Oracle

Intranet on the Internet

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.

milestone release for Oracle database

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.’

open letter to Howard Rogers

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.

readers of Oracle blog aggregators unite (and take over)

‘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).

idiot's guide to Oracle installation

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.

UKOUG agenda

Monday 3 December

Get up very early and drive to Birmingham.

09:40-10:30 ‘30 years at Oracle’ - Tom Kyte. I own a couple of Kyte’s excellent books and various sources report he is an excellent speaker.

10:40-11:00 Visit a few stands. A quick game of ‘spot the colleague’ and ask 27 different companies ‘How can XYZ help me grow my business ?’

11:15-12:00 ‘Siebel Keynote’ - David Mills. Possible sales and marketing fluff alert. Need to sit at the back adjacent to an aisle to allow a potential rapid escape to ‘Oracle RAC versus Oracle Data Guard - which should I use for Disaster Recovery and which should I use for High Availability ?’.

Oracle Open Underworld

I decided to save Oracle Corporation lots of money by not attending Oracle Open World in San Francisco. Initially, my manager spent a lot of time trying to dissuade me but as soon as he uttered the words ‘Billy Joel’ and ‘Prince’, I immediately volunteered for some billable work in Sunderland to help pay for Doug’s complimentary red sleeping bags.

Doug Burns, Tim Hall and John Scott seem to have a real problem conquering jet lag while Mark Rittman just does ’the British thing and goes down the pub’. While I don’t travel to the States that often, I did attend a Microsoft training course in Seattle last year. As I don’t sleep on planes, I do recall being quite tired when we disembarked and slightly annoyed when my colleague volunteered to navigate and let me concentrate on driving.

analyzing cdos

I thought it would be interesting to analyze the number of postings by month from 1997 to August 2007 to the Usenet newsgroup comp.databases.oracle.server.

However, I was wrong.

please welcome Oracle 11g

Oracle 11g has recently been released so it’s time for everyone to submit their colourful screenshots into the ‘Oracle 11g banner version’ competition. Well, nearly everyone.

Apologies for the delay but, finally, I am proud to present my paltry, monochrome effort.

I just installed Oracle 11g onto a VMware server running Redhat Enterprise Linux 4.0. It actually took me more time to configure VMware tools and successfully share the folder staging the distribution than to install and configure Oracle.

helping people write things down

Today, a gentleman approached me and politely asked if he could ask me a question.

Normally, this dialog is a little more protracted and goes as follows:

‘Excuse me. Is your name Norman Brightside ?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you work for Siebel ?’

‘Yes.’ (although strictly I work for Oracle on the Siebel CRM product)

‘Are you from Expert Services ?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you mind if I ask you a quick question ?’

Read more