, and we continue to do so, maintaining good relationships with the technical and community people at the vendor side. This time, the collaboration initiative came from the vendor directly, and we’ve heard them.

    SAP HANA is an emerging cloud SQL and in-memory SQL platform, with a big Java and Scala based tool chain, which constitutes a perfect match for the jOOQ ecosystem. We’re going to support both HANA’s SQL features as well as HANA’s SQLScript features in the jOOQ 3.6 Enterprise Edition. If you’re an SAP HANA user and interested in details, or in a free preview of jOOQ 3.6.0, please contact sales right away. We’re more than happy to provide you with more info.

  • Nested records and tables. One of the SQL standard’s most underestimated features is the capability of nesting records and tables. In a true ORDBMS, tables (or MULTISETs) can be nested any level deep. If your SQL database supports these features, it is very easy to materialise a nested object graph directly in the database, instead of relying on the JOIN-based workarounds provided by modern ORMs.

    Nesting of records can also be very useful when reusing common data structures, such as audit columns (creation_date, creation_user, modification_date, modification_user). JPA supports the @Embedded annotation for this, and we’ll delve into these features as well.

    We believe that true MULTISET support will obsolete our competing products’ most important asset: mapping. Once you can declare all mapping already in SQL, you will no longer miss JPA once you’ve migrated to jOOQ.

  • A new ConverterProvider SPI. Converters are great for supporting custom data types, but having to register them all the time is tedious. What if jOOQ just supported T <-> U conversion right out of the box, for any combination of T and U? We’ll let you register all your favourite converters and jOOQ figures out the conversion path through the converter graph.
  • Even better PL/SQL support. PL/SQL types are ubiquitous, but they are not easily accessible via JDBC, and thus via jOOQ. We’re researching a variety of possibilities of working around JDBC’s limitations to allow you to use your favourite PL/SQL types: BOOLEAN, RECORD types, perhaps even table types.

 

Upcoming jOOQ Events

Have you missed one of our talks and presentations in the recent past? No problem at all, we’re back on the road after a short winter break. Here are all of our upcoming events:

Keep up to date with our own and third-party jOOQ events on our news website:https://www.jooq.org/news.

We’re looking forward to meeting you and to talking about all things Java and SQL!

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