Safari Books Online

So I wanted to subscribe for Safari Books Online. If you don't know what Safari Books is, I would recommend that you visit http://www.safaribooksonline.com/. Anyways they offer two products for individual subscription: Safari Library (expensive & good one) and Safari Bookshelf (cheap & not so good one). When I went to sign up on their site, to my surprise I did not get an option to subscribe for Safari Library. In response to a ticket submitted to their customer support, I got a response "India is not one of the country they offer Safari Library". This makes me wonder the country which produces most of the IT talent is not in the list of countries that can have access to Safari Library subscription.

Huh!!! Go Figure!!!

P.S. There is a catch here and people in India can still subscribe to safari library if they want to. All they have to do is log on to a VPN network in the US (like I did) and get a US IP address and you will see an option to choose Safari Library.

Omega.MSSQL

Omega.MSSQL (http://omega.cerebrata.com) is the first product of our company. In a nutshell Omega.MSSQL provides a browser based access to your SQL Servers. So now using just Internet Explorer (it looks real bad in other browsers!!!), you have access to your SQL servers. I can go on and on about this product but here are the highlights of the product:

• Supports SQL Server 2008, 2005 & 2000 out of the box.
• Allows you to create/alter/drop most of the common database objects (Tables, Views, etc.). It has a designer features for objects like User Defined Table Types which is not available in any tool at this time.
• Allows you to search for meta data - This is one of the coolest features available in this product. Have you ever wondered where all a column by certain name is used in your database (try finding it in Enterprise Manager or You end up writing your own scripts)? Well Omega.MSSQL makes it easy for you. You just type in what you are looking for and where you want to search (tables, views, stored procedure etc.) and Omega.MSSQL will give you a list of all the objects grouped by object type.
• Allows you to document the database.
• Allows you to build and execute queries. This is a feature where we need to do some improvements but we are eagerly waiting for Silverlight 2.0 and then we will probably porting the software from there.

Anyways check it out. URL is http://omega.cerebrata.com. This is currently in its final Beta Stages. We hope to release it in production in next few months.

Back in India

Hello readers. My name is Gaurav Mantri & I recently moved back to India after spending 10 years in the USA. I intend to use this medium to share my experience. I actually wanted to start writing this when I got back (middle of July) but I finally got a chance to settle down. So there will be old events (when I got back) I would be writing about. Ihave also started a software development company [Cerebrata Software, www.cerebrata.com] here in India and will share my experience in setting up a company from scratch & growing pains. Other than that, there will be many more things ranging from software to movies to politics to religion to anything possible under the sun. So keep watching this space.

Cheers!!!