Posts in category "oracle"

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.

When I read this recent post announcing a new version of Oracle Connect (an internal networking initiative within Oracle behind the corporate firewall), my immediate reaction was: 'Why did he post this to the AppsLab blog ? Why on earth would this possibly be relevant, or of interest, to non Oracle employees ?'

Then I realised such internal developments are of interest to a wider audience as it demonstrates Oracle's commitment to 'Web 2.0' technologies.

I also pondered how long it would have taken me to find out about this upgrade if I wasn't subscribed to the AppsLab blog.

There is a certain irony in finding out about internal developments within Oracle on a public blog.

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.'

'Oracle are delighted to announce the immediate availability of Release 11.1.0.7.0 which is now available for every single platform (well apart from OpenVMS).'

'The release includes the productisation of a previously, hidden parameter known only to highly paid consultants. Previously, the configuration setting could only be invoked by dressing up in long white robes, waving a magic wand while dancing over sheep's entrails and simultaneously chanting holy, mystical incantations. The parameter previously known as '_GO_FASTER' is now available as a documented SPFILE parameter with possible values of 'FALSE, SAFE, CHEAP, TRUE or TURBO.'

Wall Street analysts were staggered at the news and, as soon as they sober up after yet another Web 2.0 lunch, they will give their carefully considered verdict but the Oracle stock price is expected to rocket following the press release.

Oracle also hopes to have a back-port for Oracle 10g and the legacy Oracle 9i database server available by the end of the month.

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.

Secondly, the very thought of having to identify eight further victims to be tagged also filled me with dread. Not because I worried about OraNA being swamped with an exponential explosion and prolonged burst of non-technical content but, because, I feared the unlucky recipients may possibly share my feelings.

Of course, they could all maintain a dignified silence and simply ignore my pleas to join the party but what if they also hated this Web 2.0 'meme' but were too shy, polite and retiring to tell me what they really thought. I know a handful of 'bloggers' but have only met two in the flesh and (thankfully) slept with neither.

While I did discover some new blogs of interest, not necessarily because of the '8 things', I must admit that I quickly tired of hearing about people's job history, favourite cars, mental and physical disorders (mild or otherwise), alternative careers, wild death defying adventures and the fact they once killed a man with their bare hands in the Burmese jungle.

So why, I hear you ask, did I capitulate, run towards the cliff and conjure up a disposable blog entry titled '8 things' ? Well, the truth is I thought it was a cheap post, I was short on inspiration and there was some elements I wanted to write about which don't merit a full blog post but were better suited to a short bullet point.

I followed your analysis, comments and thoughts with interest (for the first couple of days at least). I continued to read your blog, I tracked your posts on c.d.o.s, I monitored your comments on other blogs. When I saw your detailed analysis, use of analogies and various lengthy responses and compared with it my paltry, throwaway one-liners, I felt like a troll.

I occasionally commented myself and you normally responded. Not, I suspect to get the last word but you genuinely care. A lot. I admired your passion and felt somehow inadequate that I had spontaneously chosen to respond to what some Oracle bloggers (unwisely IMHO) had termed a 'chain letter', 'spam' or a 'game'.

I am genuinely sorry that you have decided to shut down your site as (as I have stated before) your blog, forums and articles represent an invaluable set of technical resources for anyone working with Oracle.

I am sorry if my trite comment on your blog that I 'hadn't signed up to your terms and conditions when I started my blog' irritated you and may have, in some small way, contributed towards your decision.

However, just as it is your prerogative to close your site down, I have the same right to post about my travel nightmares, '47 things', my thoughts on Newcastle's new manager or Scoble's laugh.

Particularly, as my blog is not (currently) aggregated by OraNA and hence will not contaminate or interrupt the stream of consciousness.

Mind you, never say never.

Andy

Forgive me Father for I have sinned. It is 25 years, 3 months and 47 days since my last confession.

According to Feedburner, Tim Halls 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).

Forget the fact, I didn't tag 8 other unfortunates to propagate the Black Death. That was only because I have no mates and am very lazy.

