SQL Zone

jOOQ Newsletter: April 16, 2014 – Monthly, Yearly, Perpetual licenses now available

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Tweet of the Day

Our customers, users, and followers are sharing their love for jOOQ to the world. Here are:

Mahmud who cannot wait to make more magic with jOOQ.

Peter Kopfler who, after hearing about jOOQ and SQL in Vienna is thrilled to take a deep dive into the awesome features of PostgreSQL

Thanks for the shouts, guys!

New license models – now available

We’ve done all the legal work and we’re happy to announce that we’re now ready to offer you a new set of alternative licensing options! For each of the jOOQ Express, jOOQ Professional, and jOOQ Enterprise licenses, you may now purchase any of the following subscriptions:

  • A new monthly subscription for short-running tasks, such as DB migrations
  • The existing yearly subscription for default use-cases
  • A new major release perpetual license for long-running jOOQ 3.x integrations with little need for upgrades

We would like to thank our customers who have been giving us great feedback on our licensing model, and to those of you who have been eagerly waiting for the perpetual license.

Can’t wait? Download your copy of jOOQ now

Are you an existing customer of the jOOQ yearly subscription interested in a switch to other terms? We’ll offer you a 50% refund discount on your existing yearly subscription, should you choose to switch to the perpetual license by the end of April.

Contact sales for a tailor-made license migration discount.

Internet Explorer 8 support on our website

No one loves the old Internet Explorer versions, agreed, but that is not a reason not to support them. We’ve finally re-worked our manual and the rest of our website to also support Internet Explorer 8. Jumping on the HTML5 train was done prematurely, which is why many of our customers in the banking sector who cannot upgrade, or use Firefox, had to go through hassles to read the jOOQ manual.

We would like to apologise for all the inconvience this has introduced to some of you! If you encounter any issues with our website, please drop us a note, and we’ll fix it immediately.

Community Zone – Another great article by Petri Kainulainen

It’s hard to believe, but Petri Kainulainen (author of a variety of books and tutorials on Spring) has done it again! And he did it even better than before. We’re very proud to present to you part 3 of his great jOOQ / Spring tutorial. This time:

CRUD is a very important part of your application, and getting it right is essential to save time and money on your development efforts. jOOQ implements an ActiveRecord-like pattern, similar to Ruby’s ActiveRecords. In his article, Petri shows how to tie these ActiveRecords to Spring’s Repository pattern. Convince yourselves! And while you’re at it, don’t miss Petri’s other two tutorials:

SQL Zone – Window Functions – A Must-Have Tool

There is SQL before window functions and SQL after window functions. If you’re fortunate enough to use a commercial database, or PostgreSQL, then you get to enjoy the merits of one of the greatest SQL features that have ever been standardised (into SQL:2003).

We often blog about window functions, and when we go to conferences to talk about jOOQ or about SQL, window functions are all over our slides.

CUME_DIST()

In this blog post, we show you the great CUME_DIST() function, which is essentially the same as the ROW_NUMBER() divided by the amount of rows. So, if you ever need to indicate the position of your row within the whole result set as a percentage, CUME_DIST() is your weapon of choice.

LEAD() and LAG()

Just yesterday, we were able to solve a very fun data problem for our friends from FanPictor, a neighbouring startup from our offices. In an Excel export of their stadium data (see above), they wanted to group blocks of similar colours and create delimiters at the beginning and at the end of each block. Essentially, they wanted to create instructions like “The next five seats are red, the next 2 seats are white, the next 10 seats are red”. This can be done very easily using the awesome LEAD() and LAG() functions.

Upcoming Events

After a great JUG Saxony Day in Dresden and an awesome Java/Scala/jOOQ/SQL talk at VSUG in Vienna, we’re looking forward to a couple of great conferences in May / June.

Have you missed any of our previous jOOQ talks? Soon you’ll get another chance to hear us talk about jOOQ or SQL in general in any of these upcoming events:

Stay informed about 2014 events on www.jooq.org/news.

jOOQ Newsletter November 14, 2013

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jOOQ Blog License now CC-BY-SA

Next to providing you with the best Java / SQL integration on the market, we’re also passionate bloggers on the matter of Java, SQL and Open Source. We think that with our experience around jOOQ, we should be major influencers on those subjects in general.

