I already knew my way around the open source database scene when I started preliminary research for my diploma thesis last December. However writing this paper has been a great opportunity to dive into this topic really indepth, dispelling some misconceptions of my own along the way. Once I finished my last courses at university in March, I began to focus on this topic. Obviously I was still doing some open source and commercial development on the side during this time. So all in all I probably put in around 6 months of time in this.

.. and everybody just needs to lift the finger to turn the wheel that little bit to prevent hitting the wall.

So with the emminent release of MSIE 7 and FF2 I decided it was high time I actually check the main project I am currently working on for compliance. Its an ajax intranet application that has a little bit of layout and convinience magic. Step one is to become able to test these new versions without breaking my current setup.

Ok, someone came in #oracle on freenode and wanted a query that would give him a distinct set of rows, where it did not matter if a values is in the first or second column.

I am currently in Zurich, after spending the last week in a farmers house in the moutains of Switzerland. This is a pretty relaxing time for me, although I am constantly working on tweaking my thesis paper (actually its not a thesis paper, its a german "Diplomarbeit"). I am more or less done and now I am just working on getting the kinks and typos out.