I am getting closer to finally holding a university degree in my hands. I am now all through with exams. Well admittedly I still need some signatures, but I trust the two professors in question to keep their word.

So now I just need to finish writing my thesis paper. But things are looking good there as well. I have the bulk of the literature search done and I have read most of the material. I will probably try to catch a few of you readers on planet OSDB for an interview, but more on that when the time is ripe.

In preparation of the post-degree times, I met up with one of those financial advisors that hunt down comp sci students at the uni campus. Its quite easy to see through their standard propositions, analogies and pretty diagrams. But they do know a few things here and there that are interesting. They also know some aspects of what the market is like (note sure if they know about the kind of jobs I am interested though), what employment contracts look like and what the common gotchas are. I am not sure yet where things will be going but I am not fond of checking on my stocks every morning or juggeling multiple insurance agents. So she has a shot at getting me on board just so I have only one person I have to talk to about crap like that. Maybe she is smart enough to read my blog, that would appearently help her get inside-infos like what I just said ...

In other news I was pondering how to implement an update to a project where we are pulling data from an Oracle 8i database into SQLite after massaging it a bit, in order to then serve it up in a little read only ajaxy table. They are now interested in getting more market depth. For the first time I am happy they are using Oracle and not MySQL (or some RDBMS without RANK() support). This will make it a breeze to get the top market items per group where otherwise it would have been a mess. I was inquiring about this feature on freenodes #oracle IRC channels which inspired "hali" to write a blog post about RANK(). Good stuff!

Congratulations on getting one step closer to your computer science degree Lukas, it is a great acheivement and a great degree to have which will open up many new opportunites for you.

I completed my comp science degree last year, where I used MDB in my final year project (you get a mention in the acknowledgements section ;-)

http://www.comp.dit.ie/dgordon/fyp/Thesis/jcollins1.pdf

I am sure you will be happy to know that I won the prize for the best final year project & dissertation for that project, thanks in part to MDB. What subject is your thesis/dissertation based on?

Congrats on your thesis paper.
Any very glad to hear that MDB was helpful!

The thesis paper will be an analysis of open source in the relation database market. The target audience will mainly be economists.

Sounds very interesting, I always enjoy economics. So are you approaching it from the angle of the cost savings which can be made from using open source databases rather than commercial ones? You won't find it difficult to find case studies for that, for example our company recently switched our Jira bug tracking system from Oracle to MySQL5 and saved ourselves an absolute fortune in license fees (as well as getting to use MySQL which in my opinon is a better database for what we needed ;-)

Actually I do not think that open source is mainly about license fee cost reduction. The cost savings are more on the production end as well in reduced risk on investments on the customer side. This all will increase efficiency and as a result will indirectly reduce cost and improve quality.

One of the novel angles of my paper will be that I will focus on the benfits of using open source for both commercial vendors selling open source products as well as the benfits to individual contributors to these open source products.