mike.mainguy

A great many people starting out with java development have only a vague understanding of the difference between a "public static String", "public String", and the difference between a class and an object. As this was confusing to me at first, I thought I would give a quick overview. A class defines a template for what data and operations are available when you tell the JVM to create an object. So, for example: class BlogPost { public BlogPost(String inString) { text = inString; BlogPost.latest = this; } public String text = ""; public static BlogPost latest; } When you do the following BlogPost myPost = new BlogPost("Hello"); You're telling the JVM to allocate some memory on the heap to store a reference to a memory location and from now on, when I refer to myPost, it means that memory location. BlogPost is a class, myPost is an Object that is a reference to a memory location that is an ins...

Having studiously avoided Oracle for over 20 years, I'm now working in a shop that uses it almost exclusively. Aside from the general overall expense of the product I'm routinely amazed at how many features other DBMS's I've used (DB2, MSSQL, MySQL, PostGres) are either missing or syntactically difficult to understand. The most recent example is server side pagination… or more specifically, having the DBMS limit the results returned to for specific subsets of rows. In oracle to do this, one must run a query something like this: select * from (select name, rownum rn from (select name from users order by name) where rownum 5; I realize that this is a legacy syntax, but I personally find the new way just as obtuse. The new way (I guess) is supposed to be: select * from (select name, row_number() over (order by name) rn FROM users) where rn between 5 and 10 order by rn Compare this with the syntax for mySql (also now...