A notification feature has been added to MyOwnDB, which currently lets you subscribe to new entry creations. Subscribing is very easy: go the the listing of the entries, and at the top you'll see a button labeled "Update Subscriptions" which will display the available subscriptions and their status. Currently, the only subscription proposed is for the creation of new entries, but the framework is very flexible and new notifications can be easily added.

Today I pushed the biggest update to myowndb.com in a long time. It's the biggest update, but you won't see anything, it's all happening under the hood. The change is about the implementation of the file attachments, which is now more flexible and will allow the implementation of multiple backends and use one simply by changing the configuration. Next step it to bring Dedomenon code up to date.

Two new features have been rolled out, both having to do with getting data in and out of MyOwnDB. We're very excited about this! It is now possible to import data from a CSV file through a very simple procedure:

1. upload your CSV file
2. link columns in the CSV file to fields in your database table
3. get an overview of the import: number of rows imported and number of rows rejected

Rows can be rejected due to data validation exceptions, for example:

• trying to import text in an integer field
• trying to import an invalid email add

Here are the slides of the talk I gave in the Ruby devroom at FOSDEM 2009. As usual, FOSDEM was a great place to meet fellow developers. It was was first talk there, and I enjoyed it a lot!

I'll have the opportunity to give a talk about Dedomenon, MyOwnDB's engine, at FOSDEM on sunday at 11:15. This will be about the inner workings of Dedomenon and will be technical.

Although our UI has not changed in a long time (but expect some news about that soon), there's been quite some work being done under the hood, especially in our infrastructure. In the previous weeks we have had literally dozens of deployment happening on our production application. As we're possibly deploying multiple times a day, it became important that our users be able to follow these evolutions, if only to be able to include the version number they are talking about when contacting us about the application.

Bart got interviewed for Datanews, a major IT magazine un Belgium, and you can see the resulting article online in dutch and in french. The article doesn't cover our software, but rather our business and the problem we want to tackle: the publishing of structure information.

I'm not lazy at writing neither I'm bad. But I do not have my personal blog! Because I wont be updating it much! Developing a REST API on top of MyOwnDB was our prime decision to make it integrate able to a number of products/services. And that way, we want to be the memory of Web 2.0! We've been working with the REST API for sometime now and it was a leap from a concept to its application to MyOwnDB within the Rails framework. We had to make many interesting design decisions and for that, I explored top ten REST API's available including Twiter, Google, Flicker and many more.

The talk at T-Dose when well, and gave an interesting discussion about the possible use of Mysql to power a Dedomenon installation, which came down to the need of an equivalent of tablefunc module with its crosstab function for mysql to make it happen. Here are the slides, in pdf format.

On saturday 25 october, Raphaël will give a talk on Dedomenon, the engine powering MyOwnDB.com, at T-Dose. T-Dose being a event focused on open source technologies, the talk will focus on Dedomenon, our engine available under the AGPLv3 license at dedomenon.org.