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....
‘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....
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....
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....
‘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....
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.