I never thought I would rejoice the arrival of monsoon (rainy season) as much as I did this year. The summer was exceptionally hot with temparatures rising upto 55 C (Centigrade) in parts of Orissa and 50C+ in Ranchi district in West Bengal. Several people died from the heat and humidity, the elderly being affected most.

Old-style database systems solve old-style problems; we need new-style databases to solve new-style problems. While the need for conventional database management systems isn’t going away, many of today’s problems require a configurable database system. Even without a crystal ball, it seems clear that tomorrow’s systems will also require a significant degree of configurability. As programmers and engineers, we learn to select the right tool to do a job; selecting a database is no exception. We need to operate in a mode where we recognize that there are options in data management, and we should select the right tool to get the job done as efficiently, robustly, and simply as possible.

Today I received a rather angry comment from one of my feed readers and I quote: "Come on! There was absolutely no content in the feed. Not even a teaser. Just ads." He was justified. To my horror I realized that not only did my feeds failed to provide any content, not even excerpt, but to add insult to injury it dutifully appended the feeds with advertisements. Now that is not good and definitely not my intention, not in thousand years. Here is a brief description of my debugging process.