Phuket trip

This blog entry is for my Phuket trip which we (me any my wife) did around 6 months back. I wanted to write a separate blog for every day experience but i could not do so because of usual excuse: i could not get time :) I am writing my experiences so that i can keep my memories alive.

So we went to Phuket for 5 days in the month of May and i would say our trip was unforgettable. It is an amazing place with kind of natural beauty you would always want to see. So before selecting the final place to go for, i had 3-4 options like Baali, Australia, Phuket, Lankavi/Pataya. But after doing some research i found Phuket the best option because it was near to Singapore (where i was staying at that time) and i had heard alot about it from my friends who had visited the place.

So preparations started with hotel booking. I booked room in IBIS hotel which my friend suggested to me. IBIS is a chain of hotels. We now even have it in Pune (Viman Nagar). Hotel was quite good with all nice facilities. Best part of the hotel was: it is very near to Patong beach which is the main beach of Phuket.

I could see lots of suggestions regarding places which could be visited in Phuket. There is this forum called "Indians in Singapore". Best thing about this forum is people share many things on the forum including flats available for rentals for indians, picninc get togethers, indian grocery shops, details of weekend places which can be visited etc etc.. I could get many good suggestions from this forum regarding which places are must go in Phuket, where can i find Indian food, prices for different things etc etc. So after looking at all these i finalised my itinerary for 5 days. Our main worry was food. Since we are vegetarian and we had faced eating out problem in Singapore so we were little worried about the food options in Phuket. Because of this reason we took lots of food items with us and it proved to be a good thing for us although we could not eat all the items we had taken with us :)

So Thailand is a very nice country. I would say overall feeling of being there was like India only. We could see lots of road side shops for eating and all. Only difference was in India we can find maximum of them vegetarian. But there, most of them were for either fish, chicken or any other non-vegetarian food item. Thai food gravy tastes almost similar to Indian gravy. Their preparation is almost similar.

I will write a separate blog for rest of the trip hopefully soon :)

HOracle acquires Sun: Impact on open source databases

So news of today is HOracle buys Sun for $9.5 per share. Immediate question which came in my mind was how is it going to impact Mysql and open source database market. MySQL never wanted to go in hands of HOracle. But ironically first it was acquired by Sun and now Sun has been acquired by HOracle. So how is it going to impact other open source markets. Well, i do not have much knowledge but following are my two cents for this:

It all depends upon how HOracle treats MySQL. Now future of MySQL depends on mercy of HOracle. There are two possibilities. HOracle continues with MySQL as low price database solution or HOracle scraps it off.

HOracle can sell MySQL to the application customers who need cheap database solution. If this is true then open source database solutions may feel more competition. Large and strong sales force of HOracle may create problem in adoption of other open source DB solutions.

But HOracle may not do above because:
1) Why would HOracle want to have a competitive product with in it self.
2) MySQL Revenues are of the order of 50-60 m$ which is nothing for HOracle. So even if it does not take MySQL further, it does not loose much. Instead it can focus on other things like openoffice, java and other things by Sun.
3) HOracle can provide next->next migrator which migrates from MySQL to HOracle. This way HOracle can reach to millions of small departmental and other web applications.

If this is the case then open source solutions can start laughing and reap the beneifits of one of the commonly used open source solution going away from the market.

So now lets keep an eye on how HOracle plays MySQL.

Disclaimer: There may be intended/unintended spelling mistakes in some names. Author does not take any responsibility in this regard:D