This Guest post is by Michele P. Rouse of SQL Certification Blog :

In my experience the top DB platforms are Microsoft and Oracle. I have come to learn that MySQL is trusted in start-up companies and DB people who know this platform could make higher salaries, but I honestly rarely ever encountered MySQL in job searches.

One reason I like MS SQL Server is because it also includes the SSRS BI platform which is powerful and popular. DB folks who know SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) have become very sought-after candidates in many companies. In most cases, companies end up needing to buy licenses for third-party BI (Business Intelligence) applications that may cost a lot of extra money.

With SQL Server, BI and ETL (extract, transform, load) tools come with the initial license. I understand that maybe the interest in databases is mainly to understand DB construction, however you can't predict when or if you branch out and find out more.

Continue reading "Will You Get Benefits From the Newest easy to get SQL Server Master Qualification?" »

Posted by Hatem at 5:08 AM to General | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wordpress is more than a blogging platform, and here is one of its amazing application : Support tickets and Bug tracking. Quality Control is a Wordpress theme which allow you to turn a basic WordPress installation into a simple and straight-forward ticketing system. With Quality Control users can create tickets, assign statuses, milestones, categories, and tags. Other users can then interact with the tickets, updating their state, milestone, or any other property.

The theme require a lot of customization to make it usable for real world applications, and support the basic workflows for ticketing support systems, however I think it's a great platform that you can build on and customize easily.

Get Quality Control from wordpress themes, demo available online at http://getqualitycontrol.com/demo/.

Posted by Hatem at 9:48 PM to General | Permalink | Comments (0)

VANCOUVER, Canada - October 18, 2010: Divcom Software today announces the release of HelpSmith 3.3, an important update of the help authoring tool for professional technical writers and software developers. The new version of HelpSmith includes improved Unicode support, the ability to use Flash and QuickTime animations in help projects, better compatibility with recent versions of Google Chrome, and other new features. The update is available immediately at http://www.helpsmith.com.

HelpSmith, a help authoring tool that combines a professional feature set, slight learning curve and comparatively low price, continues to receive new features, providing its users with up-to-date technologies and standards in help authoring.

One of the most important requirements for modern help authoring software is the ability to work with multiple languages due to support of the Unicode standard. HelpSmith 3.3 introduces improved support for Unicode: now not only the built-in word processor allows you to type text in multiple languages simultaneously, but all text controls that store numerous parameters of a help project. Such an approach meets the today's highest software standards and makes it easy to create, distribute, and view help projects written in different languages.

Continue reading "HelpSmith 3.3: Improved Unicode Support and New Multi-Media Features" »

Posted by Hatem at 9:29 PM to Dev Tools | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ilia Alshanetsky have just announced a new PHP Excel extension that he wrote after getting his right hand broken three weeks ago while biking. Good to hear that you are well Ilia ! I'm not a big fan of Excel, but I had faced similar issues mainly with memory usage while generating Excel files with PHP. The new extension uses LibXL, a closed source commercial product but very fast and small according to Ilia.

"The library natively generates BIFF 7/8 format, which can be opened all devices and Excel readers I've tried it on and is available for Linux, Mac and Windows". he added "The end result is a PHP extension that offers a complete, object oriented interface to the library that allows you to do just about anything with Excel. I've also introduced a few helper functions to streamline reading/writing from Excel files. The speed and memory usage are pretty damn impressive, on my debug build of PHP, it can generate 10,000 cells in 0.03 seconds with a 262kb complete PHP memory usage, not just the code."

Sample usage of the extension :

$sT = microtime(1);

$x = new ExcelBook();
$s = $x->addSheet("Sheet 1");

for ($i = 0; $i < 1000; $i++) {
for ($j = 0; $j < 10; $j++) {
$s->write($i, $j, ($i * $j));
}
}

$x->save("bench.xls");

$eT = microtime(1);

var_dump(($eT - $sT), memory_get_usage(1), memory_get_peak_usage(1));

Code source available here, more information available here.

Posted by Hatem at 7:46 PM to General | Permalink | Comments (0)

DoNanza, the world's leading work-from-home job search engine, released its quarterly trends statistics report for the second quarter 2010. The report is based on the analysis of millions of work-from-home projects, aggregated from all over the web, indexed by the DoNanza search engine. According to the report demand for HTML5 Developers increased while demand for Flash developers decreased; however it's noticeable that the number of Flash-related projects is still 11 times higher than HTML5 projects.

In mobile market, it's amazing to see how the competition between Android and Apple become crucial. In the report, and in only three months, iPad overtakes Android in Mobile Development Projects. It's also interesting to notice that the average budget for iPhone-related projects is 30 percent higher than Android projects, which may be the result of only 28 percent of iPhone apps being free, compared to the Android market with 57 percent of its applications being free.

In programming languages demand, PHP dominates the websites development market. The request for .Net developers is decreasing dramatically even though the average budget for .Net projects remains the highest among the other programming languages. This is a result of the lack of developers, unlike PHP where the number of programmers available is much higher.

Continue reading "Report : PHP Dominates and HTML5 Demand Increasing" »

Posted by Hatem at 11:22 PM to General | Permalink | Comments (0)

Enjoying your Summer ? What about taking an RIA with PHP and Ajax online course ? Marco Tabini just sent an email about an upcoming 19 hour, on-line, live, instructor led class titled "Rich Internet Applications with PHP and Ajax".

The course start on August 6th-20th, 2010 and include :

* Proper (X)HTML programming
* Web service creation and management
* REST, XML-RPC and SOAP
* JavaScript primer
* Asynchronous operations
* Debugging
* Using JSON for data transfers
* Managing events with JavaScript
* Security

You can register for the class here.

Posted by Hatem at 8:36 PM to General | Permalink | Comments (1)