London, near England - Wednesday 2 November 2005

The Oracle community was reeling yesterday from the revelation that the universally respected, internationally renown technical expert and long standing Oracle employee, Thomas Kyte, had made a mistake.

The error was discovered by a Senior Oracle DBA based in Solihull in the UK, Mr. N. Brightside who explained:

“I was dearly looking forward to attending the UK Oracle User Group in Birmingham and hoped to get my copy of Tom Kyte’s latest book, (Expert Oracle - Database Architecture) signed by Tom personally. However, at the last minute, my manager told me that the end of Q3 was imminent and there was no budget available for the daily 4.50GBP return rail fare. So, I decided to ‘work from home’ and sit down to savour Tom’s excellent book. Imagine my surprise when I found what appeared, at first sight, to be a typographical error on page 38. In a paragraph discussing other relational database systems, Tom incorrectly refers to ‘Ingress’ instead of ‘Ingres’. Then to my horror, a quick search on AskTom revealed that Tom makes this identical misspelling elsewhere. It was not a typo, it was a genuine mistake.”

A spokesperson for Apress (the publisher of Kyte’s book) commented:

“Thank you for the feedback on Tom Kyte’s book. We were unaware of this problem and will update the Errata section accordingly in due course. However, we did note Tom had a tendency to use a mixture of ‘Apres’, ‘Apress’ and ‘Apresss’ in communications while writing the book. We attributed this to the long hours he was working on the book, the tight deadlines or a faulty auto-repeating ‘S’ key.

When we politely brought this to his attention, he was absolutely mortified and apologised profusely for the inconvenience (additional hard parses, increased latching and CPU utilisation) caused. Thereafter, he would only refer to the company as ‘:B1 Publishing’.”

Tom Kyte was quick to acknowledge the error and said he was only too pleased to correct the problem although he thought all the fuss and extra work involved was rather a ‘bind’.

Don Burlesson was unavailable for comment but sources reported he was ‘absolutely ecstatic at the news’.