A week or two ago, I was reading an article on technologizer.com titled “The Speculative Prehistory of the iPhone.” (click here for the article)
What stuck out to me is how all of the mockups, speculating what the upcoming innovative iPhone looked like, were making the iPhone look like a merging of the traditional cell phones and an iPod. Well, when the real iPhone stood up, Apple did more than fuse two devices together, they completely redefined the phone! Apple jumped over all the cell phone makers/providers by probably 3 years. It’s amazing to see how all the cell phones coming out now are basically knock offs of the iPhone. Whether you like Apple or not, you gotta give them props for changing the game.
What I want to know is what will the next generation of phone look like? I bet Steve Jobs at Apple has a couple thoughts.
My takeaway: I don’t want to just improve, I want to redefine. It’s hard. I have to step out of my box. I have to throw assumptions away. I have to think at another level.
I am interested to see if Apple will blow us away with the “iTablet.” Will it redefine laptops for us?
The need: When you have a lot of databases that must have the schema synchronized, it can get difficult. At work, when I finish making changes in our development database, I need to roll out the schema changes to our other 10+ databases.
Old solution: Keep track of all the “ALTER” statements in a text file. Then apply them to every database. Inevitably something gets missed. Oh the fun.
New solution: Power*Architect Data Modeling Tool by SQL Power. Just one part of this application is the ability to compare data models! It’s EXTREMELY simple to compare data models from two databases and have Power Architect output the SQL statements needed to make the older database match the newer.
Once you install the application, go to the “Connections” menu and add your database server connections. Then to compare data models, go to the “Tools” menu and click “Compare DM”. Comparing data models could not be any simpler.
Power Architect seems to natively support Oracle (8i,9i,10g), PostgreSQL, SQL Server (2000,2005), MySQL, DB2, Derby Embedded, HSQLDB and SQLstream.
This is a VERY powerful tool! I am looking forward to learning more about the power of this program.
