Oracle

People often write in and ask ‘Is Oracle blogging dead ?’ Well, I thought it might be interesting to revisit the list of Oracle blogs I posted way back in 2007 and see what they’re up to. Life After Coffee - dead (last post May 2011). The pressure of the No. 1 slot proved too much. The Tom Kyte Blog - frequency much reduced but Tom’s a busy man. Rittman Mead - now a multi-user, shiny, corporate blog. Oracle Scratchpad - Jonathan Lewis is still going strong. Eddie Awad …so is Eddie. Doug Burns - Our favourite Scotsman is still active and contemplating a migration away from Serendipity. Kevin Closson - occasional poster. David Aldridge - as above (when something annoys him). Tim Hall - still travelling the world, presenting, reading books and watching weird films. Jeff Hunter - resting (inactive since May 2012). Peter Scott - alive and well blogging under the Rittman Mead umbrella. Andrew Clarke - sporadic flurries of activity from Tooting. Chris Foot - not known at this address. William Robertson - still manages to exclaim ‘WTF?!’ once a year. Howard Rogers - still blogging from Down Under. Robert Vollman - resting (since August 2012). Andy Campbell - hijacked by spammers. Either that or he really is pimping satellite TV systems and payday loans. Moans Norgaard - pining for the fjords (since July 2010). Laurent Schneider - actively blogging about Oracle. Lisa Dobson - went to the trouble of getting her own domain and then neglected it (since Sept 2011). No longer a ’newbie’. Jeff Moss - pimping vacations in Florida. Beth - Data Geek Gal has been quiet on data quality (since Oct 2012). Steve Karam - the alchemist is busy mixing up strange concoctions involving Hadoop, Hue, Oozie and occasionally Oracle. Eric Emrick - nothing since March 2009. Alex Gorbachev - busy growing Pythian Corp. Robert Baillie - blogging about Agile, Extreme and project management after a 3 year lull. Gary Myers - moved house (still in Oz) but helpfully remembered the redirect. Nuno Souto - still blogging from Sydney. Daniel Fink - The Optimal DBA blog has been dropped with constraints cascaded - which is suboptimal. Ed Whalen - wrote a popular book in 2011, got rich on the proceeds and retired in the Caribbean.

‘Burns - I guess this means I can book the hotel for four nights and cancel the flights to OpenWorld then ?' It was 10:30 am on a dull, grey overcast Monday morning in Manchester. Sherlock Burns and Doctor Timothy Hall had just emerged from a fractious, tense kick-off meeting at Tiger Telecom. Sherlock Burns and Dr. Timothy Hall had been called by the IT director at short notice to investigate a sudden and marked degradation in the performance of the production database ...

AND TO_NUMBER(TO_CHAR(appt_start_dt + 9/24, 'YYYYMMDDHH24MISS')) <= TO_NUMBER(TO_CHAR((TO_DATE(:b1, 'DD/MM/YYYY HH24:MI:SS')), 'YYYYMMDDHH24MISS'))` Please can a clever Oracle person explain, in English, the precise semantics of this WHERE clause snippet in the comments below. I realise this construct and variants thereof have probably been discussed ad infinitum on Oracle WTF but I just don’t get it. I don’t know whether this SQL was written by a human being or a third party ETL tool but it doesn’t matter. Currently, all ETL tools are written by humans in any case. ...

My longest standing and all-time favourite Oracle blogger is Doug Burns of Edinburgh, near Scotland. In addition to his sharp, analytical Oracle skills, helpful attitude and easy going manner, Doug does a great deal of unsung, unpaid work for charity (although, obviously he doesn’t like to talk about it) and is a fully paid up member of Amnesty International. Doug is also passionate about the the causes of data privacy, security issues, the freedom of information and continues to fight an unceasing battle for the rights of the individual against the evil spectre of Google Corporation. ...

After over five varied and enjoyable years working for Siebel (and then Oracle) in Expert Services, I am changing jobs. However, I will continue to work for Oracle as part of the group responsible for ‘Social CRM’. Although this was a internal transfer, my interview process was quite unusual. Instead of being forced to massage my CV into Microsoft Word format and send an email attachment to a faceless recruitment agency, I was able to publish my CV using Google Docs and the whole interview process was conducted by telephone. ...

Oracle AppsLab is one of my longest standing and favourite blogs. Jake Kuramoto (and the AppsLab team) always post interesting and thought provoking articles and I also share a few areas of common interest (Twitter, Disqus, FriendFeed et al). Although I happen to work for the same company as Jake Kuramoto, I have never actually met Jake in person. Curiously, I have had more interactions with Jake by commenting on the blog as opposed to communications via Oracle email. ...

Oracle Corporation - Redwood Shores, near California. Oracle today announced the release of a major maintenance release of version 11g of the companies flagship database server product. Charles Phillips took the world by surprise by making a major announcement a full six months ahead of Oracle Open World as he addressed the media (including 17 carefully selected representatives from the blogging community): ‘This release is the culmination of years of engineering effort aimed at delivering deterministic and reliable performance with the very highest levels of throughput. Oracle 11gR7 offers proven scalability for all Oracle applications including universal support for third party (aka legacy) applications while simultaneously reducing the cost of ownership and maximising the return on investment for all our customers.’ ...

Howard When Tim Hall ‘tagged’ me, my initial, instinctive gut reaction was: God- what an infantile, puerile idea. There’s no way I am going to participate in that ‘meme’. The concept wasn’t new to me as I’d already seen Scoble and those Web 2.0 PR types participate in similar mindless activities which I just chose to ignore. However, my reasons for objecting were slightly different from yours. Normally, I despise being told what to so and what to blog about. Similarly, whenever my various employers announced a ‘Dress down Friday’ which was gleefully received by my colleagues, I would purposefully don a suit and tie. After all, a uniform on a Friday is still a uniform. ...

‘Forgive me Father for I have sinned. It is 25 years, 3 months and 47 days since my last confession.’ According to Feedburner, Tim Hall’s Oracle blog aggregator has 723 avid readers. One of those readers summoned up the courage to send me an email complaining about my continuous off-topic posts. Apparently, the straw that broke this particular camel’s back was my participation in the evil ‘8 things’ Oracle TagFest. Forget the fact, my blog is not currently aggregated by OraNA which is purely a temporary oversight by Eddie and will be rectifed imminently (once my cheque for $250 clears). ...

Not many things make me laugh out loud. Especially about Oracle. With enough preparation, a Siebel installation (Next-Next-Next) could use a similar technique which is something I would dearly love to accomplish.