Cloudscape Contest

I was intrigued enough by the advertisement ("Win an iPod!") that I clicked on it, to find that it as for a contest, sponsored by IBM, for the Open Source database Cloudscape.

Not to cheerlead for IBM, but Cloudscape is actually pretty neat. I'm thinking that when I finally get around to taking inventory of all of those thousands of books in the basement, I'll embed Cloudscape into my app, rather than using mySQL.

The contest itself is pretty simple. They send you a starting table and row, and you have to write an app that queries the database to get the data from that table and row. That leads you to a second table, which leads you to a third table and row. That third entry contains a word, which is your ticket to contest entry. (Okay, "simple" if you've ever written a JDBC application. The hardest part for me was figuring out how to construct the database URL, since I had no idea where Cloudscape was going to look by default.)

I wrote a horribly ugly app (what do you want for two hours' work?) and submitted my answer, which turned out to be correct. Maybe now that I already have an iPod, I'll win another one.

If you need a relational database, you could do a lot worse than Cloudscape.