Archive for September, 2009

• Ross Cooney
  This was a quick presentation covering where databases come from? Why are new databases needed and what is the theory behind them?
  You can download the presentation (A brief history of databases) here.

• David Lavery
  Dave started with a quick run down of the various databases that he has used over the years and then gave an excellent introduction to SimpleDB from Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine.
  
  You can download the presentation (An introduction to SimpleDB and Google App Engine) here.

• David Livingston
  David told us about RAQUEL, a new database system that he is helping to develop with a team at Northumbria University. RAQUEL is being developed as an open source project and you can get involved in it’s development by registering at the SourceForge RAQUEL website.
  
  You can download the presentation (An introduction to RAQUEL) here.

This event was sponsored by Codeworks Connect and The eCommerce Experiment. SuperMondays are very grateful to their platinum sponsors, Northern Film and Media and Sunderland Software City.

You can read some excellent blog posts about this event here:

• The Pickards Blog: SuperMondays: Databases
• Daniel Swan: SuperMondays – the oxymoron of face to face geek social networking
• Stephen Woods: First time at SuperMondays

Last night we had a sell out event at the Side Theatre. This is an excellent venue and judging my the feedback we will be back there soon.

David Coxon started off proceedings and gave an excellent presentation of how he setup the online store for The Baltic. Rather than choosing an off-the-shelf ecommerce application, David and his team decided to develop the shop from scratch. This was a risky decision but one that paid off in the end because after many long nights work the site was released on time and significantly under budget. You can download Davids presentation here and watch the video here:

Paul Callaghan then gave a detailed introduction to version control and why saving your data in bomb proof bunker is rather useless if your disk fails. Paul went on to introuduce us to Git, a free and open source version control system. Traditional revision control systems use a centralized model, where all the revision control functions are performed on a shared server where every Git clone is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server. Through a practical demonstration Paul showed us that branching and merging tasks are fast and easy to do. You can download his presentation here.

Finally we heard from Alex Kavanagh. Alex gave us an introduction to Subversion (SVN), another open source version control system. Subversion differs from git because it is a centralised repository, this means that all changes are checked into a central repository and users must communicate over the network with the central repository to obtain history about a file. You can see Alex’s presentation here:

I want to thank Alex and Hannah from Sailor Girl for finding and organising the venue for us.