Our blog at blog.jooq.org will have reached the 200k hits threshold by the end of the week and we’ll most certainly celebrate that. Our topics and insights are increasingly appreciated by a wider and wider audience outside of the jOOQ user base, also on our syndication partners DZone (where we’ve had around 800k readers so far), JCG(readers unknown) and Tech.Pro (100k reads so far). The recent success shows that our marketing efforts pay off. Here are some stats from the jOOQ blog:

Because our blog is reaching far beyond our user base, we have decided to license its content under the terms of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license, a permissive license that reflects our Open Source spirit. You may thus freely use our content for commercial purposes, if you attribute authorship to us. Please contact us, if you’re not sure how to create appropriate attribution.

Dual Licensing. An Experience Report

A month ago, we started dual-licensing jOOQ. We are happy to see that our competitors follow our lead in offering commercial services around their software. This is a strong indicator for having done something right. Here’s a little review from Data Geekery about the recent events around our new licensing model.

We have to admit that switching over from a very permissive Open Source license to more restrictive dual-licensing wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. Getting legal aspects right wasn’t easy. How many Open Source products out there do you think are neglecting due diligence with respect to copyright? Our estimate: 95%.

Yet, removing commercial database support from the jOOQ Open Source Edition has had only little impact on the number of downloads, nonetheless. After a short break in August / September (no jOOQ 3.1 patch releases), jOOQ 3.2 is almost as strong as ever as can be seen in this chart originating from oss.sonatype.org:

This doesn’t even count the number of downloads from www.jooq.org/download, or from SourceForge, before we removed the SourceForge download channel. The same effect can be seen on Stack Overflow and on GitHub, where jOOQ has had a significant increase of traction in the last 2-3 months!

Furthermore, with our recent discussions with the Apache GORA and Apache CloudStack guys, we’re positive that dual-licensing won’t keep jOOQ out of the professional Open Source world.

At the same time, sales talks around tailor-made agreements with medium and large customers are ongoing. We’re considering our work of the last 4 months a great success and we’re positive to be able to provide you with a much better jOOQ in the near future by creating professional Open Source software built on solid financial grounds, which everyone can greatly profit from.

Upcoming Events

As mentioned in the October newsletter, Lukas is going to be present at a number of events in the near future, talking about jOOQ and other database related stuff. ThejOOQ presentation at Topconf in beautiful Tallinn, Estonia has had around 35 attendants – well, it was hard to compete with the Google Glass presentation :-)

Upcoming events include

Stay informed about 2014 events on www.jooq.org/news.

SQL Zone – ORM (Un)Popularity

We’re personally thrilled by the fact that the ORM debate is far from over, even more than half a decade after the vietnam of computer science was first recognised. We firmly believe that ORMs are a very leaky abstraction, which is fine in “top-down” engineering approaches where the relational database is a second-class citizen.

But many companies don’t think that should be the case. Many companies want their data to be the first-class citizen, processed by more volatile entities, such as Java programs. It often just doesn’t make sense to have the data abide by the rules of the ORM. It is thus not surprising that Charles Humble from InfoQ has again detected increasing discomfort with ORMs at QCon and other conferences.

In our opinion, there’s a simple reason for this. SQL is constantly evolving, but JPA isn’t. Most importantly, JPA doesn’t do SQL as understood by the ISO / IEC standards. And it doesn’t look as though that’s going to change. Read our blog post on that subject.

SQL Zone – The History of NoSQL

A witty remark about what NoSQL really is has recently been made at the O’Reilly Strata Conference in London, where Mark Madsen, a popular researcher and analyst was walking around with a geeky T-Shirt depicting the History of NoSQL.

We sincerely hope that this awesome piece of humour will go viral. See for yourself:
https://twitter.com/edd/status/400190499585544192/photo/1

Clearly, betting on the “SQL horse” isn’t such a bad bet after all.