I can only apologise. I owe you, Roger Howard, an apology. I never meant my inane posts to push technical content off the front page within 27.8 seconds.

I never envisaged that this blogging meme might possibly 'inconvenience' you. May the Lord have mercy on my soul. "Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Oh, hang on, I nearly forgot your penance. 67 'Hail Marys' and 43 'Our Fathers'".

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.

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 ?'.

12:25-13:20 'Under the Covers of Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus' - Mick Bull/Lisa Dobson. I would like to learn more about Oracle's Business Intelligence tools. Plus I have an innate weakness for presentations titled 'Under The Covers...'

13:15-14:15 'TimesTen: Anatomy of an In-Memory Database' - Chris Jenkins (Oracle). Curious to hear more about this technology.

14:15-15:15 'Remote Hand Held SFA solutions need housekeeping - Ian Keleher/Nicola Burrows (Gallaher). A verbose and hardly compelling title but I have worked with this customer so I might get a mention on the Credits slide.

15:20-16:25 'Oracle 10g: RAC Tuning Tips' - Joel Goodman

16:45-17:30 'Siebel Marketing and Marketing Analytics' - Ben Wales

17:35-18:35 '11g new features for DBAs' - Tom Kyte. This has better be worth it. I am missing 'Siebel Networking', free beer and prawn volavons for this !

Back to hotel to dump marketing literature, USB memory sticks and complimentary gifts from Quest Software.

Shower, brush teeth, apply deodorant and slip into something more comfortable. Head over to the Pitcher and Piano to gatecrash the Oracle bloggers meetup.

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.

However, after checking into the hotel, having a walk around the lovely harbour and getting something to eat, I remember feeling pretty good. In fact, after a couple of drinks, I was ready put my Amex card behind the bar but my colleague insisted on dragging me back to my bedroom screaming 'But we must go to bed at 22:09'

Anyway to OOW; Oracle Apps Lab launched Oracle Mix which is a version of an internal Oracle networking site (which I am ashamed to admit I only discovered recently) and there is a short discussion about Oracle's gradual adoption of such networking and community tools. I must say I preferred the name 'Connect' to 'Mix' but still, if anyone wants to link up, you know where to find me.

Andrew Clarke has a typically British and impartial review on Larry Ellison's opening keynote while Eddie Awad has recorded some fun micro-interviews with Oracle staff and bloggers alike. Interesting to put a face and voice to people I only know from their Internet presence.

The other announcement thus far of note is Oracle VM. Virtualisation is a strong growth area (I meet lots of Siebel customers deploying or planning to use VM) and this is an obvious market for Oracle to enter to complement Enterprise Linux.

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.

Oracle 11g has recently been released so its 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.

The virtual server had a mere 512MB of memory and was hosted on a Thinkpad T43 laptop with 2GB memory.

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 ?'

'Not at all. Fire away.'

Anyway, what was unusual and striking about this approach was the fact the gentleman was carrying a Reporters Notebook and a pen.

When we sat down to discuss the various strategies for gathering, refreshing and (in obtuse cases), dropping statistics on objects in the Siebel schema, he actually asked me if I minded pausing briefly while he wrote things down.

I am not very clever. I am always writing things down mainly to avoid forgetting them. I tend to gather a lot of data when I visit a customer. Some of it is important, some of it is not. At first, it is not always obvious which is which.

As I usually have to produce a formal report, I find it necessary and useful to jot things down. My jottings are normally in a text file which I take away with me as input into the report. This is another reason I almost always exclusively use SQL*Plus to script test cases and take away a wad of spool files on a memory stick.

I am not overly organised. Sometimes, I may have a pristine pad of A4 paper but more often I am scribbling on the reverse of my flight/hotel itinerary or a Google map.

If I am talking to a Siebel administrator, project manager, Oracle DBA, in a meeting or a conference call or just chatting with an end user, I will ensure I have a piece of paper available. Just to write things down.

However, the fact I actually noticed this gentleman was equipped with a pen and paper for our brief chat and also made notes and jottings, merely served to reinforce how rare this seemingly obvious and eminently sensible practice is.

Or am I just mixing in the wrong circles ?