The Planet Blog

Sir Isaac Newton saw an apple drop from a tree, and started contemplating gravity. Albert Einstein was riding in a street car, and Bern’s clock tower inspired the key to special relativity. Larry Page woke up in the middle of the night to scribble down a plan to download the Web, and Google was born. These “Eureka!” moments get the most fanfare, but Thomas Edison reminds us that “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

The same can be said about new businesses and software applications: Even the best ideas require time, diligence, resources and a whole lot of work to succeed. If you’re a small business owner, you probably won’t make it very far by spending an hour a week executing your business plan. If you’re a developer, you won’t be able to code and test “the next Google” on an old Pentium II desktop in your closet.

While we can’t provide the inspiration, diligence or “whole lot of work” pieces of the puzzle, our new Sand Castle program can give you the resources and time you need to jumpstart your vision:

• A Dual Xeon server
• An Enterprise-class data center
• An Industry-leading network
• FREE for 12 Months.

The costs of rolling out new business plans and testing software can be prohibitive, especially in uncertain economic times. So think of Sand Castle as an economic stimulus for entrepreneurs and developers. We’re providing an online environment to help launch the next big Internet success.

The initial Sand Castle deployment includes up to 500 servers, and The Planet’s Chairman and CEO Doug Erwin looks at it like this: “With eight data centers, we’re in a position to offer a single server to 500 individuals who want to start their own businesses. These 500 servers could create 500 jobs, and then we’ll have taken one small step to pay it forward and be part of the solution.”

FREE Server Configurations

We consulted with many developers, and with their feedback, we set minimum server specs for this program:

• Dual Xeon 2.4, 2.8 or 3.2
• 1GB RAM
• 146 GB of HDD space
• 10Mbps Unmetered Bandwidth
• Operating System: CentOS 5

Eligibility

Are you a developer? Do you have a vision for a new application or service? Do you need help turning that vision into reality? If so, you’re perfect for the Sand Castle program.

Fill out the one-page signup form with your contact information and vision for a Sand Castle server. We expect demand to exceed our initial supply, so quantities may be limited, and not every application will be accepted. Take time to detail your plans and provide any applicable examples to give yourself the best chance.

If you’ve got the inspiration, it’s time for some perspiration. Visit the Sand Castle page to learn more and apply!

-Kevin

P.S. If you know of any friends who may be interested in the program, be sure to Tweet this, Digg it, email it or smoke-signal it.

When it comes time for a small business to take the plunge into the world of dedicated servers, one of the key deciding factors is price — especially given the current economic climate. Budgetary concerns often dictate which platforms and resources can be incorporated into a project, despite a developer’s comfort zone or personal preference. If you come from a background of doing .Net programming on a Windows 2008 server with SQL Server databases, having a CentOS budget could make the starting part of your startup pretty difficult. But now, there’s a solution.

To cut the cost factor out of the initial decision-making process for new software development companies, Microsoft started a program called BizSpark. BizSpark lowers the barrier to entry for many of Microsoft’s enterprise platforms and solutions like Visual Studio, BizTalk, SharePoint and Systems Center by providing eligible companies with free access to the software for up to three years.

Eligibility requirements, as outlined by Microsoft, are simple and direct. A company must be actively engaged in the development of a software-based product or service; the company must be privately held and in business for less than three years; and it must generate less than U.S. $1 million in annual revenue.

As we announced yesterday, The Planet joined Microsoft in the BizSpark program as a Hosting Partner, so we want to get the word out to everyone about this great opportunity. If you’ve got a qualifying company looking to control your costs while taking advantage of the Microsoft family of products, visit http://www.theplanet.com/bizspark to get details on how we can help you obtain an enterprise-level development platform in no time at all.

For additional information about the BizSpark program, check out Microsoft’s startup program guide. If you have questions about how the program can benefit your company, leave a comment here or get in touch with The Planet sales team, and we’ll get you an answer.

-Mark

Often, developers and administrators come across situations in which the only apparent solutions are overly complex and require significant effort to implement. Most of the time this happens because they don’t know something else – and usually something easier – exists.

This practice was evident in a recent case where a customer didn’t know it was possible to do table joins inside an UPDATE statement.

Here’s an example of a task he was faced with: You have a user table and a user_subscription table; the former contains information about each user, while the latter contains start and end dates for particular subscription products for each user. You want to extend the access period for each user that lives in the UK using product #5.

A common way of tackling this is to create a temporary table and populate it with all of the userIds from the user table that has the country = 'UK' property, then update the subscription table specifying only those userIds in the temporary table:

CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE ukUsers (userId INT(11));
INSERT INTO ukUsers SELECT userId FROM user WHERE country = 'UK';
UPDATE user_subscription 
  SET expireDate = DATE_ADD(expireDate, INTERVAL 3 DAY)
  WHERE userId IN (SELECT * FROM ukUsers) AND productId = 5;

While the code outlined above gets the job done, it could be better written. Let’s see how the SELECT statement could be used to retrieve the user information (i.e. get all UK users with subscription to product #5):

SELECT u.firstName, u.lastName
FROM user u LEFT JOIN user_subscription s USING(userId)
WHERE u.region = 'UK' AND s.productId = 5;

Now, let’s translate the above get into an UPDATE statement:

UPDATE user u LEFT JOIN user_subscription s USING(userId)
SET s.expireDate = DATE_ADD(s.expireDate, INTERVAL 3 DAY)
WHERE u.region = 'UK' AND s.productId = 5;

It’s as simple as that! We no longer need the temporary table, and it saves us a couple of extra SQL commands.

For more information on MySQL UPDATE syntax, visit: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/update.html

-Matthew